Reality is something you rise above.
— Liza Minelli
Reading Time: 5 minutes 10 seconds
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Today is Tuesday, January 16th, 2024. It is Book Publishers Day, National Good Teen Day, National Fig Newton Day, National Nothing Day, National Quinoa Day, National Without a Scalpel Day, National Religious Freedom Day, and International Hot and Spicy Food Day.
On This Day
In 1707, the Scottish Parliament ratified the Act of Union, paving the way for the creation of Great Britain.
In 1786, Virginia enacted the Statute for Religious Freedom, authored by Thomas Jefferson.
In 1847, John C. Frémont was appointed governor of California Territory.
In 1883, the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, establishing the U.S. Civil Service, was enacted by Congress.
In 1909, Ernest Shackleton’s expedition found the magnetic South Pole.
In 1920, the League of Nations held its first council meeting in Paris.
In 1942, TWA Flight 3, a twin-engine Douglas DC-3-382 en route from New York to California crashed into a sheer cliff on Potosi Mountain in Nevada. All 22 people on board, including movie star Carole Lombard, were killed.
In 1979, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah, fled his country amidst the Iranian Revolution.
In 1991, a U.S.-led coalition went to war with Iraq, beginning the Gulf War.
In 2020, the U.S. Senate ratified the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement as a replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Today’s Birthdays
Astronomer Jill Tarter is 80. Radio host and moralist Laura Schlessinger (“Dr. Laura”) is 77. Filmmaker and composer John Carpenter is 76. Actress, dancer, choreographer, director, and producer Debbie Allen is 74. Singer-songwriter Sade, born Helen Folasade Adu, is 65. Former model Kate Moss is 50.
The Links
Just How Alienated Are Our Masters and Commanders? (Jeffrey A. Tucker)
“Indeed, nearly the whole of the intellectual class joined in this disgusting display of class-based self-regard, even daring to cheer on the smashing of rights and liberties earned through a thousand years of struggle by regular people against privileged elites. To this day, they as a group have not admitted error. At best, they beg the increasingly angry rabble to grant them amnesty. After wrecking countless lives, they presume we are all just going to move on?”
The Cult of Technology Seeks Absolute Control (The Daily Sceptic)
“In our highly secularised state it seems to me that perhaps we’ve transferred our need for reassurance to a new form of cult: technology. Instead of rain dances and sacrifices we look to weather forecasters, satellites and modelling to tell us the weather future. Instead of expecting gods to protect us, we have turned to computers and electronics and all their attendant systems to run the world around us. They are increasingly treated as if they were infallible, as if they were a pantheon of gods, mainly because we want them to be. In our uncertain world we are desperate for certainty. This thread ran throughout Covid, but that kind of belief in what mathematics and technology and the will to believe we can control our environment runs through almost every part of our society now.”
34.7 percent of business establishments born in 2013 were still operating in 2023 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor)
“The agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting industry had the highest survival rate (50.5 percent still in business in 2023), followed by utilities (45.7 percent) and manufacturing (43.6 percent). The lowest survival rate was in mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction (24.5 percent). Other industries with low 10-year survival rates were information (29.1 percent) and wholesale trade (32.1 percent).”
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