Outside the Beltway

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1. Scott says:
   Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 07:00

   Today’s history lesson from Heather Cox Richardson

   March 15 is, of course, that it is the day in 1820 that Maine, the Pine Tree State, joined the Union.

   Maine statehood had national repercussions. The inhabitants of this northern part of Massachusetts had asked for statehood in 1819, but their petition was stopped dead by southerners who refused to permit a free state—one that did not permit human enslavement—to enter the Union without a corresponding “slave state.” The explosive growth of the northern states had already given free states control of the House of Representatives, but the South held its own in the Senate, where each state got two votes. The admission of Maine would give the North the advantage, and southerners insisted that Maine’s admission be balanced with the admission of a southern slave state lest those opposed to slavery use their power in the federal government to restrict enslavement in the South.

   They demanded the admission of Missouri to counteract Maine’s two “free” Senate votes.

   But this “Missouri Compromise” infuriated northerners, especially those who lived in Maine. They swamped Congress with petitions against admitting Missouri as a slave state, resenting that slave owners in the Senate could hold the state of Maine hostage until they got their way. Tempers rose high enough that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Massachusetts—and later Maine—senator John Holmes that he had for a long time been content with the direction of the country, but that the Missouri question “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”

   Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, but Jefferson was right to see it as nothing more than a reprieve.

   The petition drive that had begun as an effort to keep the admission of Maine from being tied to the admission of Missouri continued as a movement to get Congress to whittle away at slavery where it could—by, for example, outlawing the sales of enslaved Americans in the nation’s capital—and would become a key point of friction between the North and the South.

   There was also another powerful way in which the conditions of the state’s entry into the Union would affect American history. Mainers were angry that their statehood had been tied to the demands of far distant slave owners, and that anger worked its way into the state’s popular culture. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 meant that Maine men, who grew up steeped in that anger, could spread west.

   And so they did.

   In 1837, Elijah P. Lovejoy, who had moved to Alton, Illinois, from Albion, Maine, to begin a newspaper dedicated to the abolition of human enslavement, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob, who threw his printing press into the Mississippi River.

   Elijah Lovejoy’s younger brother, Owen, had also moved west from Maine. Owen saw Elijah shot and swore his allegiance to the cause of abolition. “I shall never forsake the cause that has been sprinkled with my brother’s blood,” he declared. He turned to politics, and in 1854 he was elected to the Illinois state legislature. His increasing prominence brought him political friends, including an up-and-coming lawyer who had arrived in Illinois from Kentucky by way of Indiana, Abraham Lincoln.

   Lovejoy and Lincoln were also friends with another Maine man gone to Illinois. Elihu Washburne had been born in Livermore, Maine, in 1816, when Maine was still part of Massachusetts. He was one of seven brothers, and one by one, his brothers had all left home, most of them to move west. Israel Washburn Jr., the oldest, stayed in Maine, but Cadwallader moved to Wisconsin, and William Drew would follow, going to Minnesota. (Elihu was the only brother who spelled his last name with an e).

   Israel and Elihu were both serving in Congress in 1854 when Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, overturning the Missouri Compromise and permitting the spread of slavery to the West. Furious, Israel called a meeting of 30 congressmen in May to figure out how they could come together to stand against the Slave Power that had commandeered the government to spread the South’s system of human enslavement. They met in the rooms of Representative Edward Dickinson, of Massachusetts—whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poems—and while they came to the meeting from all different political parties, they left with one sole principle: to stop the Slave Power that was turning the government into an oligarchy.

   The men scattered for the summer back to their homes across the North, sharing their conviction that a new party must rise to stand against the Slave Power. In the fall, those calling themselves “anti-Nebraska” candidates were sweeping into office—Cadwallader Washburn would be elected from Wisconsin in 1854 and Owen Lovejoy from Illinois in 1856—and they would, indeed, create a new political party: the Republicans. The new party took deep root in Maine, flipping the state from Democratic to Republican in 1856, the first time it fielded a presidential candidate.

   In 1859, Abraham Lincoln would articulate an ideology for the party, defining it as the party of ordinary Americans standing together against the oligarchs of slavery, and when he ran for president in 1860, he knew it was imperative that he get the momentum of Maine men on his side. In those days Maine voted for state and local offices in September, rather than November, so a party’s win in Maine could start a wave. “As Maine goes, so goes the nation,” the saying went.

   So Lincoln turned for his vice president to Hannibal Hamlin, who represented Maine in the Senate (and whose father had built the house in which the Washburns grew up). Lincoln won 62% of the vote in Maine in 1860, taking all eight of the state’s electoral votes, and went on to win the election. When he arrived in Washington quietly in late February to take office the following March, Elihu Washburne was at the railroad station to greet him.

   Ms Richardson concluded: I found it fascinating that a group of ordinary people from country towns who shared a fear that they were losing their democracy could figure out how to work together to reclaim it.

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2. Scott says:
   Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 07:10

   I found this pretty terrifying and I’m just a guy.

   They Didn’t Want to Have C-Sections. A Judge Would Decide How They Gave Birth.

   On the afternoon of Sept. 9, 2024, Cherise Doyley was in her 12th hour of contractions at University of Florida Health in downtown Jacksonville when a nurse came in with a bedsheet and told her to cover up. A supervisor brought a tablet to Doyley’s bedside. Gathered on the screen were a judge in a black robe and several lawyers, doctors and hospital staff.

   “It’s a real judge in there?” Doyley asked the nurse at the beginning of what would be a three-hour hearing. “Now this is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”

   Doyley hadn’t asked for the hearing. The hospital had sought it. Doyley had mere minutes to prepare. She had no lawyer and no advocate — no one to explain to her what, exactly, was going on.

   Judge Michael Kalil informed her that the state had filed an emergency petition at the hospital’s behest — not out of concern for Doyley, per se, but in the interest of her unborn child. He described the circumstances as “extraordinary.”

   The hospital and state attorney’s office wanted to force Doyley to undergo a cesarean section. Doyley, a professional birthing doula, didn’t want that and had been firm about it. She’d had three prior C-sections, one that resulted in a hemorrhage, and hoped to avoid another serious complication and lengthy recovery. She was aware that doctors were concerned about the risk of uterine rupture, a potentially deadly complication for her and her baby. She would say during the hearing that she understood the risk to be less than 2% and didn’t want to agree to a C-section unless there was an emergency.

   But the choice would not be hers. The judge would decide how she would give birth.
   …
   In Florida and many other states, court-ordered medical procedures are just one of the ways pregnant patients’ rights are restricted. The effort to chip away at those rights is rooted in the concept of fetal personhood — that a fetus has equal and, in some cases, more rights than the woman sustaining it.

   Just a step away from Bene Tleilax

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3. Jax says:
   Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 08:08

   In the span of two weeks, I’ve gone from waking up every morning afraid Trump had started a war, to waking up wondering if this will be the day he launches a nuke.

   Will we get an emergency broadcast warning if he does, like we get Amber Alerts and severe weather alerts thru our phones? Does anybody know?

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4. Scott says:
   Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 08:15

   @Jax:

   You just made me think of this:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15YgdrhrCM8&t=25s

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5. CSK says:
   Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 09:54

   @Scott:

   So interesting.

   @Scott:

   So appalling.

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6. Rob1 says:
   Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 11:13

   @Jax:

   I’d like to think that there are more safeguards and human reluctance in the system than for that to happen. But, I have much concern that a much battered Iran or its proxies will find a way to come up with a nuke device. They do not even need a ballistic delivery system to make it effective.

   What has happened — with Trump’s irrational violent assault on Iran and Venezuela, coupled with Russia’s violent criminal invasion of Ukraine, AND Israel’s horrific scrubbing of Gaza — is that there is an ongoing, large scale retreat from rational conflict resolution on this planet. Behavior modeling begets behavioral repetition. A long-in-the-making social compact between nations, to civilly work through our state level problems is unraveling in the face of power mad leaderships. Xi is itching to take Taiwan. Humane rationality has been rocked back on its heels.

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7. charontwo says:
   Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 11:21

   @Rob1:

   I would worry more about Trump getting frustrated and needing an emotional fix by nuking Iran.

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8. Rob1 says:
   Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 11:52

   @charontwo: Which leads to blowback, the magnitude of which we have no preconception.

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9. Kathy says:
   Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 12:19

   Forget nukes. Cheap drones are giving weaker nations outsize power now, and they’re within the means of pretty much every nation on the planet.

   2
10. Kathy says:
    Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 13:35

    Back in 2012 I went to war against Windows 8 (or, as I called it, WINDOS*). The interface was so terrible and near useless, that the war ended relatively quickly with the announcement and launch of Windows 10 (at the time, I suggested it be called Window Apology Edition).

    Now I’m at war against LLMs. This is going to be much harder. Microsoft could always back down and release a rational desktop interface And in any case, all Windows versions are understood to be for a few years only. Open AI has nothing else to fall back on, neither does Anthropic. Google and others, including Adolf’s combo ISP/data mining/LLM/space launch concern, have other lines of revenue, but they’ve poured billions on their LLMs, and won’t back off them any time soon.

    Still, the first major blow against WINDOS back in the day were apps that overlaid a rational desktop interface on it. I used one, Start8, for my laptop. So, a good beginning would be an app that blocks LLMs from one’s PC and phone.

    *I’m contractually obligated with myself in perpetuity to denigrate WINDOS; a.k.a Windows 8 Is Not a Desktop Operating System.

    3
11. charontwo says:
    Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 13:58

    “AI slop, examples and discussion”

    The truth is inaccessible. Everything becomes vibes.

    And it is getting worse, because we have created and deployed the most powerful lie machine ever imagined, with virtually no actual guardrails and precious little social stigma applied to its use. To the contrary, America’s most powerful institutions and corporations are all but insisting we participate in it.

    What a stupid world we are creating.[7]

    And a dangerous one: Breaking our ability to discern truth from fiction in areas we pay a lot of attention to — and, for better or worse, sports and celebrity are two such areas — can’t help but carry over to our ability to discern truth from fiction when it comes to things most of Americans don’t know as much about. Like, say, foreign policy or the tax code.

    5
12. gVOR10 says:
    Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 17:07

    Pathocracy.

    According to Lobaczewski, the transition to pathocracy begins when a disordered individual emerges as a leader figure. While some members of the ruling class are appalled by the brutality and irresponsibility of the leader and his acolytes, his disordered personality appeals to some psychologically normal individuals. They find him charismatic. His impulsiveness is mistaken for decisiveness; his narcissism for confidence; his recklessness for fearlessness.

    Soon other people with psychopathic traits emerge and attach themselves to the pathocracy, sensing the opportunity to gain power and influence. At the same time, responsible and moral people gradually leave the government, either resigning or being ruthlessly ejected. In an inevitable process, soon the entire government is filled with people with a pathological lack of empathy and conscience. It has been infiltrated by members of the minority of people with personality disorders, who assume power over the majority of psychologically normal people.

    Soon the pathology of the government spreads amongst the general population. As Lobaczewski wrote, ‘If an individual in a position of political power is a psychopath, he or she can create an epidemic of psychopathology in people who are not, essentially, psychopathic’ (2006, p.25). The pathocratic government presents a compelling simplistic ideology, promoting notions of future greatness, with a need to defeat or eliminate alleged enemies who stand in the way of this great future.

    Le sigh.

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13. Kathy says:
    Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 17:37

    BTW, here’s a video on the coming XpaceS IPO.

    Beyond Boyle’s snarky, deadpan delivery, he makes some rather good points. Including two I’ve noted before: 1) XpaceS is merging with XAI, which merged with Xitter, to give the investors in both some kind of return by merging them into an Adolf venture that actually makes money; 2) XpaceS seems to depend more on Xtarlink for income than on its stated purpose of launching cargoes to space*.

    To the latter, Boyle notes also further growth for Xtarlink is limited. Most people who can afford it live in urban areas where broadband is plentiful , fast, and cheaper. Not to mention that if you get many users in one place, like a city, the satellites will inevitably get congested (whereas optic fibers in DSL lines have a larger data carrying capacity than wireless signals).

    Pretty much the major growth areas are commercial aircraft, where Xtarlink faces competition, and seagoing vessels (ditto).

    * I sense a kind of vicious circle here. The infamous Xtarlink satellites have a limited lifespan, and require a Xalcon 9 launch to get deployed. Maybe that’s the main reason why Xtarship was designed to be fully reusable, and to be recovered only at the launch site. Also why Adolf harps on how cheap it will be, once he clears the regular explosion phase of development.

    Of course, the same applies to Lex Bezos’ satellite ISP venture as well. Maybe in a worse way, as he has so far depended on Adolf’s ISP to launch his internet satellites. IMO, the huge volume capacity of the New Glenn upper stage was meant for deploying as many satellites as possible in one launch.

    (and maybe not. the New Glenn’s been in development for over a decade).

    1
14. gVOR10 says:
    Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 17:41

    @gVOR10: I hadn’t followed the link to the full essay above when I posted it. Worth reading. Turns out it dates from 2021 and was written by one Dr Steve Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University, and Chair of the Transpersonal Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society.

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15. Eusebio says:
    Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 18:22

    @Rob1:

    …there is an ongoing, large scale retreat from rational conflict resolution on this planet.

    And two notable milestones in this trend have been the unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA eight years ago, and the recent JD head fake with the Epstein administration’s relative peacenik VP meeting with the Oman foreign minister and discussing progress made in the Oman-sponsored diplomatic negotiations between the US and Iran just hours before a surprise attack timed to take advantage of the “opportunity” to assassinate scores of Iran’s political leaders.

    One nuclear power has been openly behaving as a terrorist nation for the past four years with limited military pushback other than from the nation it invaded. Now that terrorism-sponsoring Iran has had its sovereignty attacked despite ongoing diplomacy, I’m afraid it will intensify and also broaden its efforts to obtain its own nuclear deterrence.

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16. JohnSF says:
    Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 18:53

    @Eusebio:
    One lesson from this for Iran, I’d say, is that regarding a nuclear weapons project:
    “I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
    There’s no conceivable scenario in which Israel permits Iran to get to the weaponization threshhold.

    1
17. Gustopher says:
    Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 19:36

    @gVOR10: Are you suggesting that our Dr. Steve Taylor is secretly British in his spare time?

    The scandal!
18. Gregory Lawrence Brown says:
    Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 19:46

    …why did the 9V battery get kicked out of church?
    Because they were holding an AA Meeting.

    (source will remain anonymous)

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19. Rob1 says:
    Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 22:01

    @gVOR10:

    Pathocracy. According to Lobaczewski, the transition to pathocracy begins when a disordered individual emerges as a leader figure. [..] Soon other people with psychopathic traits emerge and attach themselves to the pathocracy, sensing the opportunity to gain power and influence. At the same time, responsible and moral people gradually leave the government, either resigning or being ruthlessly ejected. [..] It has been infiltrated by members of the minority of people with personality disorders, who assume power over the majority of psychologically normal people.[..] Soon the pathology of the government spreads amongst the general population

    —- The constructs of a theory I’ve been kicking around in my head for over 30 years. Thanks for the post. It’s good to know other people see the same things.

    2
20. Richard Gardner says:
    Sunday, 15 March 2026 at 23:34

    Paul R. Ehrlich of “The Population Bomb” (1968) has passed at 93. I’m not a fan of the Neo-Malthusians. Doom, gloom, repent (but in a secular way). There is a NYT Obit (paywalled). He certainly was a major public intellectual.