Not written by me, yet still interesting

Figure 1. "Few people want to be saints nowadays, but everybody is trying to lose weight." ~ René Girard, of whom Peter Thiel was a student. Whom do you celebrate, emulate?

Tracing Woodgrains, reviewing Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: “In the early United States, writers were rock stars. Common Sense was the Super Bowl. Farm boys did in fact follow the plow with book in hand. Text was what people had. What did a print discourse do? Compare the Lincoln-Douglas debates, when Lincoln lamented at having only half an hour to respond to an hour and a half of topics, to modern presidential debates… So what changed? The heart shifted from the typography of Boston to the show business of Las Vegas… Look at the news: murder and mayhem, in between banter, commercials, and upbeat music. Look at even "serious" television—brilliant thinkers speaking in five-minute bursts of self-promotion with arguments nobody has time to seriously examine…How often, Postman asks in a time when people still cared for the morning news, does that news alter your daily plans, take actions you would otherwise not have, or provide new insight for your daily problems?... It's not that TV made us dumber. It reshaped culture in its image, acting as the paradigmatic medium of its era: decontextualization and a focus on entertainment for all… [And now on the internet:] What do you remember from yesterday? I'll get more specific: I assume, since you're reading this, you spent some time online yesterday. What did you see? What did you do? What did you read, or hear, or laugh at? Okay, how about two days ago? Just how much information do you process, scan over, and discard without a second thought in any given day?”

Boze: “Reading about the insane numbers of books that ordinary working people used to read a hundred years ago feels like seeing pictures of the Pacific Ocean back when it teemed with whales. Hard to comprehend what we’ve lost. It’s honestly shocking what an intellectual culture we had a century ago. On the floors of tailoring factories, workers debated Marxism. Old couples with no formal education read to each other in Latin. Jane Austen and George Eliot were posthumous celebrities. Jonathan Rose tells how publishers had to “churn out school editions of Scott, Goldsmith, Cowper, Bacon, Pope and Byron” to keep up with demand from students. Traveling preachers introduced farmers to Milton and Tolstoy. Shakespeare reduced prisoners to tears. Up to the 1950s, coal miners built and maintained their own lending libraries. Unschooled Irishmen “somehow picked up a broad knowledge of etymology.” A young woman scared away suitors by revealing that she had read In Search of Lost Time three times. And again, folks a century ago weren’t inherently more intelligent than we are. I believe we could revive a culture, not of intellectuals but of autodidacts. People who are curious about the world, who are excited to learn and study together in community.” - Reflecting on my own college experience, it seems that schools more effectively train students to BS their way through than actually do the reading.

This next article probably requires some set up. Here’s an excerpt of how I’ve written up land value taxation in a history resource I’m developing for my kids: In 1879, The American journalist Henry George self-published Progress and Poverty, which went on to sell millions of copies, said to outsell everything but the Bible in the next couple decades. In it, George argues for replacing all taxes with a single tax on the underlying value of land but, significantly, not its improvements. In other words, an empty lot would be taxed at the same rate as the skyscraper next door. Milton Friedman would later observe: “There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise – and yet we need taxes… So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago.” The essential idea is that it would incentivize the owners of undeveloped land to make the most profitable use of it or sell it. The standard property tax disincentivizes improvements because the tax rises with each one. Other free market supporters have been more skeptical: Reading George helped get Friedrich Hayek interested in economics, but he concluded that a fair government assessment of land value was unlikely. Murray Rothbard went further, saying it was impossible (due to the subjective theory of value) and that George was calling for the nationalization of all land: does one really own something if one has to pay rent or have it taken away? John Bates Clark argued contemporaneously, as Mark Skousen summarizes, “While the amount of land existing on earth does indeed remain constant, the supply of land available for sale varies with the price, as any other commodity” - and therefore is already put to its best use in a free market. Bryan Caplan similarly argued that “a 100% Georgist tax would destroy the incentive to search for natural resources and discover optimal locations for businesses, as the additional profits that would result from such discoveries would lead to a corresponding increase in the unimproved value of the land, and so be taxed away.” Perhaps strangely, George’s arguments inspired both free market advocates and socialists, with George Bernard Shaw claiming that 5/6 of British socialists had begun their journey by reading George. Socialists were struck by George’s argument that the owners of land did not merit the profits they reaped for doing nothing and merely enjoying the economic growth (and increasing public services) around them. Socialists wound up with greater confiscatory ambitions, but George was trying to make the point that a single tax on land value would recapture the wealth created by society while sparing individuals taxes on their own productivity.

Figure 2. The board game “Monopoly” was designed to evangelize Georgism, though you probably have not become a Georgist from playing it - obviously, in real life, you don’t just happen to randomly visit properties that extract rent from you. The real game - a load of fun - should have been something about how landlords were so afraid of taxation that they never developed their property!

A billboard on an empty piece of real estate succinctly proclaimed: “‘Everybody works but the vacant lot’ I paid $3,600 for this lot and will hold till I get $6,000. The profit is unearned increment made possible by the presence of this community and enterprise of its people. I take the profit without earning it. For the remedy, read Henry George.” George separately argued that the revenue from the single tax could be used to supply a universal basic income. An additional problem with the single tax is how high it would have to be to pay for the expanded government we wound up creating in the 1900s. This book’s popularity is especially good evidence of the era’s literary society, in which uneducated working men read and discussed it en masse as a proposed solution to how society was progressing massively and wealth was accumulating without eliminating poverty (in fact, statistically, people were earning higher real wages and getting wealthier, but they were distracted by the inequality: poverty is the natural state of man, capitalism provides an alternative). The land value tax idea was not new (Adam Smith discussed it), but was certainly popularized by George. The city of Houston briefly had a land value tax in the 1910s before it was struck down as violating the constitution of Texas; smaller communities have experimented with it, but no government of substantial size has made it the single tax. Fans have included such diverse political figures as Winston Churchill, Albert Jay Nock, John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Gary Becker, and Sun Yat Sen (who pledged to make Georgism the basis of Nationalist China economic policy). But not Karl Marx, who called it “capitalism’s last ditch.” That didn’t stop George from eulogizing Marx as someone who “so steadfastly, so patiently, and so self-sacrificingly labored for the freedom of the oppressed and the elevation of the downtrodden.” Nevertheless, George accurately predicted that socialism “would, if carried to full expression, mean Egyptian despotism.”

But Watling details how the UK’s attempt to implement the land value tax was disastrous: “Land value taxes are once again becoming a popular all-purpose solution to housing issues. But implementing them in early 1900s Britain destroyed the then-dominant Liberal Party… Across the Atlantic from George, the wealthy landowners who dominated British politics predominantly supported the Conservative Party. In response, their opponents, the Liberals and Irish nationalists, increasingly harnessed tenant agitation for political support and with it, support for land taxation….The tax cost more to administer than it collected, and it was so poorly worded that it ended up becoming a tax on builders’ profits, leading to a crash in the building industry.”

Robson, reviewing Alex Salter’s Political Economy of Distributism, which was an early 20th century British Catholic attempt to create a third way of economics beyond socialism and capitalism by giving everyone land (and thus, independence): “Marx signally failed to predict the emergence of a sizable middle class across numerous countries, and its effect on the economic and political power of citizens. The incomes of this class now protect employees from considerable (if not all, alas) abuse and enable a level of social mobility long absent in human experience…why [is] wealth is not a sufficient guarantor of freedom, perhaps even one that could substitute for productive property, in a plausible distributist approach to political economy [?] Suppose, for example, that Jane doesn’t own farmland, machines, or digital productive property. She is, however, a multimillionaire. Mightn’t her wealth be enough to secure her freedom? If Jane spends her money in targeted ways, she can plan a life of purpose for the good. It is not at all clear that she needs traditional productive property in order to do so…. I had hoped to hear more about the following question that would benefit from future research: Just what counts as productive property? We cannot know how to assess a call for widespread distribution of productive property without first knowing just what such property is and what it isn’t, and without a worked-out sense of the persons and groups who can and do own it. Does productive property include only physical items such as machines and farmland? Does it also include, say, mental skills and social know-how? Do middle-class and lower-class families in affluent countries own productive property? If so, which property, and how much? The long-standing paradigm of productive property as consisting purely of physical items—farmland, machines, factories, tools, etc.—is outmoded… It would also have been interesting to hear more about practical prescriptions for a distributist political economy. Chesterton (1926/2024, p. 215) argued for an incentivization system of tariffs and subsidies to increase small local businesses and ownership, partly to militate against the rise and dominance of big businesses. This might make theoretical sense as a way to rein in large corporations. But is reining in large firms so important? Might a system of tariffs and subsidies be comparably commandeered by crony capitalists, with midsize to small firms themselves colluding to secure favors from the state? If so, is it worthwhile to assume this risk when instituting an incentivization system?... A government can gain more power, opportunity, and funding by providing $15 million to a few large corporations now than by putting in place a policy that would save 100 million consumers $50 million a decade hence… Even the best political-economic regime cannot guarantee what I call freedom-for-the-good: robust freedom in our hearts and lives to lead the best lives we can… A society whose members are robustly legally free to do or not do what they wish might, in fact, be radically unfree. They might lead undisciplined or degenerate lives. They might shun virtue for vice and love for spiritual darkness. Discussing Christian views on the lives we choose, C. S. Lewis famously observes, “The doors of hell are locked on the inside.” If hell indeed exists, Lewis sees it as a place of chosen separation from God, who is The Good”

Figure 3. Handley: “The latest IMF World Economic Outlook expects Poland to overtake Japanese GDP per capita next year” - imagine being told in 1985 that this would be true in your lifetime.

Fishback, reviewing Career and Family by Claudia Goldin: “As an economic historian, Goldin is used to discussing the complexity of history. Yet much to her amazement (p. 23), she discovered that the evolutionary story for college-educated women could be told simply by dividing them into five distinct cohorts over time. The women within each cohort faced the same constraints, had the same aspirations, married at the same rate, chose similar ages at which to marry and give birth, and had similar timing in their career choices. Meanwhile the differences between cohorts were substantial, and the breaks between groups were due mainly to forces outside the control of the families who were making decisions.. The first cohort, born between 1878 and 1897 and graduating between 1900 and 1919, was a relatively small group that chose between Family or Career. Half never had children and those generally worked for pay at some point in their lives. The Job then Family cohort, born between 1898 and 1923 and graduating between 1919 and 1945, often started out in a job and then formed a family. Most who eventually married had children. Their working lives encompassed the Great Depression, which contributed to marriage bars that forced them to quit when they married... The Family then Job cohort, born between 1924 and 1943 and graduating between 1945 and 1965, typically started families first and then later found jobs. More than 90 percent of this group got married. Most married young, and those almost all had children and contributed to the baby boom. Once the children were grown, the women then went to work, and some developed careers. The Career then Family group was born between 1944 and 1957 and graduated between 1965 and 1979. They were the first group to have ready access to the pill. Although exposed to the increasing success of the women’s movement, Goldin suggests that they were more influenced by seeing their mothers, aunts, and older sisters start working again after having families, but without much foresight. A significant number of their relatives were divorced, with rusty workplace skills, and they faced significant struggles. Thus, the Career then Family cohort focused on establishing careers first. They ended up with higher divorce rates but were better prepared for that outcome. But there was a cost because a significant share of the women who delayed families ended up with no children. The final Career AND Family group was born between 1958 and 1978 and graduated between 1979 and 2000. This group saw the frustrations of the previous group and sought both careers and family at the same time. In consequence, their labor force participation was the highest of any of the cohorts while their share with no children by age 44 was only 21 percent, only slightly higher than the 18 percent for the baby boom Family then Job cohort.”

Cremieux: “Something that bothers me about family policy debate is how people say it's ineffective by finding a framing in which effects are small. France's pronatal policy boosts TFR by ~0.1-0.2. Small, right? No! Put differently, that's 5 to 10 MILLION of the French people alive today.”

Beckworth: “Imagine if Chair Powell did not have to answer [how to assess how much of inflation is coming from tariffs] because the Fed was targeting nominal income. Doing so would allow the Fed to see through such supply-shock inflation while still having a credible nominal anchor. Something to think about for the framework review!”

CS Lewis: “The only two questions we may now ask about a punishment are whether it deters and whether it cures. [But what does the criminal deserve?] The immediate starting point of this article was a letter I read in one of our Leftist weeklies. The author was pleading that a certain sin, now treated by our laws as a crime, should henceforward ,be treated as a disease. And he complained that under the present system the offender, after a term in gaol, was simply let out to return to his original environment where he would probably relapse. What he complained of was not the shutting up but the letting out.”

Caldwell: “Half a century ago, [the French nationalist] Le Pen called for an uprising against a dawning era of human rights, abortion, sexual liberation, transnational governance, and—above all—mass migration. He won the near-unanimous loathing of his country’s journalists and intellectuals, who accused him of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism. For a time he was the most despised major politician in the West, rivaled only by Britain’s Enoch Powell. Not all of his views have been vindicated—far from it. But his general vision, which passed through Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul and Brexit on its way to Donald Trump, has triumphed… In 1972, he co-founded the National Front, the political party he would lead till passing it to his daughter Marine in 2011… It is more popular, in fact, than any party in France, commanding a solid third of the vote and kept out of office only by ever-more-elaborate deals between the establishment parties… Le Pen was, simply put, a nationalist, but there were three causes he cared for especially. First, he opposed Communism from his earliest youth until that movement’s extinction. Second, he had an imperial vision of France: when Charles de Gaulle, as president, showed a weakening resolve to keep Algeria French, Le Pen declared himself de Gaulle’s enemy and drew close to army officers suspected of disloyalty. Finally, he fought immigration. He did so almost alone. In 1972 France enacted its so-called Pleven Law, meant to fight racism. It could be described as France’s equivalent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But there was a twist: France’s principle of non-discrimination applies not only to races and sexes but also to citizenship status. Newly arrived migrants had the same rights to benefits, housing, and so on that French citizens did. As historian Éric Zemmour has noted, this turned the Pleven Law into a “program to melt the French nation into a planetary magma.” … He was open to the idea that the great obsession of his young life—his battle against de Gaulle to preserve French Algeria—might have been a mistake. For had Algeria remained French the level of migration from there would have been even higher than it was, and the demographic changes more intense. “Everyone was with us,” he recalled. “Even so, it is probable that Algerian independence spared us a problem of integration that would have been insoluble.” He went even further, describing de Gaulle as the great leader of postwar France. “He was an adversary. I fought his politics. But I must recognize his gifts as a head of state,” he said. “Not to mention that he was a great writer. As soldiers often are.” … Deregulation and free-market capitalism had been sweeping the world since Margaret Thatcher’s election in Britain in 1979. In 1980 Ronald Reagan followed in the United States. But in France in 1981 the Socialist François Mitterrand took power at the head of a “united Left” that included Communists. He bucked the trend, nationalizing industries, shortening the work week, lowering the retirement age, and imposing a high wealth tax. The experiment collapsed, along with the economy, in 1983. France’s working class discovered that Socialists were unable to protect them against the old dangers, like unemployment, and unwilling to protect them against new ones, like mass immigration. Le Pen became the defender of a class that had suddenly found itself without defenders… In the winter of 1984—after Dreux and just before his breakthrough in European Union elections that spring—Le Pen was invited onto the popular television show L’heure de vérité (Moment of Truth) for an extensive interview with several of the country’s top journalists. It was an ambush. The financial writer Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber peppered Le Pen with racist statements drawn from various sources, many of them years old and none of which had been verifiably made by Le Pen himself, but all of which involved a person who could be tied to him in some way… the entire exercise seemed to be aimed at amalgamating Le Pen’s views on immigration and abortion with the worst enormities of modern times… Days after his death, The New York Times wrote that Le Pen had been “considered so odious that many opponents refused to debate him.” One could just as easily say that he was so formidable in debate that his opponents invoked his odiousness to avoid humiliation… Possibly due to the attachment of immigrant groups to the Palestinian cause, the Le Pen party, now firmly pro-Israel, took a sizable percentage of the Jewish vote in 2024.”

NYT obit for Monica Getz. “The Swedish-born Ms. Getz was a student at Georgetown University in Washington when Mr. Getz, one of the most revered jazz saxophonists of the 20th century, met her backstage at a campus concert and pursued her even though he was married…Mr. Getz was smitten by Monica’s beauty. (One of his young sons from his first marriage thought she looked like Grace Kelly.) He married her on Nov. 3, 1956, a few days after obtaining a no-contest Mexican divorce…. Drugs and alcohol, however, created havoc in the Getzes’ marriage. Mr. Getz had begun using heroin at 16 and was arrested two years before the marriage for attempting to rob a pharmacy to get narcotics. At the insistence of his wife, a teetotaler, he would seek medical help and enter rehabilitation programs, but relapses followed. At the couple’s divorce trial in 1987, Mr. Getz said he often drank to the point of blacking out. “I have a discography of 210 records,” he said, but “some of them I can’t even remember making.” The trial, in civil court in White Plains, N.Y., was a lurid affair that made headlines, especially because of the accounts of Mr. Getz’s violence toward his family. While drinking, he hit his wife repeatedly, according to testimony from Ms. Getz and the couple’s two adult children. Their daughter, Pamela Raynor, said he “would slap, kick and punch” her mother while drunk. Monica Getz recalled her husband once beating her so badly with a telephone that she fell and hit her head, requiring hospitalization. The case reached the courtroom six years after Mr. Getz had moved out of Shadowbrook, decamping for San Francisco, and sued for divorce. Ms. Getz did not want a divorce. She explained both in and out of court that she still loved her husband, despite his battery and a string of mistresses, and despite having obtained an order of protection against him in Family Court in 1980. She made excuses for his violence to the jury, just as she had to her children, blaming his alcoholism. She forgave him, she testified, “because I know it’s a disease, and I’m a forgiving person.” … For years, Ms. Getz had been secretly dosing her husband’s food and drink with Antabuse, a medicine that causes nausea and dizziness when combined with alcohol, which kept him mostly sober throughout the 1970s, Nicolaus Getz said. “He began to tell his friends on the phone, ‘I can’t drink anymore, I’m allergic to it,’” he recalled… In court, Mr. Getz accused his wife of trying to poison him with the surreptitious Antabuse. “I couldn’t live with her in a million years,” he told the jurors. Clearly baffled as to why such a marriage should continue, the jurors sided with Mr. Getz. They ruled in May 1987 that his wife had treated him cruelly and inhumanly in dosing his food, and that she had committed adultery, which she denied… Ms. Getz continued to contest the divorce vigorously, in court and in the public sphere. In 1988, she founded the Coalition for Family Justice, a nonprofit group devoted to reforming divorce laws and supporting divorcing spouses, mainly women… She denied that she wanted to extract more money. As appeals ate up ever-higher lawyers’ fees, it became clear that her quest was to erase the blot of being judged as the party at fault, and to secure a moral victory: to be recognized for having saved her husband’s life by standing beside him during the worst of his drinking and drug addiction… Ms. Getz’s Coalition for Family Justice held monthly meetings at Shadowbrook to support and advise women going through divorce. It also ran seminars for judges, aiming to sensitize them to divorce issues that disadvantaged women and children.” FWIW, ChatGPT estimates a high likelihood that she did not in fact commit adultery but that the jury needed to blame her in order to grant the divorce - that’s especially notable because it would have affected her settlement.

Caplan: “I would much rather hang out with a random group of kids than a random group of adults. For all of the following reasons: Kids are much less boring than adults. They have more energy, joie de vivre, and curiosity. A lot more. They want to do things in their free time, rather than merely “relax.” Kids are much more honest than adults. While kids do invent bald lies for short-run gain, they are far more candid overall. Indeed, they routinely blurt out what they’re really thinking. When one of my relatives was ten, she opened her mouth and said, “I don’t like homeless people.” To which I responded, “Most people feel the same way, but few have the courage to admit it.” Kids are much less conformist than adults… Kids have better imaginations than adults. They pose novel hypotheticals, like: “What would you do if a cow fell from the sky?” They ask deep questions instead of accepting the world as it is: “If you could live forever, what would you do?” They invent imaginary worlds and characters instead of talking about the health issues of their elderly relatives… Kids have much better hobbies than adults. A large share of grown-up recreation revolves around alcohol consumption… Kids hold far fewer grudges than adults. If you make them angry or sad, they scream or cry. Half an hour later, they’re back to normal. Adults, in contrast, bottle up their feelings — and hold petty grudges for decades. Kids express far more joy and love than adults. They don’t just sincerely rejoice in holidays and birthdays. They rejoice over an unexpected ice cream cone… Kids have more time for you than adults… Kids are more likely to teach you new things than adults. While kids rarely want to hear another educational lecture from adults, most are eager to give such lectures to adults. Want to learn what’s cool today in music, shows, games, and life? Ask a kid… Kids are much less jaded than adults. Kids yawn at art museums, but that’s on you. Try taking them to Disneyland or a simple waterfall and witness their excitement. If and when you tire of your favorite activities and places, you can see the world anew again just by bringing some kids to experience them with you.”

Morson: “Shortly before the [1968] invasion, author Anatoly Marchenko, who guessed from Soviet news reports what would happen, circulated an open letter addressed to editors of Soviet, Czech, and Western newspapers. The impending Soviet intervention, he maintained, was not about “protecting socialism.” It was designed primarily to prevent Soviet “workers, peasants and intelligentsia” from imitating their Czech counterparts and demanding “freedom of speech in practice and not only on paper.” Marchenko was arrested, ostensibly on another charge… In his splendid new study of Soviet dissidents, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, University of Pennsylvania historian Benjamin Nathans asks why they organized this and similar protests. They had no illusions about changing Soviet policy or public opinion. And the risks they faced were enormous. To be sure, conditions had improved markedly since the Stalin era—“people no longer returned from interrogations with their fingernails gone,” Nathans observes—but they were still horrific. [In prison there was] perpetually inadequate food… It was still worse if they put you in “the box,” a sort of prison within the prison. There, writes Bukovsky, “you get no paper, no pencil, and no books. They don’t take you out for exercise or to the bathhouse; you get fed only every other day.” It is almost completely dark, it is always cold, and at night you wake up every 15 minutes to warm yourself by running around. The hole in the ground serving as a toilet stinks to high heaven, and the walls are covered with gobs of bloody saliva left by tuberculosis sufferers. With nothing to do in the dark blankness, “gradually you lose all sense of reality…and the more time passes the more you turn into some sort of inanimate object…. Your body is no longer you, your thoughts are no longer yours; they come and go of their own accord.” … How can one stay sane in such conditions? Bukovsky managed to do so by using his imagination. “I set myself the task of constructing a castle in every detail…. I carefully cut each individual stone,” planned the tapestries in all detail, invited guests, and browsed through old books. “I even knew what was inside those books. I could even read them.” The castle preserved Bukovsky’s sanity because “it saved me from apathy, from indifference to living,” and from the emptiness that annihilates the self… When Navalny returned to Russia in 2021, a puzzled Western reporter asked Sharansky: didn’t Navalny know he would be arrested and probably killed? For Sharansky, this question betrayed the Western assumption that the point of life is individual well-being. He described his retort as “pretty rude”: “You’re the one who does not understand something. If you think the goal is survival—then you are right. But his true concern is the fate of his people—and he is telling them: ‘I am not afraid, and you should not be either.’” … The moment when Sharansky realized that his escape from Soviet reality into chess, science, and careerism had deprived him of self-respect came when the most eminent Soviet scientist, Andrei Sakharov, gave up his immense privileges to demand freedom… My favorite passage in Bukovksky’s memoir describes an experiment he performed while on a geological expedition. “I caught three ants and put them in a mug…. I wanted to see to what degree ants were better than people.” Every time the ants tried to climb out, he shook them back to the bottom. After 180 attempts to escape, the ants gave up. Bukovsky left the mug in the grass for three days, but the ants remained. “Several times it drizzled, the sun set and rose, but they simply stayed there in the mug, twitching their whiskers—probably telling one another jokes.” … As Václav Havel pointed out, although it may have felt as if cheating undermined the system, in a lip-service state cheating was the system… Gathering in Pushkin Square on December 5, 1965—Soviet Constitution Day—poet Joseph Brodsky, bard Bulat Okudzhava, samizdat compiler Aleksandr Ginzburg, Volpin, and others unfurled a homemade banner reading “Respect the Constitution of the USSR!” The writer Varlam Shalamov observed that this was the first unsanctioned demonstration since 1927. Sinyavsky and Daniel, he added, were the first Soviet defendants in a major political trial to plead not guilty. They acted, in other words, as if the trial were a real one. At Bukovsky’s trial his lawyer, Dina Kaminskaya, did something unheard of: she acknowledged that her client had done everything he was accused of but argued that none of it was illegal. Bukovsky mastered the criminal code and repeatedly cited it to interrogators and prison officials. Before long, Soviet authorities came to regard these trials—descriptions of which were broadcast by Western media to Russian citizens—as counterproductive. So, they often avoided judicial proceedings by declaring defendants insane and incarcerating them in psychiatric hospitals.”

Economist obituary: Oleg Gordievsky worked for both sides in the Cold War

Gilley: “The United States is an inheritor of the British imperial tradition, and despite our self-image as revolutionaries, we embraced that tradition from the get-go. Americans in the colonial period thought of themselves not just as British but as British imperialists… Whether native or European, the prospects of economic dynamism, political stability, and social freedoms under American rule were far preferable to the failed polities it replaced – culminating in the rescue of the feuding Polynesian kingdom in Hawaii in 1898 that was being swamped by migrants from Asia. Native Americans in particular escaped from brutal pre-literate societies where war, slavery, and cannibalism were common. From Jamestown to Wounded Knee, the average annual number of Native Americans killed resisting the American imperial state was a minuscule 25, vastly outnumbered by the thousands who joined the American empire every year. After declining precipitously due to disease and assimilation, the American Indian population swelled, its landholdings expanded, and its cultural production blossomed -- not quite evidence of American misrule… “

i/o: “So what did "anti-racist" math (or "ethnomathematics") look like in practice? Seattle's own primer on the subject stated that it's about "resistance" and "liberation" and overcoming "oppression" by resurrecting non-Western mathematics and emphasizing the "stories" of people of color. … After the miserable test scores were released, Castro-Gill [the former equity and ethnic studies director for Seattle's public school system] wrote that closing learning and score gaps was a "white supremacist" notion and that the gaps should never be closed because they "provide space for reflection and growth."”

Shaurya: “> james chadwick > 1932 > results don't add up so there must be a new particle > call that neutron > single page > nature publication > nobel prize in physics”