Random News and Notes 18 August

On this date:

• 1227 – Mongol ruler Genghis Khan dies in camp during a campaign against the Chinese kingdom of Xi Xia.
• 1590 – John White, the leader of 117 colonists sent in 1587 to Roanoke Island (North Carolina) to establish a colony, returns from a trip to England to find the settlement deserted. No trace of the settlers is ever found.
• 1700 – After invading Denmark and capturing Norway, Charles XII of Sweden forces Frederick IV of Denmark to sign the Peace of Travendal.
• 1759 – The French fleet is destroyed by the British under “Old Dreadnought” Boscawen at the Battle of Lagos Bay.
• 1862 – Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart‘s headquarters is raided by Union troops of the 5th New York and 1st Michigan cavalries.
• 1864 – Union General William T. Sherman sends General Judson Kilpatrick to raid Confederate lines of communication outside Atlanta. The raid is unsuccessful.
• 1870 – Prussian forces defeat the French at the Battle of Gravelotte during the Franco-Prussian War.

• 1914 – Germany declares war on Russia while President Woodrow Wilson issues his Proclamation of Neutrality.
• 1920 – Tennessee becomes the thirty-sixth state to ratify the nineteenth amendment granting women’s suffrage, completing the three-quarters necessary to put the amendment into effect.
• 1939 – The film The Wizard of Oz opens in New York City.
• 1942 – Japan sends a crack army to Guadalcanal to repulse the U.S. Marines fighting there.
• 1943 – The Royal Air Force Bomber Command completes the first major strike against the German missile development facility at Peenemunde.
• 1965 – Operation Starlite marks the beginning of major U.S. ground combat operations in Vietnam.
• 1973 – Hank Aaron notches his 1,378 extra-base hit, surpassing Stan Musial’s record.
• 1974 – Luna 24, the USSR’s final major lunar exploration mission, soft-lands on moon.
• 1982 – Pete Rose sets a record with his 13,941st plate appearance. He would go on to make 15,890 PA in his career.
• 1988 – Republican Convention in New Orleans nominate the George H.W. Bush-Dan Quayle ticket.
• 1991 – A group of hard-line communist leaders unhappy with the drift toward the collapse of the Soviet Union seize control of the government in Moscow and place President Mikhail S. Gorbachev under house arrest.
• 1992 – Celtics – and NBA – all time great Larry Bird retires.

We start today’s coverage in India, kinda. There was some drama on X yesterday that involved a poster I follow and a large chunk of the Sub-continent. It ended when Aesthetica – the poster I follow – shared figures showing about 1,266 daily diarrheal deaths in India versus 457 total U.S. school shooting fatalities since records began. You read that correctly, nearly 1300 Indians die every day from diarrhea. Official stats say some 460,000 Indians shit themselves to death each year.

For those interested in the context, Jeff Bezos said something about wanting 1 trillion humans in the solar system, claiming that there would be 1000 Mozarts or Einsteins at any given time. Aesthetica asked: How many Mozarts have come out of the 1.4 billion indians?

To add a bit more perspective, here’s what it looks like in graphic form showing it as per capita:

A pair of explosions rocked a Toledo Ohio industrial facility this morning. The blasts hit during a shift change at Brent Industries, an industrial textile reconditioning and recycling facility on the 2900 block of South Avenue, triggering a fierce fire that partially collapsed the building. Fire crews from multiple departments contained most of the blaze by 6:15 a.m. Two employees remain unaccounted for amid ongoing searches complicated by chemicals and debris. The other employees escaped with minor injuries.

Neighbors felt their homes shake and watched thick smoke rise high enough to be seen on weather radar. Officials are investigating the cause as they prioritize finding the missing pair and securing the site.

Early Saturday morning, 30 to 50 masked individuals used power tools to break into A-Z Market on Bellflower Boulevard in Bellflower, California, emptying shelves and damaging counters, a lottery machine, and refrigerators in about two minutes. The burglary followed a street takeover with over 100 vehicles blocking nearby intersections.

Co-owner Nathan Abdullatif called the destruction heartbreaking, far worse than past robberies, and a GoFundMe is helping the family repair and restock amid an ongoing sheriff’s investigation with no arrests yet for the looting.

We need to bring back street justice in these cases.

This next one. . .

I don’t know how caught up in primary politics some of you are. I follow the bigger primaries pretty closely, and one of the races I was keeping tabs on was the Dem Wisconsin governors race because the DSA candidate, Francesca Hong, seemed to be leading the whole way. Well, it turns out one of the pollsters saying she was up by double digits was just making up the numbers.

Median Strategies admited it fabricated surveys showing Democratic socialist Francesca Hong leading by 20 to 23 points in Wisconsin’s August 11 Democratic primary for governor. In reality, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley won narrowly with 39.8% to Hong’s 39.3%.

The firm, now claiming to be a ‘short-term social experiment’, withdrew all releases, also admitting a fake poll in Los Angeles’ mayoral race favoring Karen Bass.

I have issues with this kind of thing. Median was held up as a trustworthy source. It clearly was not. I have similar issues with the so-called prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket though for slightly different reasons.