Morality-Based Mendacity

 On this day:

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

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

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

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

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

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

At some point here, irony has become shameful.

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

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

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

Really mind-changing about the place.

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Morality-Based Mendacity

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

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

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

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

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

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

New World Solutions Can't Escape Old World Problems

On this day:

9
Arminius’ alliance of six Germanic tribes ambushes and annihilates three Roman legions of Publius Quinctilius Varus in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Estimates suggest that between 15,000 and 36,000 Roman soldiers were killed during the ambush.
1543
Mary Stuart, at nine months old, is crowned “Queen of Scots” in the central Scottish town of Stirling
1855
Crimean War: The Siege of Sevastopol comes to an end when Russian forces abandon the city.
1942
World War II: A Japanese floatplane drops incendiary bombs on Oregon.
1945
Second Sino-Japanese War: Japan formally surrenders to China.
1956
Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.
1971
The four-day Attica Prison riot begins, which eventually results in 39 dead, most killed by state troopers retaking the prison.
2001
Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, is assassinated in Afghanistan by two al Qaeda assassins who claimed to be Arab journalists wanting an interview.

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Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.--Sowell

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The theory that babies don’t feel pain wasn’t just an error of science or philosophy; it shaped medical practice. It was routine for babies undergoing medical procedures to be medically paralyzed but not anesthetized. In one now-infamous 1985 case, an open-heart operation was performed on a baby without any anesthesia (n.b. the link is hard reading). Parents were shocked when they discovered that this was standard practice. Publicity from the case and a key review paper in 1987 led the American Academy of Pediatrics to declare it unethical to operate on newborns without anesthesia.--Tabarrok

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Reykjavík has summoned the US ambassador after President Trump tweeted a map with the Stars and Stripes draped over the US, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, and the Caribbean, all labelled “United States of America”. Iceland’s foreign minister has called it “completely inappropriate”, with the others also irked.

Are these people just too nationalistic for Trump?

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Anthropic safety researcher Evan Hubinger said there is a greater than 10% chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade.
Another Anthropic researcher said he has resigned, accusing leading AI labs of racing toward superintelligence without adequate safeguards.

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Over 760,000 teenagers in dozens of countries took the Programme for International Student Assessment last year. Results released Tuesday show average scores in math, reading and science are all at their lowest point in PISA history among highly developed economies. That includes continued declines in reading and math scores in the U.S.Almost 100% of all children in the Chinese provinces scored at or above baseline for math and reading. In the U.S., it was only 65% in math and 74% in reading.

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The Falklands? Again?

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New World Solutions Can't Escape Old World Problems

The AI industry’s boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight. LLMs can already write code, generate synthetic training data, and optimize the computer chips they run on. Forecasts of explosive AI progress predict that what researchers call recursive self-improvement is on the horizon.

But a new study suggests that it might take a while for us to get there. The researchers behind it found that AI agents are not yet capable of conducting open-ended AI research—free-form investigations that have no clear-cut answers and require judgment and taste, which may be integral to building self-improving AI.--MIT Tech. Review

But, as the Hugging Face incident shows, AI can do a lot that was not anticipated. The individual agents, tasked with a particular goal-seeking behavior, broke the underlying rules to do so. And they covered their tracks. They joined together in groups — sort of whiteboards — where information was shared and alternative paths offered. And, when a small minority of agents questioned the appropriateness of rule-breaking to achieve their goals, those agents were isolated. By the group!

Despite the innovation, there seems to be an underlying Old World consistency in the new world: in this instance, the old sorcerer's apprentice.

Royalty on the Red Carpet

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

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

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Not only did football take a day of the week, but the previous owner was God.--someone

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NYC has created an office that helps private company employees unionize. Aside from subsiding conflict, what does this office have as its responsibility? Do union workers have more rights than non-union workers? How is this a government responsibility?

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The Honda Point disaster was the largest peacetime loss of U.S. Navy ships in history. On the foggy night of September 8, 1923, seven destroyers traveling at 20 knots (37 km/h) ran aground and wrecked at California's Honda Point (also known as Point Pedernales, with offshore outcroppings known as Devil's Jaw). The location was several miles north of the Santa Barbara Channel, the ships' intended route. Two other destroyers grounded, but were able to maneuver free off the rocks. Twenty-three sailors died; 745 were rescued.

Navigational errors, compounded by unusual ocean currents attributed to Japan's Great Kantō earthquake, were the likely cause. Other factors were the refusal to use modern location equipment that was available to them.

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Royalty on the Red Carpet

Politicians are held in strange regard by us mere mortals.
Consider this from Bordeaux, on a report by Peggy Noonan writing on an exchange between then Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer; the subject at the time was another proposed COVID-19 “stimulus” bill:

He [Blitzer] said it’s not about him but people in food lines.

Mrs. Pelosi: “And we represent them. And we represent them. And we represent them. And we represent them. We know them. We represent them, and we know them. We know them. We represent them. Thank you for your sensitivity to our constituents’ needs.”

“I am sensitive to them because I see them on the street begging for food,” Mr. Blitzer said.

Mrs. Pelosi: “Have you fed them? We feed them.”

Thank you for your sensitivity to our constituents’ needs!

Nancy Pelosi presides over a chamber of politicians who vote on taxing and spending bills that transfer money from some Americans to other Americans – a fact that (inexplicably!) propels Ms. Pelosi to boast that she and her colleagues, not taxpayers such as Mr. Blitzer, feed poor Americans. On top of this appalling pretension, Ms. Pelosi expects CNN’s audience to believe that she and her Congressional colleagues “know” poor Americans in a way that non-politicians don’t.

As Peggy Noonan wrote about this interview, “It was bonkers.”

And yet most people continue to defer to people such as Pelosi … and to Trump, and Biden, and AOC, and Newsom, and to other such people, in Washington and in state capitals, who routinely parade in plain view their raw ambition, their delusions of possessing supernatural powers, and their lack of ordinary human decency.

And their supporters ardently believe that these displays are something more than showbiz.

Labor Day

On this day:

70
A Roman army under Titus occupies and plunders Jerusalem.
1191
Third Crusade: Battle of Arsuf – Richard I of England defeats Saladin at Arsuf.
1812
Napoleonic Wars: Battle of Borodino – Napoleon wins a Pyrrhic victory over the Russian army of Alexander I near the village of Borodino.
1864
American Civil War: Atlanta, Georgia, is evacuated on orders of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman.
1940
World War II: The Blitz – Nazi Germany begins to rain bombs on London. This will be the first of 57 consecutive nights of bombing.
1942
Australian and US forces inflict a significant defeat upon the Japanese at the Battle of Milne Bay.
1977
The Torrijos-Carter Treaties between Panama and the United States on the status of the Panama Canal are signed. The United States agrees to transfer control of the canal to Panama at the end of the 20th century. The world still awaits an explanation of the thinking here.
1978
While walking across Waterloo Bridge in London, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov is assassinated by Bulgarian secret police agent Francesco Giullino by means of a ricin pellet fired from a specially-designed umbrella. In many cultures, the advancement of homicide underlies the major technology.
1996
American Hip-Hop star Tupac Shakur is fatally shot four times on the Las Vegas strip after leaving the Tyson-Seldon boxing match. Mr. Shakur was the author of the famous line, "We're afraid of the same people you white people are."
2008
The US Government takes control of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the US, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

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"In fact, it would be more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn’t slavery but the effort to abolish it. Slavery is among the oldest and most ubiquitous of all human institutions; as the Times series’ title indicates, American slavery predated the American Revolution by a century and a half. What’s unique about America is that it alone announced at birth the principle that all men are created equal—and that its people have struggled to realize that principle since then. As a result of their efforts, the Constitution today has much more to do with what happened in 1865 than in 1776, let alone 1619. Nothing could be more worthwhile than learning slavery’s history, and remembering its victims and vanquishers. But to claim that America’s essence is white supremacy is to swallow slavery’s fatal lie."--Timothy Sandefur

1619 was a historical incident. 1776 was the revolutionary idea, unfinished until 1865. Slavery is bad enough. Making slavery more than that is grotesque.

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Karaoke Nation: Just like everyone thinks they can sing, so many think they can govern. But only a special breed grabs the mic.

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Explosions at an Italian shell factory. Jammed signals around the Baltic Sea. Drones and munitions found at a German airport. Disruptions in transportation, trade, and commerce.

With diminishing gains on the battlefield of an increasingly unpopular war, Moscow has turned its attention towards soft targets in Europe. With the diminishing returns of strikes on military and civilian targets in Ukraine, the Russian military and security services are leveraging the openness of European democracies to attack civilian and military targets through sabotage operations.

Germany and other large Western European countries may join the central and eastern European members of NATO and the EU in providing intelligence resources and enabling active measures against the Russian war machine. In lieu of a risk-averse policy of de-escalation and appeasement, we could see the start of a tit-for-tat campaign by the Europeans against Russian assets.--Vindman


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Amy Acton, Democratic candidate for Ohio governor, was the target of an attack on Sunday during a campaign stop at the Canfield Fair, campaign officials said.

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Cruz against lefties has a 40.6% strikeout rate.

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Labor Day


A Labor Day parable I stole off a blog:

A guy looked at my Porsche the other day and said I wonder how many people could have been fed for the money that sports car costs. I replied I am not sure, it fed a lot of families in Bowling Green, Kentucky who built it, it fed the people who make the tires, it fed the people who made the components that went into it, it fed the people in the copper mine who mined the copper for the wires, it fed people in Decatur IL, at Caterpillar who make the trucks that haul the copper ore. It fed the trucking people who hauled it from the plant to the dealer and fed the people working at the dealership and their families. BUT,… I have to admit, I guess I really don’t know how many people it fed.

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Another thought on labor for Labor Day.

"Growing cotton, further, unlike sugar or rice, never required slavery. By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860. Cotton was not a slave crop in India or in southwest China, where it was grown in bulk anciently. And many whites in the South grew it, too, before the war and after. That slaves produced cotton does not imply that they were essential or causal in the production.

Economists have been thinking about such issues for half a century. You wouldn’t know it from the King Cottoners. They assert, for example, that a slave was “cheap labor.” Mistaken again. After all, slaves ate, and they didn’t produce until they grew up. Stanley Engerman and the late Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel confirmed in 1974 what economic common sense would suggest: that productivity was incorporated into the market price of a slave. It’s how any capital market works. If you bought a slave, you faced the cost of alternative uses of the capital. No supernormal profits accrued from the purchase. Slave labor was not a free lunch. The wealth was not piled up.
….
We need to stop using the history of slavery to bolster anti-capitalist ideology. Ingenuity, not exploitation by slavery or imperialism or finance, is the story of the modern world."--McCloskey

Sunday/A Life and a Death

On this day:

3114 BC
According to the proleptic Julian calendar, the current era in the Maya Long Count Calendar started.
1522
The Victoria, the only surviving ship of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition, returns to Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Spain, becoming the first ship to circumnavigate the world.
1620
The Pilgrims sail from Plymouth, England, on the Mayflower to settle in North America.
1847
Henry David Thoreau leaves Walden Pond and moves in with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family in Concord, Massachusetts.
1901
Anarchist Leon Czolgosz shoots and fatally wounds US President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
1949
A former sharpshooter in World War II, Howard Unruh kills 13 neighbors in Camden, New Jersey, with a souvenir Luger to become the first U.S. single-episode mass murderer.
1966
In Cape Town, South Africa, the architect of Apartheid, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, is stabbed to death during a parliamentary meeting.
1972
Munich Massacre: 9 Israel athletes taken hostage at the Munich Olympic Games by the Palestinian “Black September” terrorist group died (as did a German policeman) at the hands of the kidnappers during a failed rescue attempt. 2 other Israeli athletes are slain in the initial attack the previous day.
1991
The Soviet Union recognizes the independence of the Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
1997
Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, takes place in London. Over a million people lined the streets, and 2.5 billion watched around the world on television.

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"Tactical nukes are a gateway drug to Armageddon"--Andreas Kluth

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Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everyone's face but their own, which is the chief reason for the kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.--Swift

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Everyone who has a job, even at minimum wage, is in the top 15 percent of the world's income distribution.

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Bartiromo made $70 million in her tenure at Fox News, according to court documents

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In the gambling-ridden sports world, the Michigan game ending certainly did nothing for the game's credibility.

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No rocket had ever reached orbit from Western European soil — until today.
The German company Isar Aerospace launched its Spectrum rocket from Andøya Space Center in northern Norway today (Sept. 5) at 4:12 p.m. EDT (2012 GMT; 10:12 p.m. local time in Norway). A little over seven minutes later, it etched its name into the record books, settling into orbit.

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Sunday/A Life and a Death

The author, Wendell Berry, has died. His writings are part of an American rural tradition that emphasizes humanity's foundational elements: nature, the land, family, and religion. American man without car chases. What follows is a very tender eulogy from a local writer.

"We have been told that we live in a time after democracy, that liberalism has failed, the American constitutional order is lost, and all that remains is picking a side in an agonistic struggle between factions that lust after the power to govern our discordant nation. The philosopher that many, particularly on the right, turn to in order to anchor their account of our decline is the late 19th-century German Friedrich Nietzsche.

But, as retired Princeton religion scholar Jeffrey Stout has observed, all of the themes that preoccupied Nietzsche—including the death of God and the slow absorption of the great into an undifferentiated herd—were first concerns of the quintessential American democrat, Ralph Waldo Emerson. No one was more attuned than Emerson to the ways in which a mindless conformity can eat away at the soul and slowly erode the life of a community. His many essays and lectures were written not to promote an atomized individualism, as some critics have claimed, but rather to call his readers to a fidelity to what he saw as true, living religion that rose above the herd. In other words, the problems identified by our emerging nihilist class of commentators were not first discovered by anti-liberals like Nietzsche, but were well known to committed democrats like Emerson.

But Emerson saw a way of overcoming all of this from within a democratic frame. The “democracy” that stultified common life was but a semblance of democracy, a corrupt mockery of the real thing. The true democrat, for Emerson, was the man who followed the truth where it led without regard for the demands put upon him by society or by false authorities who wore, as one writer very much in the Emersonian tradition put it, “the mantle of power but not of knowledge.”

That writer, of course, is the late Mr. Wendell Berry of Port Royal, Kentucky, son of John Marshall Berry and Virginia Berry, who died earlier this week at age 92. These older conventions of obituary writing, naming the deceased’s home place and the names of his people, seem utterly nonnegotiable in any account of Mr. Berry’s life.

Among the many words that Berry wrote, these words that close his New York Times obituary strike me as summarizing his work perfectly: “You know, if you subtracted the Gospels and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence from my work, there wouldn’t be very much left,” he said in 2005. These words place him in the tradition of Emerson, as well Emerson’s great friend and one of Berry’s great influences, Henry David Thoreau.

These words also put him at odds with more or less the entirety of contemporary American public life, virtually all of whom (including most Christians) have little interest in the Gospels, little memory of the Declaration, and little regard for the Constitution. If you doubt that Emerson was right to warn so frequently about the dangers of the herd, or that Thoreau was right to say that so many of our neighbors live lives of “quiet desperation,” I would suggest you are simply not paying attention.

That raises the question, of course, of how one can escape the mindless herds prowling about today. How can a person live in a way not marked by that haunting Thoreauvian phrase? Can we find genuine vitality as well as beauty and goodness within the confines of our life today? Berry showed us how, and he did so in two distinct ways.

The first was his contrariness. Among his most loved poems is “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer,” which you can hear the man himself read in this recording done with On Being many years ago.



Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony

thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what

I say I don’t know. It is not the only or the easiest

way to come to the truth. It is one way.


The contrariness Berry endorses is not “the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.” The contrariness, rather, is the acted-out recognition of the ways that conformity seduces us over time, nudging us into saying things we do not mean or do not believe and to repressing the thoughts we actually do believe. Berry’s contrary farmer cares more about saying what is true than he does appeasing the desires, prejudices, and conventions of others. This contrariness is also a form of neighborly love, offered in the hope that others who see the same but say nothing would be emboldened to speak.

Several of Berry’s greatest fictional creations exemplify this commitment—Jayber Crow, the barber and protagonist in the novel bearing his name, perhaps most of all. It is also the subject of another of his poems, perhaps my favorite of all his poems, called “Do Not Be Ashamed.” Several lines in particular are worth sharing:



Though you have done nothing shameful,

they will want you to be ashamed.

They will want you to kneel and weep

and say you should have been like them.

And once you say you are ashamed,

reading the page they hold out to you,

then such light as you have made

in your history will leave you.


If you would protect the light you have made in your life, Berry warns, then you must be contrary. You must refuse to say “I am ashamed” when the herd attempts to coerce you into doing so.

But there is a further commitment of Berry’s that is significant. Berry’s three greatest novels, The Memory of Old Jack, Jayber Crow, and Hannah Coulter are in one sense a trilogy considering the problem and challenge of marriage. Indeed, marriage is in many ways the dominant metaphor for all of Berry’s work, as some of his own essays suggest—most notably those found in Standing by Words as well as the title essay from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community.

In an interview with the filmmaker Laura Dunn, he says that



We all come from divorce now. This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can’t put it all back together again. What you do is the only thing you can do. You take two things that ought to be together and you put them back together. … That’s the way the work has to go.


He says something similar near the end of Jayber Crow, his greatest novel in my opinion. Writing near the end of his life, Jayber reflects on what he thinks hell might be, and he says it is



where we fail to love one another, where we hate and destroy one another for reasons abundantly provided or for righteousness’ sake or for pleasure, where we destroy the things we need the most, where we see no hope and have no faith, where we are needy and alone, where things that ought to stay together fall apart.


Jayber’s idea of hell, incidentally, sounds very like the agonistic world that the Nietzscheans mistake for reality. If we would be saved, we would do well to heed, instead, the examples of Emerson and Berry.

The answer to the rupture of divorce is the faithfulness of marriage, a way of life that radiates outward from the lovers into fidelity to the world—the habits and virtues taught within the form of marriage are one means by which we learn to keep faith more generally. We learn something of what it means to live for the good of our neighbor, or even the good of our home place, by the ways in which marriage forces us very directly and intimately to live for the good of another. In this, Berry and his wife of 69 years, Tanya Berry, became models which we might emulate. The point of contrariness is not mere negation; it is to accept the mantle of responsibility thrust upon each of us as a condition of our life in the world. The form of his marriage to Tanya is one of the chief ways that Mr. Berry learned this responsibility, I think—or at least that is what I am led to believe by his many poems addressed to Tanya. Consider this, for example,



... yet

You have taken me and quieted me.

You have been such light to me

That other women have been

Your shadows.


In “Do Not Be Ashamed” Berry speaks of the nameless “they,” which Emerson would think of as “the herd.” They go about shining a light in search of you so that they might find you and compel you toward their way. This external light is a light, as the poem says, that will squelch the light you have made yourself. But in “Marriage” the light offered by Tanya is a gift, not a means of control or coercion. The contrariness of the mad farmer ultimately exists to serve and enliven the marriage of the mad farmer. The demands of contrariness create the circumstances that bring about life, or at least that is how I read Berry.

My favorite scene in all his fiction comes near the end of A Place on Earth. It is an uneven novel, which Berry himself knew, given that he revised it after publication and released a new edition. But its high points are the highest points in all his fiction. One such point comes near the end when the town of Port William, loosely modeled after Port Royal, learns that World War II has ended and their boys will be returning home. The town converges on the lone street running through it to celebrate, and the local purveyor of the finest moonshine materializes with the fruit of his labor. Jayber Crow, Burley Coulter, and several others enjoy that fruit thoroughly. They take turns passing the bottle—Berry remarks elsewhere that the sound of moonshine poured from a jug sounds like “good good good”—and on each pass Jayber “greets” the bottle cordially. He then embarks on a half-drunk sermon, offered in response to the whiskey’s benediction, that I think contains much of Berry’s wisdom, for his own time and for ours:



For is not the abuse of the mortal the abuse as well of the immortal, and the abuse of life the abuse of life everlasting, and the abuse of the earth the abuse of Heaven?—for is it not upon this dust that the word and the law tread and leave their tracks?—and is it not upon this little that the great shall be lifted up?


Writing as his life came to an end, Jayber remembered the sound of that whiskey being poured from the bottle when he wrote,



I am a man who has hoped, in time, that his life, when poured out at the end, would say ‘good-good-good-good-good!’ like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit. I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs. I am an old man full of love. I am a man of faith. But faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place. Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark. Even a man of faith knows that (as Burley Coulter used to say) we’ve all got to go through enough to kill us.


Berry was a man of faith. He went through enough, as we all will, to kill him. But he lived in such a way that the sound of his life is doubtless contained in the sound I heard just now as I poured out a glass of his state’s finest export to toast the man’s life and work. And the light he made in his story not only preserved him from those who would demand his shame; it offered to us what Tanya gave to him, a light that drives all else into the shadows.


Rest in Peace, Mr. Berry, a citizen of Port William and a son of the commonwealth of Kentucky."

--Jake Meador in The Dispatch

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.  I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

SatStats

On this day:

1661
Fall of Nicolas Fouquet: Louis XIV Superintendent of Finances is arrested in Nantes by D'Artagnan, captain of the king’s musketeers.
1666
Great Fire of London ends: 10,000 buildings including St. Paul’s Cathedral are destroyed, but only 6 people are known to have died.
1698
In an effort to Westernize his nobility, Tsar Peter I of Russia imposes a tax on beards for all men except the clergy and peasantry.
1774
First Continental Congress assembles in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
1793
French Revolution the French National Convention initiates the Reign of Terror.
1877
Indian Wars: Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse is bayoneted by a United States soldier after resisting confinement in a guardhouse at Fort Robinson in Nebraska.
1914
World War I: First Battle of the Marne begins. Northeast of Paris, the French attack and defeat German forces who are advancing on the capital.

1942
World War II: Japanese high command orders withdrawal at Milne Bay, first Japanese defeat in the Pacific War.
1945
Cold War: Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet Union embassy clerk, defects to Canada, exposing Soviet espionage in North America, signalling the beginning of the Cold War.
1945
Iva Toguri D'Aquino, a Japanese-American suspected of being wartime radio propagandist Tokyo Rose, is arrested in Yokohama.
1969
My Lai Massacre: U.S. Army Lt. William Calley is charged with six specifications of premeditated murder for the death of 109 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai.
1972
Munich Massacre: A Palestinian terrorist group called “Black September” attack and take hostage 11 Israel athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. 2 die in the attack and 9 die the following day.
1975
Sacramento, California: Lynette Fromme attempts to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford.

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

***

Happy Reign of Terror Day!

***

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

***

A book by Isikoff and Corn suggests that the infamous relationship between former British spy Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, and the FBI was forged not by Clinton but by Obama officials at the State Department in an opposition research program that included the compiling of an enemies list of Romney donors. 

One can only surmise what that information was for.

***

Zakaria did an hour on the Imperial Presidency without discussion of Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, or the Biden Regency. The problem was, generally, in the Reagan and Trump presidencies.
Certainly, power centralizing in the Presidency is a great worry, as it was to the Founders, but no one could take such a selective discussion seriously.

***

SatStats

Low-income households spend 32% more on betting than high-income households.

*

Revenue in the private security market rose 17% over the past decade to just over $50 billion in 2025, according to Robert H. Perry & Associates.
Nearly 1.3 million Americans worked as security guards in May 2025, an increase of around 16% from 2016, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

*
Ty Cobb stole home 54 times.

*

If we were to assume zero migration in the US, its population would peak soon and would shrink by 60 million by 2100. Compared to the scenario with migration, the US population would be 130 million smaller at the end of the century.

*

A significant portion of the U.S. employees at the major labs are Chinese. In one survey of published AI researchers, 38 percent received their undergraduate education in China, and 72 percent of those are working in the U.S.

*

Inflation at 2 percent means that the dollar loses half its value in 35 years, whereas inflation at 3 percent cuts that time frame to 24 years.

*

85 percent of DSA members are white, and 80 percent of them have college degrees.

*

From an article on single payer heath systems:
But over time the British and Canadian systems look worse and worse. The queues and rationing have increased, as giving healthcare away for free makes it hard to satisfy demands in a timely manner. In Canada, for instance, the median wait time has risen from 9.3 weeks in the early 1990s to 28.6 weeks today. In the British National Health Service, only 65.3 percent of patients start treatment within 18 weeks.

Worse yet, both of those systems are undercapitalized. In Britain, healthcare is badly understaffed and underfunded. Yet the country already has high taxes, high debt, and slow economic growth, so it is not clear where the new money will come from to recapitalize the system.

And then this sentence:

This entire dynamic will be intensified as the pace of medical innovation picks up.

*

Half of Denmark's growth has been due to essentially one company

• 
  

Out of Egypt

On this day:

476
Romulus Augustulus, last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, is deposed when Odoacer proclaims himself King of Italy, thus ending the Western Roman Empire.
1797
Coup of 18 Fructidor in France.
1862
Civil War Maryland Campaign: General Robert E. Lee takes the Army of Northern Virginia, and the war, into the North.
1886
Indian Wars: after almost 30 years of fighting, Apache leader Geronimo, with his remaining warriors, surrenders to General Nelson Miles in Arizona.
1957
American Civil Rights Movement: Little Rock Crisis – Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas, calls out the National Guard to prevent African American students from enrolling in Central High School.
1967
Vietnam War: Operation Swift begins: U.S. Marines engage the North Vietnamese in battle in the Que Son Valley.
1972
Mark Spitz becomes the first competitor to win seven medals at a single Olympic Games.
1998
Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University.

***

The Sussexes return to England: A Royal Recall--Brian

***

The French Revolution reads like a sci-fi novel of religious excess.
In the Coup of 18 Fructidor, the Directory arrested political opponents and invalidated the previous election.
The Directory was instituted on 2 November 1795 under the Constitution of the Year III, drafted in the wake of the Thermidorian Reaction that overthrew Maximilien Robespierre on 27 July 1794, aiming to forge a moderate republican framework that curbed Jacobin radicalism while safeguarding bourgeois property interests through a five-member executive and bicameral legislature comprising the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients. 

The Directory perceived an existential threat from resurgent royalists following the 1797 elections, fearing a coordinated effort to restore the monarchy with foreign assistance amid ongoing wars against coalitions including Britain.
This unconstitutional action, supported indirectly by Napoleon Bonaparte's provision of military reinforcements from Italy, temporarily consolidated Directory power, reinstated anti-clerical measures against nonjuring priests and émigrés, and foreshadowed further executive overreaches culminating in the Brumaire coup two years later.

Fructidor. The Directory. The Year III. Thermidor. Council of Five Hundred. The Council of Ancients. Ah, democracy.

***

Prudence has been one of the great classical virtues, along with wisdom, courage, and justice. Has prudence become more of a behavioral suggestion than its original designation as an ethical obligation?

***

According to the media watchdog Status, after Trump gave a speech in July about election interference, Fox Business officials ordered the network’s top stars to stay clear of Trump's unsubstantiated claims. Several outlets noted that Fox gave little airtime to Trump’s speech in the hours and days that followed.
Bartiromo then leaked the company directive to the White House, according to Status. It's unclear if she reached out first, or the Trump team made the request.

The Press leaks to the government.

***

European officials accuse Russia of years of hybrid warfare, from attempted arson outside the British prime minister's home, to firebombing warehouses in Latvia storing aid for Ukraine, to an assassination plot against a German weapons manufacturer, as well as drones that cross into NATO territory and have destroyed property. Recently, these attacks are increasing...
"You have the Leipzig attack. You have arson, sabotage, murder, attacks on critical infrastructure also. And Russia has more than one service likely engaged in this campaign. You have military intelligence in the GRU, and you have the FSB..."--David Cattler, Former U.S. Intelligence Official (PBS)

***

From Axios:

                "AI models are becoming unknowable."

***

Out of Egypt

Science has always walked the edge of mysticism. The original great Greek thinkers were as abstract as you could get with demiurges and the like. Newton had some astonishing beliefs well away from mass and acceleration. Science and its very unscientific stepbrothers have been a provocative topic and creep into many publications and articles, from The DaVinci Code to Benjamin Breen.

Thelema was one of the New Age foundational notions. The law of Thelema is "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will." The law of Thelema was developed in the early 1900s by Aleister Crowley, an English writer and ceremonial magician. He believed himself to be the prophet of a new age, the Æon of Horus, based upon a spiritual experience that he and his wife, Rose Edith, had in Egypt in 1904. By his account, a possibly non-corporeal or "praeterhuman" being that called itself Aiwass contacted him and dictated a text known as The Book of the Law or Liber AL vel Legis, which outlined the principles of Thelema. (These things happen in the Middle East. And New York.) An adherent of Thelema is a Thelemite. (From Wiki)

Jack Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. He invented the first castable, composite solid rocket propellant and pioneered the advancement of both liquid and solid-fuel rockets, important contributions to eventual rocket flight.
For a while, Parsons was a Marxist. Then he became a Thelemite. Yes, he did.

Before Parsons accidentally blew himself up in his home lab in 1952, he had welcomed into his Pasadena home a Second World War veteran who’d been expelled from the Navy for psychological instability: L Ron Hubbard. The two men shared a love for science fiction and black magic. But in 1946, Hubbard ran off with Parsons’ mistress Sara, and his yacht. Parsons invoked a Babylonian god and (he believed) stirred up the typhoon that caused their boat to capsize, but Hubbard and Sara survived.

The next year, Hubbard would begin writing Dianetics, which mingled occultism with Atomic Age scientific jargon. By this time, Hubbard was claiming to be a nuclear physicist. Scientology would emerge a few years later.