Joseph II: The Tragic Emperor Who Tried to Change Everything

Wikipedia:

Joseph II (13 March 1741 – 20 February 1790) was Holy Roman Emperor from 18 August 1765 and sole ruler of the Habsburg monarchy from 29 November 1780 until his death. He was the eldest son of Empress Maria Theresa and her husband, Emperor Francis I, and the brother of Marie Antoinette, Leopold II, Maria Carolina of Austria, and Maria Amalia, Duchess of Parma. He was thus the first ruler in the Austrian dominions of the union of the Houses of Habsburg and Lorraine, styled Habsburg-Lorraine.

. . .Joseph was a proponent of enlightened absolutism like his brother Leopold II; however, his commitment to secularizing, liberalizing and modernizing reforms resulted in significant opposition, which resulted in failure to fully implement his programs. Meanwhile, despite making some territorial gains, his reckless foreign policy badly isolated Austria. He has been ranked with Catherine the Great of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia as one of the three great Enlightenment monarchs. False but influential letters depict him as a somewhat more radical philosophe than he probably was. His policies are now known as Josephinism. He was a supporter of the arts, particularly of composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri. He died with no known surviving legitimate offspring and was succeeded by his younger brother Leopold II.

. . .In 1888, Hungarian historian Henrik Marczali published a three-volume study of Joseph, the first important modern scholarly work on his reign, and the first to make systematic use of archival research. Marczali was Jewish and a product of the bourgeois-liberal school of historiography in Hungary, and he portrayed Joseph as a Liberal hero. The Russian scholar Pavel Pavlovich Mitrofanov published a thorough biography in 1907 that set the standard for a century after it was translated into German in 1910. The Mitrofanov interpretation was highly damaging to Joseph: he was not a populist emperor and his liberalism was a myth; Joseph was not inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment but by pure power politics. He was more of a despot than his mother. Dogmatism and impatience were the reasons for his failures.

. . .The Austrian-born American scholar Saul K. Padover reached a wide American public with his colorful The Revolutionary Emperor: Joseph II of Austria (1934). Padover celebrated Joseph's radicalism, saying his "war against feudal privileges" made him one of the great "liberators of humanity". Joseph's failures were attributed to his impatience and lack of tact, and his unnecessary military adventures; but despite all this, Padover claimed the emperor was the greatest of all Enlightenment monarchs. While Padover depicted a sort of New Deal Democrat, Nazi historians in the 1930s made Joseph a precursor of Adolf Hitler.

. . .A new era of historiography began in the 1960s. American Paul Bernard rejected the German national, radical, and anticlerical images of Joseph and instead emphasized long-running continuities. He argued that Joseph's reforms were well suited to the needs of the day. Many failed because of economic backwardness and Joseph's unfortunate foreign policy. British historian Tim Blanning stressed profound contradictions inherent in his policies that made them a failure. For example, Joseph encouraged small-scale peasant holdings, thus retarding economic modernization that only the large estates could handle. French historian Jean Bérenger concludes that despite his many setbacks, Joseph's reign "represented a decisive phase in the process of the modernization of the Austrian Monarchy". The failures came because he "simply wanted to do too much, too fast". Szabo concludes that by far the most important scholarship on Joseph is by Derek Beales, appearing over three decades and based on exhaustive searches in many archives. Beales looks at the emperor's personality, with its arbitrary behavior and mixture of affability and irascibility. Beales shows that Joseph genuinely appreciated Mozart's music and greatly admired his operas. Like most other scholars, Beales has a negative view of Joseph's foreign policies. Beales finds that Joseph was despotic in the sense of transgressing established constitutions and rejecting sound advice, but not despotic in the sense of any gross abuse of power.

Video Title: Joseph II: The Tragic Emperor Who Tried to Change Everything. Source: Czech The History. Date Published: March 18, 2025. Description: 

Joseph II, ruler of the Habsburg Monarchy (1765–1790), was an enlightened reformer who sought to modernize his empire. Inspired by the Enlightenment, he introduced radical reforms—abolishing serfdom, promoting religious tolerance, and centralizing power. But despite his bold vision, he faced relentless opposition from the nobility, the church, and even the very people he tried to help.

Professor Hamamoto - Epstein’s New Mexico Bio-Golem Experimental Complex

 

Video Title: Epstein’s New Mexico Bio-Golem Experimental Complex. Source: Professor Hamamoto. Date Published: February 22, 2026.

It Is War

The facade of the two-state solution has long been dead. Gaza is in ruins. But to go beyond Palestine and conquer all of the Middle East? Madness. 

This Huckabee character let the cat out of the bag. Ideologues and cult members can't contain themselves. They live in their own worlds. They can say the craziest stuff and think they're being rational.

I don't see Arab and Muslim regimes resisting this conspiracy. They are worthless. But it's one thing to conquer and another to rule. The Israelis are destroyers, they're not empire builders. And the Americans aren't interested either. So I don't see this grand plan coming to fruition. There will just be a lot of destruction, death, and millions of refugees pouring out into Europe. 

Rogue militias and terrorists will be left to pick up the pieces. We've seen that in Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The same scenarios will play out in Jordan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

BREAKING: US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee tells Tucker Carlson that Israel has the Biblical right to take over all of the Middle East.

“It would be fine if they took it all.” pic.twitter.com/BN4fXh03ga

— Tucker Carlson Network (@TCNetwork) February 20, 2026

Going For Gold: Predicting The USA Vs Canada Olympics Final

I've been watching every hockey game during this Olympics, waking up at 6 am to assess each country. This is sacred time for me as a hockey fan. I would've watched the games if they were on at 3 am. 

After 12 long years of no Olympics hockey with NHL players we've been spoiled with some classic games in the past week. And the best is saved for last.

I'm happy the two best teams are meeting in the final. I'll give my prediction below. But I just have to say, watching an Olympics without Russia just doesn't feel the same. It's like a World Cup without a Germany or a Brazil. It just doesn't feel right. It's unfair.

This was Ovechkin's last chance at Olympic gold. He was robbed of that opportunity. And the hockey world was robbed, too. It's a shame they dragged politics into it. I don't think Russia would've won, but with the best goaltending in the competition and elite game breakers up front they had as good a chance as any of the traditional hockey powers. Russia would have at least competed for third place. 

That it's going to be Canada vs the United States for gold was not inevitable. The Finns and Swedes put up a great fight. It could have easily been them in the gold medal game. But they played too conservatively. 

Finland had Canada down 2-0 in the semi-final and stopped playing from that point on. Russia would have taken it to Canada, and focus on scoring goals instead of defending a lead. If you want to win gold, you need to play with aggression. 

I expect the U.S. to not play conservative tomorrow. I think it's going to be a shootout, a back and forth classic. And I have the Americans winning 5-3. I think it'll be a close game, a one goal game until the final minutes, and I could see the U.S. scoring an empty netter at the end as Canada tries to take it to overtime.

I hope I'm wrong. But the Canadian team is running on fumes. They had to claw their way to even make this final. With their captain Sidney Crosby sidelined with an injury and Nathan MacKinnon not a hundred percent healthy, they don't have the firepower to withstand the U.S. depth. I think they have the four best players, with the aforementioned MacKinnon, Connor McDavid, Cale Makar, and teenager Macklin Celebrini, but the U.S. has the better overall team. Their defense is much deeper. They play faster. And speed kills in a tournament like this one.

Last night I re-watched the gold medal game from the 2010 Olympics. I know Crosby emerged as the final hero of that clash, but without Luongo that game wouldn't have even gone to overtime. For the last ten minutes the Americans pushed relentlessly, and Luongo stood tall, only giving up the tying goal. 

Can Canada's goalie Jordan Binnington replicate that performance? He's my X factor for tomorrow's game. He has to be the 2019 St. Louis Blues Binnington. He has to be on the top of his game for Canada to have a chance. Anything less and it's silver.

Richard H. Helmholz - The Roman Law of Blackmail

 

Wikipedia:

Richard H. Helmholz (born 1940) is the Ruth Wyatt Rosenson Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He received his LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1965 and also earned an A.B. in French literature at Princeton University, and a Ph.D. in medieval history from the University of California at Berkeley.

He is a member of the Selden Society Council and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. Before moving to the University of Chicago, he spent ten years at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a professor of law and history. He is best known for his work on the influence of canon law on the common law.

An excerpt from, "The Roman Law of Blackmail" By Richard H. Helmholz, The Journal of Legal Studies, January 2001:

This paper attempts to do three things: first, to describe the classical Roman law as it related to blackmail; second, to follow the subject into the commentaries of the Continental jurists written during the Middle Ages and Renaissance; and third, to cross the English Channel briefly. Its focus is historical. It has no agenda for shaping the law of blackmail that has drawn so much attention in recent scholarly literature. It is hoped that an account of the Roman law of blackmail may interest some of the many scholars who have contributed to understanding the subject. But its aspiration reaches no higher than that. 

The puzzle is this: if one person has information that would harm another's reputation by bringing shame upon the second person, under normal circumstances he has every right to disclose it. Why, then, should it be illegal for the person with the information to demand money for not revealing that information? It is not altogether easy to see why. Yet that is exactly what the law of blackmail prohibits. The reason for the prohibition against what might be regarded as freedom of contract does seem mysterious, and the natural desire to hit upon a plausible explanation has proved inviting to a wide variety of theoretical approaches, almost all of which assume the law is right to punish blackmail but differ on the reason for the result. The puzzle has also given rise to a casuistic literature that must warm the heart of old-fashioned lawyers who believe in the inevitability and even the utility of drawing fine distinctions in the law.

This paper says little, nothing really, to solve the puzzle that lies at the core of informational blackmail. Indeed, it requires that the reader ‘‘un-think’’ it for a moment. The assumption upon which it rests—that a person has every right to inform the world of what he himself knows, just so long as what he says is true—was not an assumption the Roman law shared. Nor did those who inherited the law of the Romans. That true information necessarily had value was not a view held by the jurists of the Middle Ages. Nor was it accepted by the lawyers and commentators who followed them during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Therein lies the (admittedly slight) relevance of this paper to the modern subject. It may explain something of how we came to have a law of blackmail, even though it tells us little about why we retain it. This is so because something very like the law discussed in this paper turns up in the early English treatises and cases involving extortion, sedition, and blackmail.