Best Bakken News So Far This Year -- Mexico Elects Far Left Socialist For President -- July 2, 2018

Mexico elects far left socialist for president. Prediction: he won't be with us four years from now if he attempts to crack down on international (read: Mexico-US border) crime. More later. I need to let that sink in for awhile. From Nick Cunningham over at oilprice.com.

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The Participation Generation

From The WSJ:

Nearly half of students who graduated from Lehigh University, Princeton University and the University of Southern California this year did so with cum laude, magna cum laude or summa cum laude honors, or their equivalents.

At Harvard and Johns Hopkins, more got the designations than didn’t.

Anyone with a grade-point average of at least 3.4 is granted Latin honors at Middlebury College; the number of students graduating with honors has been rising in recent years, the school says, and was north of 50% this spring.

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Nothing New Under The Sun

I don't think I've seen a story rise and fall so quickly: the murderous rampage in the Baltimore newspaper building.

In retrospect, it pales in comparison to a similar story that occurred on July 28, 1914. I first read about it in The Vertigo Years, Europe, 1900 - 1914, Philipp Roth, c. 2008. The wiki "history" is very, very dry; very, very bland compared to the story as told by Philipp Roth, pp. 388 - 393.

Quiz: these are the facts to which everyone agrees --

• early 20th century, the French minister of finance, would later become Prime Minister
• married; he has an affair with Henriette; his career will be destroyed if he doesn't solve the problem
• he solves the problem: the French finance minister, Joseph Caillaux, divorces his wife and marries his lover, Henriette, who now becomes Henriette Caillaux, of course
• the Parisian newspaper's editor Gaston Calmette and his paper Le Figaro launch a "veritable campaign of character assassination against the Prime Minister, Joseph Caillaux"
• Madame Caillaux takes it upon herself to solve the matter in her husband's best interests
• on July 28, 1914, Madame Caillaux goes to the Le Figaro newspaper building and asks to see the editor
• the editor is out; Madame Caillaux is escorted to the editor's office
• the editor returns; a few words are exchanged; Henriette Caillaux takes a revolver out of her fur muff, and fatally shoots the editor four times, point blank, in the chest
• at the trial Henriette did not deny those facts
• El Figaro went from eight pages to twelve pages to print verbatim reports from the courtroom 
• it might have been the story of the year, except for the murder of Jean Jaures, three days after the trial of Henriette ends: Jean Jaures was the main defender of Captain Dreyfus and one of the most universally respected politicians in France at the time
• those two stories crowded out the story of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, June 28, 1914

Now, the quiz: Henriette was, of course, brought to trial. Was she found guilty or found innocent? If guilty, on what charges and what was her sentence? If innocent, on what basis did the jury find her innocent?