Old Laocoön

O miseri, quae tanta insania, cives?

[eburke @JamesWHankins1]

The Japanese were taking Confucian principles from China already in the 8th c. Chan=Zen Buddhism around the same time. Japanese Buddhism has many viable schools in addition to Zen which go unnoticed by Western observers. I don't know whether Daoism had much impact in Japan. Maybe somebody out there knows?
Japanese painting improves vastly on Chinese models from 19th c. onwards IMHO. 20th c. shin-hanga print-making reaches heights of expressiveness and beauty the Chnese never achieved. To be sure. their artistic sense was depraved by Marxism. Comparing what Japan and China respectively took from Western artistic traditions in the late 19th c. strikes me as an interesting line of inquiry, though I don't have the time or expertise for it.

[Marc E. Elias @marceelias]

🚨BREAKING: Federal Court REJECTS Department of Justice lawsuit to force Virginia to provide the DOJ with access to its complete statewide voter registration database.

Another victory for Elias Law Group and its clients. DOJ is now 0-14 in these cases.
https://t.co/tz7qVcxVMl

[Old Laocoön @OldLaocoon]

@SpeakerJohnson The barbarians are in the White House and in your boogie of weasels, the House GOP caucus.

[Old Laocoön @OldLaocoon]

@HawleyMO https://t.co/E9ftIAAxiQ

https://t.co/uUKgPxlyvu

Typically, one investigates a conspiracy to stage a coup by investigating the conspirators.

[Old Laocoön @OldLaocoon]

@HorcherF

[Armand D'Angour @ArmandDAngour]

This is wonderful. An interactive guide to the Iliadic Catalogue of Ships.
Created by a Wharton prof using AI:

https://t.co/eoEHvi6Qae

[Ferenc Hörcher @HorcherF]

Professional update: I won a visiting research fellowship 2026, to the Politics Department of @Princeton University, generously sponsored by the James @MadisonProgram, led by @McCormickProf. My research topic is: Township, Subsidiarity, Oikophilia: In Defence of the Local.
2/1

[Marc E. Elias @marceelias]

🚨BREAKING: Federal Court REJECTS Department of Justice lawsuit to obtain West Virginia full voter registration file. Another victory for Elias Law Group and our clients.

This marks DOJ's 13th defeat with zero victories. https://t.co/eQecNA72U4

[Peter Morley @morethanmySLE]

I'm going to KEEP talking about how Florida Senator Rick Scott, the RICHEST man in all of Congress DEFRAUDED Medicare & is trying to CUT Social Security.

Will you join me?🤚

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

🚨HOLY SHIT: Republican Senator Ron Johnson just DENIED the Mitch McConnell photo was taken now:

"I just heard from a source that was an older photo.” YIKES!

[Marc E. Elias @marceelias]

🚨BREAKING: Idaho’s Republican attorney general’s office accused the Department of Justice of potentially violating state ethics rules by threatening the state’s top election official with a criminal prosecution while suing him for the state’s voter rolls. https://t.co/3jSkphp1hf

[Michael McFaul @McFaul]

Just realized France is playing tomorrow on Bastille Day. Will be a crazy night in Paris if they win.

[Hidden History @HiddenHistoryYT]

In 1945 the USS Indianapolis secretly delivered the parts for the atomic bomb that would hit Hiroshima.

Days later, mission done, a Japanese submarine put two torpedoes into her. She sank in 12 minutes.

Nearly 900 men made it off the ship alive and into the open ocean. Then it got worse.

No one knew they were missing. Three separate Navy stations picked up the distress signals and every one of them ignored it. One officer thought it was a Japanese trap. Another had ordered not to be disturbed.

So the men floated. For almost five days. No food, no fresh water, burning by day and freezing at night. Some drank seawater and went insane. And the whole time, the sharks were circling and feeding. It is considered the worst shark attack in human history.

When rescue finally came by accident, only 316 of the nearly 1,200 crew were still alive.

The Navy needed someone to blame for the disaster. They chose Captain Charles McVay, one of the men who survived it. He became the only U.S. captain in the entire war to be court-martialed for losing his ship to the enemy.

At his trial the Navy did something almost unheard of. They brought in the Japanese commander who sank the ship to testify against him. Instead, the enemy captain told the court that zigzagging would have made no difference and that McVay did nothing wrong.

They convicted him anyway.

For years afterward McVay got hate mail from the families of the dead. Some sent letters every Christmas telling him he murdered their sons. In 1968 he walked onto his front lawn and shot himself, holding a toy sailor he had kept since he was a boy.

Case closed. For fifty years.

Then in 1996 an 11-year-old named Hunter Scott watched Jaws with his dad and got hooked on the 30 second speech about the Indianapolis. He made it his sixth grade history project.

He tracked down and interviewed nearly 150 survivors. He dug through more than 800 documents. And buried in there he found what the Navy had left out, including that they knew enemy subs were operating right on the ship's route and never warned McVay.

A kid's school project turned into a national story. It reached Congress. In 2000 lawmakers passed a resolution clearing McVay's name and President Clinton signed it. The Navy officially cleared his record in 2001.

The captain the Navy spent decades blaming was finally exonerated by a sixth grader.

Hunter Scott grew up and became a naval flight officer.

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

This image shows 21-year-old Nicole Carol Miller boarding United Airlines Flight 93 on the morning of September 11, 2001.
At the time, it was just another routine flight — passengers lining up, unaware of what the next hours would bring.
Flight 93 would later be hijacked, and those on board would learn of the earlier attacks. In a final act of resistance, passengers and crew attempted to regain control of the aircraft, preventing it from reaching its intended target.
The plane ultimately crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, and everyone on board lost their lives. Nicole Miller was among them. Photos like this carry a quiet weight — capturing ordinary moments just before history changes everything.

[Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸 @jimstewartson]

Union leaders were some of the first people sent to Dachau.

The unions were all replaced with the German Labor Front which had the same logo as DOGE—14 teeth and all.

[Noah Rothman @NoahCRothman]

Iran’s unilateral alteration of the established order on the high seas could help the president convince a reluctant world that he was right all along – that Iran is a revisionist power that cannot be talked out of its violent ambitions.

Instead, the president has decided that it’s better for the United States to present itself not a champion for the status quo ante from which all benefited but as just another threat to it.

[Old Laocoön @OldLaocoon]

@EVKontorovich @politicalelle @StateDept @marcorubio Is the United States now, or has it ever been, a signatory to the Rome Statute?

[Old Laocoön @OldLaocoon]

@ThisMomSaid @SenMikeLee She’s in Congress.

[Old Laocoön @OldLaocoon]

@RecolonizeM @SenMikeLee You know of course Rep. Tlaib was born in Detroit.

[Old Laocoön @OldLaocoon]

@SenMikeLee I think “We aren’t going anywhere” suggests she knows that.