While that is true as far as incineration goes, in a bit over 1 billion years it will be uninhabitable due to increased insolation. Of course, some areas will be uninhabitable by 2050 due to climate change, but they don’t want to talk about that. The reasonable timeframe is somewhere between 250 million and 1.5 billion years. For a species whose entire history only spans roughly 300,000 years, that might as well just be “many.”
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At best, the money cons encouraged MAGA’s drinking and abuse in order to gain power over others they couldn’t get alone, and now that MAGA is stumbling around the house with a loaded shotgun in one hand and a grenade in the other, they are reconsidering their choices…
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Republicans are the savior-complex codependent in my head cannon now.
My whole life has had a thesis about the weakness of identity-based authoritarian rule in it, who knew?
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Quite bluntly I think some of the dysfunction in leadership here is due the encouragement of literal substance and human abuse.
I mean part of this is a venn diagram because it really is an overlap where people are like “my daddy raped my 8 yo sister and I hate her for it because she was a slut who ruined my dad’s life so I’m an alcoholic because of feminism making my wife leave me and now and too many Mexicans are in the country so that’s why I don’t have a better job And don’t you dare insult my culture because it’s the best culture.”
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But… but… FUTURE HUMANS MATTER MORE THAN ALL OF US PUT TOGETHER…!!! I know because… some dumb reason, I forget which… ./s
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I miss when we just called longermism “hubris” and “delusion.”
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The easy way to keep track of how long these things are is to look back in time. A million years ago there were different species of Homo. The Cambrian explosion was half a billion years ago. A billion years ago we weren’t even multicellular.
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Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Aid is in the process of being given to our enemies. QED.
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I hate this so much. AI (more accurately LLMs) can’t “learn” anything. It can’t “research” anything. All it can do is consolidate and regurgiate that’s already there. It can’t “create” something new, it can only reinterpret something that already exists. It can’t even know if what it’s doing is correct because it can’t “discover” anything outside of what it’s been trained on. It’s not scientific in any way; it’s just taking a whole bunch of inputs and deciding, “eh, this is probably what you want, good luck”.
You can certainly use an LLM to make research simpler because it can quickly work against a large corpus of data, but it’s also incumbent on the researcher to actually confirm its outputs for correctness. In many ways, it’s worse than using a search engine because its seemingly authoritative outputs can easily lull you into a sense of false security – granted, so can search engine results, but if you are searching for medical advice and the link takes you to something like “jimbobwellnesshutandbaitshop.com”, that can generally impart a certain amount of skepticism in most. In many cases, LLMs don’t even tell you where the data comes from (or they just lie about it when you ask for sources).
This is all the complete opposite of what research is supposed to do which is to determine the result of a hypothesis through rigorous testing and validation.
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I read somewhere once that if you could compress the entire timeline of the universe into a 24 hour period, the entirety of human existence would fit into the last 4 seconds, and recorded history would fit into the last .2 seconds. That has always been a powerful way for me to contemplate the insignificance of humanity on the grand scale of things.
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A nice combination of the LLM people lying about what they can do to keep the bubble going, and a lot of rich people so deeply uncreative they don’t even understand what creativity is.
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May 8, 2025 (Thursday)
Today, on the second day of the papal conclave, the cardinal electors—133 members of the College of Cardinals who were under the age of 80 when Pope Francis died on April 21—elected a new pope. They chose 69-year-old Cardinal Robert Prevost, who was born in Chicago, thus making him the first pope chosen from the United States. But he spent much of his ministry in Peru and became a citizen of Peru in 2015, making him the first pope from Peru, as well.
New popes choose a papal name to signify the direction of their papacy, and Prevost has chosen to be known as Pope Leo XIV. This is an important nod to Pope Leo XIII, who led the church from 1878 to 1903 and was the father of modern Catholic social teaching. He called for the church to address social and economic issues, and emphasized the dignity of individuals, the common good, community, and taking care of marginalized individuals.
In the midst of the Gilded Age, Leo XIII defended the rights of workers and said that the church had not just the duty to speak about justice and fairness, but also the responsibility to make sure that such equities were accomplished. In his famous 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, translated as “Of New Things,” Leo XIII rejected both socialism and unregulated capitalism, and called for the state to protect the rights of individuals.
Prevost’s choice of the name Leo invokes the principles of both Leo XIII and his own predecessor, Pope Francis. In his lifetime he has aligned himself with many of Francis’s social reforms, and his election appears to be a rejection of hard-line right-wing Catholics in the U.S. and elsewhere who have used their religion to support far-right politics.
In the U.S., Vice-President J.D. Vance is one of those hard-line right-wing Catholics. Shortly after taking office in January, Vance began to talk of the concept of ordo amoris, or “order of love,” articulated by Catholic St. Augustine, claiming it justified the MAGA emphasis on family and tribalism and suggesting it justified the mass expulsion of migrants.
Vance told Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel, “[Y]ou love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.” When right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec, who is Catholic, posted Vance’s interview approvingly, Vance added: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’ Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense.”
On February 10, Pope Francis responded in a letter to American bishops. He corrected Vance’s assertion as a false interpretation of Catholic theology. “Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity,” he wrote. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups…. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by…meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
“[W]orrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth,” Pope Francis wrote. He acknowledged “the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival,” but defended the fundamental dignity of every human being and the fundamental rights of migrants, noting that the “rightly formed conscience” would disagree with any program that “identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.” He continued: “I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.”
The next day, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, who said he was “a lifelong Catholic,” told reporters at the White House, “I’ve got harsh words for the Pope…. He ought to fix the Catholic Church and concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us.”
Cardinal Prevost was close to Pope Francis, and during this controversy he posted on X after Vance’s assertion but before Pope Francis’s answer: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.” After the pope published his letter, Prevost reposted it with the comment: “Pope Francis’ letter, JD Vance’s ‘ordo amoris’ and what the Gospel asks of all of us on immigration.”
On April 14, Prevost reposted: “As Trump & [Salvadoran president Nayib] Bukele use Oval to [laugh at] Feds’ illicit deportation of a US resident [Kilmar Abrego Garcia], once an undoc[ument]ed Salvadorean himself, [Bishop Evelio Menjivar] asks, ‘Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?’”
The new Pope Leo XIV greeted the world today in Italian and Spanish as he thanked Pope Francis and the other cardinals, and called for the church to “be a missionary Church, building bridges, dialogue, always open to receiving with open arms for everyone…, open to all, to all who need our charity, our presence, dialogue, love…, especially to those who are suffering.”
As an American-born pope in the model of Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV might be able to appeal to American far-right Catholics and bring them back into the fold. But today, MAGAs responded to the new pope with fury. Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, who is close to Trump, called Pope Leo “another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.” Influencer Charlie Kirk suggested he was an “[o]pen borders globalist installed to counter Trump.”
In the U.S., President Donald Trump, who said he would like to be pope and then posted a picture of himself dressed as a pope on May 2, prompting an angry backlash by those who thought it was disrespectful, posted on social media that the election of the first pope from the United States was “a Great Honor for our Country” and that he looks forward to meeting him. ‘It will be a very meaningful moment!” he added.
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That’s about the best we can do, because we don’t have a Total Perspective Vortex, and even if we did, some jerk took the piece of fairy cake that powered it. /snark
This. Gotta keep that line going up so we can get our grift and get out…
I’ve heard both good and bad things about the new pope, at least in regards to LGBTQIA+ matters, but I’ve been informed that he’s probably going to drag the catholic church in a more progressive direction, and I’m good with that.
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I’m not Catholic or even particularly religious (at best I would be described as a cynical agnostic) so I don’t have any real stake in who’s in charge. However, given some of the views of people who were being listed as potential candidates, they could have done a whole hell of a lot worse.
I certainly look forward to the day that the Catholic church reverse its stances on homosexuality and abortion (both things Jesus was never reported to have talked about let alone expressed disapproval for), but for now, I guess we should be thankful for someone more moderate than what we could have had. If it makes the MAGAts unhappy, then that’s a plus in my book.
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May 9, 2025 (Friday)
Yesterday afternoon, President Donald Trump withdrew his nomination for interim U.S. attorney Ed Martin to become U.S. attorney in Washington D.C., the top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital. A Missouri political operative with no experience as a prosecutor, Martin defended the January 6 rioters and fired the prosecutors who had worked on their cases, threatened to investigate Democrats and critics, and hosted a notorious antisemite on his podcast. His nomination proved too much for Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), who joined all the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to oppose his confirmation, deadlocking the committee and blocking the nomination.
Trump announced he was moving Martin into three roles that do not require Senate confirmation. He will become the new director of the Weaponization Working Group at the Department of Justice, an associate deputy attorney general, and a pardon attorney. “In these highly important roles, Ed will make sure we finally investigate the Weaponization of our Government under the Biden Regime, and provide much needed Justice for its victims,” Trump posted on social media.
To replace Martin, Trump has tapped Fox News Channel host Jeanine Pirro, who is passionately loyal to him. He noted among her qualifications that she “hosted her own Fox News Show, Justice with Judge Jeanine, for ten years, and is currently Co-Host of The Five, one of the Highest Rated Shows on Television.”
Matt Gertz of Media Matters for America recalls that the Fox News Channel took Pirro off the air after the 2020 election because of her conspiracy-theory-filled rants. In emails turned up in the defamation suit against the Fox News Channel for pushing the lie that voting machines had tainted the election results, her executive producer called her “nuts” and a “reckless maniac,” who “should never be on live television.” That lawsuit cost the Fox News Channel $787 million.
A similar scenario played out earlier this week when Trump withdrew his nomination of former Fox News Channel contributor Dr. Janette Nesheiwat for surgeon general, the officer who oversees the nation’s public health professionals. Nesheiwat is the sister-in-law of former national security advisor Mike Waltz, let go after he admitted a journalist to a group chat about a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen. As Anthony Clark reported in The Last Campaign, she had falsely represented her “medical education, board certifications, and military service.”
Trump’s replacement pick for surgeon general, Casey Means, did not finish her residency and is not currently licensed as a doctor but has embraced the anti-vax positions of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., including his thoroughly debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. Still, she is not extreme enough for some of Kennedy’s followers, who are unhappy with the nomination.
When asked yesterday why he had nominated her, Trump answered: “Because Bobby thought she was fantastic…. I don’t know her. I listened to the recommendation of Bobby.” Today, Casey Means’s brother Calley, a White House advisor, went after Trump ally Laura Loomer for opposing the nomination, posting on social media that he had “[j]ust received information that Laura Loomer is taking money from industry to scuttle President Trump’s agenda.” Loomer responded: “You’re so full of sh*t.”
The administration appears not to be able to attract the caliber of federal officials to which Americans have become accustomed.
Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel, who did not have experience in law enforcement when he took the job, has drawn criticism from current and former officials in the FBI and the Department of Justice, which oversees the FBI, for reducing FBI briefings, traveling frequently on personal matters, and appearing repeatedly at pro sporting events.
Yesterday Patel showed up at a hearing for the Senate Appropriations Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee on the FBI’s spending plan for 2025, but he had not produced the plan, which by law was supposed to have been turned over more than a week ago. When Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) called the absence of the plan “absurd” and asked Patel when they could expect the plan, he answered he did not have a timeline.
Stacey Young, a former DOJ lawyer who co-founded Justice Connection, which supports current and former DOJ employees under pressure from the administration, told NBC’s Ken Dilanian: “There’s a growing sense among the ranks that there’s a leadership void. And that the highest echelons of the bureau are more concerned about currying favor with the president, retribution, and leaks than the actual work.”
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) took Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem even more fully to task. At a meeting of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security yesterday, Murphy told Noem: “[Y]our department is out of control. You are spending like you don’t have a budget,” he said. “You are on the verge of running out of money for the fiscal year…. You’re on track to trigger the Anti-Deficiency Act. That means you are going to spend more money than you have been allocated by Congress. This is a rare occurrence, and it is wildly illegal. Your agency will be broke by July, over two months before the end of the fiscal year.”
The obsession with the border, he continued, “has left the country unprotected elsewhere…. To fund the border, you have illegally gutted spending for cybersecurity. As we speak, Russian and Chinese hackers are having a field day attacking our nation. You have withdrawn funds for disaster prevention. Storms are going to kill more people in this country because of your illegal withholding of these funds.”
On Wednesday, Customs and Border Patrol confirmed that it had been using the communication app TeleMessage, which was a clone of Signal and which was hacked earlier this week. On Tuesday, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate “the government’s use of TeleMessage Archiver,” which “seriously threatens U.S. national security.”
Last night, New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport suffered another 90-second radar blackout at 3:55 am. On May 6, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy took to social media to blame his predecessor in the Biden administration for the troubles in the airline system.
Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported today that the White House is so fed up with the turmoil around Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth it will not permit him to name his own new chief of staff after his first one resigned last month.
Tim Marchman of Wired reported yesterday that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard failed to follow basic cybersecurity protocol, reusing “the same weak password on multiple accounts for years.”
The administration appears chaotic, but far from taking the chaos in hand, President Trump appears happy to let others take the reins. As his tariffs are beginning to bite, today he suggested his worry about the economic fallout by posting “CHINA SHOULD OPEN UP ITS MARKET TO USA—WOULD BE SO GOOD FOR THEM!!! CLOSED MARKETS DON’T WORK ANYMORE!!!” Five minutes later, he posted: “80% Tariff on China seems right! Up to Scott B.”
The Constitution gives Congress alone the power to set tariffs. Trump seized that power for himself by declaring an emergency. Now he appears to be handing that power to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, likely so that he can blame Bessent when things go poorly.
Today, in the latest legal setback for the Trump regime on immigration, a federal judge in Vermont ordered the government to release Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk from custody. Agents arrested Öztürk, a Turkish national, on March 25, claiming that she had been engaged with associations that “may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students.” U.S. District Judge William Sessions III noted that the government provided no evidence for that assertion aside from a 2024 op-ed Öztürk wrote for the school newspaper criticizing the university’s response to the crisis in Gaza. She was freed this evening and will have to pursue her case before an immigration judge.
As the administration has lost repeatedly in court, officials appear to be upping the ante in their attempts to traumatize migrants and increase its power, but it remains unclear who is calling the shots. Amy McKinnon of Politico reported today that Trump has sat for only 12 “daily” intelligence briefing sessions since he took office, and does not read his written daily intelligence report.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported that the U.S. was preparing to send migrants to prison in Libya. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued an order stopping the removal, saying such renditions would clearly violate a court order. Migrants from Asia sat on a military plane on the tarmac in Texas for hours before being taken off the plane and bussed back to detention.
When a reporter asked Trump if his administration was sending migrants to Libya, he answered: “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask, uh, Homeland Security, please.”
Today, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Newark, New Jersey, mayor Ras Baraka when he and three members of New Jersey’s congressional delegation stood outside a private ICE detention facility in Newark called Delaney Hall. New Jersey’s interim U.S. attorney, Trump loyalist Alina Habba, posted on social media that Baraka had “ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center…. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law.” But, as Tracey Tully, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, and Alyce McFadden of the New York Times reported, videos show him being arrested in a public area outside the facility.
Tully, Ferré-Sadurní, and McFadden report that in February, the administration signed a 15-year, $1 billion contract with GEO Group, which operates private prisons, to expand the Delaney Hall facility dramatically as an ICE prison. New Jersey officials have argued in federal court that GEO Group does not have the required permits to operate the expanded facility.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters today that voters elected Trump to “deport the illegals” and that “Marxist” judges frustrating that effort are attacking democracy. In fact, Trump convinced many voters that he would deport only violent criminals, and they are now aghast at the scenes unfolding as masked agents grab women and children from their cars and sweep up U.S. citizens.
In The Bulwark today, Adrian Carrasquillo explained how podcasters, sports YouTubers, and comedians, including Joe Rogan, have brought the rendition of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador onto the radar screen of Trump voters. Americans now disapprove of Trump’s immigration policies by 53% to 46%.
Miller made an even bigger power grab when he said “we’re actively looking at” suspending the writ of habeas corpus, a legal change that essentially establishes martial law by permitting the government to arrest people and hold them without charges or a trial. Legal analyst Steve Vladeck explains that Miller’s justification for such a suspension is dead wrong, and suggests Miller’s threat appears to be designed to put more pressure on the courts.
But in this chaotic administration, it seems worth asking who the “we” is in Miller’s statement. In the group chat about striking the Houthis, when administration officials were discussing—without the presence of either the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the president himself—what was the best course of action, it was Miller who ultimately decided to launch a strike simply by announcing what he claimed were Trump’s wishes.
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I guess sentence that works as understatement for comic relief, but it’s not that the administration is unable to do that. Tramp certainly could attract high caliber, qualified officials, but he simply doesn’t want to do that. Seems to me that he instead wants loyal sycophants and/or people who can help with The Grift. If they’re TV people like Trump himself was (23 people now from Fox News!), that’s a bonus.
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I agree. In fact, he did just that during his first Administration. He didn’t like that because those people kept telling him he couldn’t do what he wanted. Ironically, it now seems like he doesn’t want to do anything, and he’s letting all these unqualified people call all the shots.
Habeas corpus has been suspended four times since the Constitution was ratified. Lincoln suspended it during the Civil War. Importantly, that act is the one thing historians most often criticize Lincoln on. The second time it was suspended was limited to some counties in South Carolina during Reconstruction because the Klan was out of control there. I don’t know enough about that to know if it was justified or not. The third time was during the Philippine-American War, a war not nearly enough Americans today are even aware was a thing. At the end of the Spanish-American War, the US took control of the Philippines, annexed as a result of the treaty that ended that war. The people of the Philippines, however, decided they wanted independence, and they declared independence. The US didn’t recognize it, and we went to war. We committed atrocities during that war. A quarter of a million Philippinos died, mostly from famine and disease. And yes, because that was officially US territory, we suspended habeas corpus during the war. The last time habeas corpus was suspended was in Hawaii in the aftermath of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Hawaii remained under martial law until late in 1944. The Supreme Court in 1946 declared that, while habeas corpus could have been suspended in the immediate time after the bombing, it was not appropriate once the imminent danger had passed.
tl;dr We’ve suspended habeas corpus four times, and all four times it was either illegal to do so, or at least problematic. Miller suggesting doing so now is unconscionable, and clearly illegal.
ETA: Also, the President doesn’t have the power to suspend habeas corpus. Suspension of habeas corpus in a time of war is allowed by the Constitution, as described in Article One, Section 9, which is a list of limitations on legislative power. Only Congress may suspend habeas corpus. That’s why Lincoln doing so during the Civil War is controversial. Congress retroactively ok’d it after Lincoln did it, but it doesn’t change the fact that Lincoln blatantly violated the Constitution.
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Thanks for the history lesson. I suggested elsewhere that a reporter should ask Miller which country is invading the US, but I suppose that even then, it seems that declaring martial law at a nationwide level wouldn’t be justified.
Is it illegal for him to merely suggest it? Arrest that man!
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Ok, I phrased that poorly. No, of course suggesting it isn’t illegal. Doing it would be illegal.
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