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Rereading Girard’s I See Satan & am always stopped short at chapter on Modern Concern for Victims: “Victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors.” I’ve never felt more seen.
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The Vatican writing, "Especially in the West, there is a progressive loss of the collective memory of rites and ritual practices in favor of a highly radical form of individualism.... [T]he Church’s rich spiritual heritage represents a precious and inexhaustible resource."
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Dialogue presupposes public order, whose restoration is the first problem to be solved.
In light of recent episodes of violence, the Church in France is calling for a response to the anxiety expressed by young people and those who feel marginalized or left behind, with the Archbishop of Tours advocating for restoring democratic dialogue through intermediary institutions.
vaticannews.va/en/world/news…
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Tbc the Compendium isn't wrong. But they are unbalanced without a similar treatment of the proper and necessary role of the state to enforce order. //
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1789-1939, the Church often sided with those who used force to enforce order. Since 1945, force against even unruly civilians is viewed as a violation of their dignity and rights. Now we struggle to say what a state can do to enforce order at all. A new recalibration is needed.
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i'm beginning to suspect that "dignity of the person" is the commerce clause of the catechism
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Consider carefully whether it makes any sense to say that Pope St. Pius V (one example of many) was erroneously teaching that we ought to kill some criminals as an act of justice, but that we now ought to listen to the pope teach about human dignity, which definitely can't be erroneous.......... because.........?
Why can you make an error that says "yes kill people" but not an error that says "people are super special"?
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There is something deeply troubling about a society that not only executes a human being, but invites the world to watch. Even when justice must confront terrible evil, it should never lose sight of our common humanity. To livestream death risks turning punishment into entertainment. Surely civilisation is measured not by our capacity to kill, but by our willingness to defend the dignity of every human life, even at its end.
🚨 Pope Leo XIV has released an X post on the DEATH PENALTY ahead of the upcoming livestream execution of Nidal Hasan
'The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person. The common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment: effective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens while at the same time do not completely deprive those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption'
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It is always remarkable the difference in tone when it comes to the United States. This is the same Vatican that was strangely vague or silent when the Iranian regime slaughtered thousands of civilians (or jails Christians) this very year.
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I still don't think Canadians appreciate just how crazy the unmarked grave allegations at Kamloops were. So I tried to sum it up as best as I could ...
The unmarked graves at Indian residential schools mentioned by the Truth and Reconciliation predominantly refer to students who died of disease, usually tuberculosis and usually before 1930. They were then buried in onsite cemeteries with wooden markers, with the result that the grave location was lost when the marker rotted away. When you hear about graves being excavated at IRS sites, it's usually something like this.
The Kamloops 215, from the start, was an entirely different thing. It purported to provide evidence of an insane blood libel that the Catholic Church was secretly murdering Indigenous children en masse as late as the 1960s. The specific "knowing" was that staff were disappearing Kamloops Indian Residential School students and burying them in the school's apple orchard in the middle of the night. This was despite the fact that nobody could actually name a specific student that had been disappeared in this fashion.
What Kamloops did was equivalent to claiming that we finally had physical evidence of the Satanic ritual abuse panic. So, think of it like a Canadian hospital publicly claiming that they'd found an onsite mass grave filled with babies murdered by Satanists in the 1980s.
Actual residential school deaths were employed as cover for an utterly bananas urban legend. And that's why, in 2021, Canada was thrown into a profoundly destructive cultural revolution from which we may never recover.
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it's being reported that around 70% of the sponsor application filed for unaccompanied minors are allegedly fraudulent.
It's also being reported that over 450k unaccompanied minors cross the border , questions that should be asked how is it even possible for kids to make it that far ?
The terrain is brutal even for an adult.
This appeared to be underage human trafficking at a massive level.
And it's true , underage migrant kids were definitely being sex trafficked, some former employees at migrant shelters have told me it was allegedly taking place out of some taxpayer funded shelters.
Once I started finding out about these horrible crimes being committed against kids , everything changed for me .
#BREAKING: “An assembly line” for unaccompanied minors—That’s how senior adviser with ORR at HHS @JohnE_Fabb described the Biden-era system for processing and releasing kids who came across the border without a parent or guardian.
A memo released today says children were handed over to sponsors without adequate vetting—including adults whose identities or claimed family relationships had not been verified. HHS says weakened screening left gaps that exposed children to exploitation and abuse.
The memo says ORR did not require fingerprints for every sponsor category or background checks on every adult in the home, permitted expired identification and loosened address verification.
And in fiscal year 2024, ORR denied fewer than 1% of sponsorship applications, according to the memo.
Among the cases:
• A 15-year-old girl was released to a man claiming to be her biological brother without fingerprints or DNA checks. Authorities later determined he was unrelated and that undisclosed adult men lived in the home. HHS says he allegedly raped and impregnated her. He faces state charges.
• A 17-year-old boy was released to a purported stepsister using Venezuelan documents HHS could not authenticate. Three months later, he was found dead in a car with his genitalia exposed, alongside an unconscious 30-year-old man. The memo does not identify that man as the sponsor or establish the cause of death.
• A nine-year-old girl was approved for release despite home studies documenting an allegedly abusive brother in the household, unknown residents and unsafe conditions. The memo says her current status is unknown.
ORR’s fraud-trend data puts intentional document or information fraud at approximately 77% of reported Child Level Events—not 77% of all children in the program. Separately, about 85% of cases examined in a targeted review involved intentional document fraud.
ORR also says it uncovered 65,000 unanswered child-related reports in March 2025, including warnings and requests for help.
The six fraud categories: identity documents, manipulated photographs, addresses, fingerprints, undisclosed household members and age misrepresentation.
HHS says screening changes began in February 2025. The review concludes stronger identity checks might have prevented some fraud and reduced risks to children.
This comes as @RealTomHoman says they have located approximately 157,000 of the roughly 300k unaccompanied minors that essentially went unaccounted for under the previous administration.
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Mass migration is an incredibly asymmetric gamble. If it goes well, you boost GDP by a few percentage points.
If it goes poorly, you end up with a permanent foreign body, constant conflict between groups, massive resource transfers, and slow reshaping of society to manage it.
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We trained a model to predict AI-written blog posts from structural features - and discovered the shape of slop.
On posts it had never seen, it told AI and human apart with 98% accuracy, getting only 19 of 1,740 wrong.
Paper and code: arxiv.org/abs/2609.15369
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Good job market for non-college workers thanks in part to lower immigration.... I heard this story on @npr news this morning, with credit to lack of immigrant competition. How did that slip through? wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/am…
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Question of my HOI4 players out there. I'm stuck in this playthrough & need help.
I need to take all of the territory in red. The mod I'm using doesn't let me use ground troops. How can I overcome this dilemma by using only a few standoff munitions from the green dots.
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wake up babe new horrors beyond comprehension just dropped
An extraordinary @Nature paper has just landed from the lab of @Sergiu_P_Pasca at @Stanford - led by Konstantin Kaganovsky. They have found a way to create "xenocortical mice" which have ~92% of their cortex occupied by a cortical organoid derived from human stem cells. This human-derived cortical graft integrates deeply with the host nervous system, supporting organised neural activity and behaviour.
This study is a milestone in synthetic biology and chimera research. It has the potential to generate multiple medical breakthroughs by providing an enhanced biological model of human brain tissue that allows behavioural as well as neural and genetic assays.
The Stanford team have been exceptionally thorough and proactive in addressing ethical concerns that comes from this frontier work. But their pioneering work nonetheless raises many open questions: are the xenocortical mice conscious? Do they have any human-like properties of consciousness or cognition?
@NitaFarahany and I will be addressing some of these questions in a forthcoming commentary - where we'll also offer an ethically-informed roadmap to guide this important research as it progresses. In this context, "pacing the frontier" really does make sense 😉
Read the Stanford @nature paper here, and buckle up. It's wild. nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
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Maybe you have recently become aware of the AI safety debate and the arguments swirling around it.
If you want to understand them, you need to understand a couple things that almost everyone gets wrong:
There are TWO distinct classes of AI dangers, and it's VERY important to think about them separately, and not let one confuse you about the other.
Many many people (including many quite intelligent, clear-thinking people) do not effectively understand the fundamental differences between these two classes of dangers.
The first one has to do with the theory that an AI far superior to human intelligence (Artificial SuperIntelligence, or ASI) will inevitably wipe out the human race.
The second one has to do with the idea that powerful AI will result in very harmful things happening to many human beings, possibly all human beings.
Those two sound VERY similar, don't they?
They are DIFFERENT. Understanding how they are different is crucial if you want to think about or contribute usefully to any conversation about AI safety or AI harm. You might feel like you are Making Very Good Points or Asking Incisive Questions, but if you aren't clear on the differences between the two, you aren't.
So, I'm going to tell you what the difference is so that you can talk more usefully.
The first one concerns itself with a very specific thing, which is ASI (Artificial Superintelligence) that is more intelligent than any human being. When I say that, I am not referring to a thing like how Einstein is smarter than you, we are talking more about something like how a human being is more intelligent than any mouse.
In our regular lives, we meet other people who we can tell are smarter than us, vs some who are less smart. The line is fuzzy, because intelligence has a lot of dimensions. I'm better at a "rotating shapes" kind of intelligence than my wife, and she is better at "words-making" kind of intelligence than I am.
But every human is better in almost every dimension of intelligence than every single mouse.
That's the level we're talking about: an artificial superintelligence - made up of a computer or a network of computers - that is more intelligent than any human. And more intelligent by a long shot, by a wide margin, in an indisputable way like how humans are above mice.
That is the first thing.
The theory says that if you have an AI that is vastly smarter than all humans - in the way that a human is smarter than mice - that superintelligent AI will inevitably, eventually, sooner or later, wipe out every human on the planet.
We will refer to this as "existential risk."
The common follow-up question "well, how exactly is it going to do that?" is NOT the important question, and one of the most important elements of understanding this theory is first getting why that particular question is not important. A couple analogies:
Analogy 1: You are playing chess against a grandmaster. My theory predicts the grandmaster is going to beat you. You can ask "Well, how exactly is he going to do that?" I don't know, because I'm not a grandmaster, I just know that a chess grandmaster is almost always going to beat a normal player like you. And I'd be right. So the question "how is he going to do that" is not important, and doesn't affect the final outcome. He's going to figure out a way because he's way better than you.
Analogy 2: Humans are smarter than all other animals, comprehensively, by a wide margin. We have driven numerous species to extinction, not because we hated them or hunted them. Many of them have died out without most humans even ever thinking about them. All we did was expand our civilization, use up resources, encroach on habitats, and pretty soon the resources needed by those species went away and they died out. We figured out a way to get what we wanted because we're way smarter than them, and often we didn't even notice they died as a result.
A lesser animal asking, "how are the humans going to wipe us out?" is not asking a relevant question. We don't know, but we do know that any time humans and lesser species compete for any kind of resources, the humans will win. The fact that we know who is going to win beforehand - and that it is due to the vastly different levels of intelligence - is the key concept here.
A vastly more intelligent AI is likely to care about things that are incomprehensible to us, the way animals can't understand human goals. It's going to need resources to pursue those goals and it's going to be far more effective at gaining control of them and excluding us from them - in the same way that we are far more effective than other lower species.
A much more intelligent AI will not care about our interests, it will care about its interests, and to whatever small degree we happen to escape total annihilation from losing access to all our resources, any remaining humans will likely be enslaved into a system that serves the AI's own purposes.
That is the first thing. (Remember how I said at the beginning of this post that there was a first thing, and then a second thing?)
The first thing is the most difficult to understand, because you have to extrapolate how a vastly superior intelligence would act, and you can only use analogies like "how do humans treat lesser creatures," and the analogies are messy.
But now let's move on to the second thing.
The second thing is "everything else you've ever heard that AI might do that's harmful."
That's a little inaccurate. It's actually "everything else you've ever heard that humans might use AI to do that's harmful."
This is the critical difference. The first one talks about the inevitable outcome of what happens when two vastly different levels of intelligence collide, e.g. ASI vs humans, or human vs mice.
The second one has to do with what happens when humans possess AI as a powerful tool. This second thing is much easier to understand, because we have many more concrete notions:
Like:
- the military uses AI to make hyper-efficient killer drones and missiles
- your capitalist overlords use AI to replace you and everyone loses their jobs
- authoritarian government uses AI to surveil everybody and control the entire population
- hackers use AI to break into secure networks and hold companies and governments hostage
- students use AI to cheat on homework and show up to college knowing nothing
- AI slop saturates the internet and makes it impossible for artists and writers to make a living
- terrorists use AI to make biological or nuclear weapons
or even things like
- the military hands control to an AI and it misinterprets something and launches nuclear attacks and kills millions
All of those sound pretty familiar, right? Yeah, you've heard them before. We call this second thing "risks from misuse."
These problems are not the first class of problem! This second class of problems exists while AI is a tool that can be controlled by humans, and humans use it to do evil or careless things to each other. The problems may sound exotic or dystopian or novel, but they are fundamentally problems having to do with flawed human nature.
Given a powerful tool, some humans will likely use it to control or otherwise harm others. This is a very familiar problem.
I am not condemning or condoning this. I'm just describing it.
That is a fundamentally different danger from the first thing, which is that when a human is far superior to a mouse, the mouse is likely to come to harm because the human cares about doing human things, and the mouse is not gonna make it once the humans get going.
=====
Hopefully from the above, you have understood the difference between the first thing and the second thing. I will list them again - see if you now understand how they are different:
The first one has to do with the idea that an AI superior to human intelligence (Artificial SuperIntelligence, or ASI) will inevitably wipe out the human race.
The second one has to do with the idea that powerful AI will result in very harmful things happening to many human beings, possibly all human beings.
Can you tell how they are different now?
If not, re-read the stuff from earlier until you understand.
We call the first one "existential risk" and we call the second one "risks from misuse."
Once you understand, here is the CRUX of the problem:
SOLUTIONS TO THE SECOND THING DO NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH SOLUTIONS TO THE FIRST THING.
In fact, it's worse:
Solutions to the second thing (misuse) look roughly like "give powerful AI to as many people as you can, so they can fight the other people using powerful AI."
But the general solution to the first one (existential risk) is basically "don't let anyone have powerful AI, no one can control super-intelligent AI."
Throughout history, harms from technological misuse typically arise because a small group has control of it and can use it to dominate or harm others. Once everyone has it, things tend to stabilize: you can hurt me, I can hurt you, maybe we test each other (ouch 💥), and then we agree not to hurt each other.
But the first one (existential risk) pretty much just arises if anyone (good or bad!) creates a superintelligence. Because they aren't going to be able to control it, the superintelligence will decide it has other priorities, and then we will be at great risk of being wiped out.
And the solutions that generally work to solve problems like the second thing are EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of the ones likely to solve the first thing.
THIS is why lots of arguments about "AI risk" or "AI safety" go nowhere. Because someone will be thinking about the risk from the first thing, and another person will be thinking about the risk from the second thing. Both are plausible risks but fundamentally they arise from different things - and so the solutions are not just "bad" or "flawed" - they are likely to be very nearly exact opposites.
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An abliterated top-tier open weights model today can tell you how to build a nuclear weapon. The challenge to building a nuclear weapon isn't knowledge. It's not even really resources.
Iran has knowledge and resources. They can't build one.
Why? A lot of other entities with knowledge and resources have a vested interest in making sure Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon, and they get in their way.
If you wanted to build a nuclear weapon in your basement, to vibecode one with abliterated GLM 5.2, you would find that your efforts are stymied at every turn.
Even with step by step instructions, even if it was good enough at day-trading (it's not) to make you a tidy profit to finance your operations, you would find you would quickly attract the attention of law enforcement and the intelligence community.
It turns out they really don't want you to have a nuclear weapon!
If GLM-5.2 were good enough to tell you how to build a superplague (it's not), you would quickly learn a similar lesson in biology.
It turns out the challenge to building a superplague isnt really knowledge. Just as there are thousands of nuclear physicists with the theoretical knowledge to build nuclear weapons, there are thousands of biologists who have the theoretical knowledge required to make a superplague.
But if they wanted to do it, or if you wanted to, with your abliterated GLM-5.2-Bio-Edition, you would find that you would be stymied at every turn.
First you would design your virus particle or virus-like-particle. You could do this in the computer. But now you need to make it.
Traditionally you would order it from a company like Thermo-Fischer scientific or IDT. They'll synthesize a DNA strand for you and send it back so you can inject it into a cell of your choice to get it to produce the protien you want. For a fee, they'll even get an organism to express it for you and send *that* to you.
But, it turns out they're not stupid. And if you engineer a highly virulent strand of ebola and send it to them, before they help you make that, they're gonna say "hey wait a second, this kind of looks like a highly virulent strand of ebola!"
They will get upset, law enforcement will be contacted, the cops will show up, and so on and so on.
So maybe you'll do it yourself.
You have GLM 5.2-Bio-Edition and GLM 5.2-Trading-Edition so you make a bunch of money to order the expensive, highly specialized equipment you need to do this complex synthesis at home in your basement.
So you go online with your roughly $300k and start trying to order a Mermade DNA synthesizer and assorted sundries and suddenly they're asking all these strange questions like "what's your .edu email" or "what institution are you a part of?" and you don't really have answers to those questions because you're just some guy trying to make a superplague in your basement.
And actually it turns out the Government, intelligence community, and Bio Research technologies company *also* have GLM-5.2-Supply-Risk Edition and so they notice you trying to order all the parts to make a superplague in your basement.
They get very upset and the cops get called and so on and so on.
And *actually* it turned out *everyone* had access to GLM-5.2 Trading edition, so it wasn't so easy to make a killing on the market to finance your operation in the first place because your agent wasn't placing trades against human rubes, but against a whole hoard of *other* agents every bit as intelligent as itself, so the net result is that the market became slightly more efficient, but no one was really able to lock in asymmetrical gains.
Unless, however, *one* person had access to the GLM-5.2-ASI-Edition. Because if that person had access, they would be trading against rubes-by-comparison, and they would make a killing in the market to finance whatever operations they please.
And their ASI would be smarter than anything anyone else had, so it could engineer a VLP that thermo-fischer wouldn't be able to detect and reject on site. Or it would be able to deftly bypass supply chain safeguards, hacking into MIT or something (who has no ASI defender) to get you a .edu email and the appearance of institutional backing.
See, in a world where everyone has ASI, it's as though no one does. It's just normal society, where everyone's wishes and capabilities are mediated by group dynamics, everyone kind of has to stay within the overton window, and deviations are policed largely by the community, and then by the state when need be.
But in a world where only anthropic has ASI, or only openAI, or only the US government, then the *first* bad idea they have is immediately implemented with no resistance, with no hope of stopping it.
And on a long enough timeline, its only a matter of when, not if, they will have a bad idea.
Pluralism has served America well for a long time, and when it comes to ASI, I'm a pluralist too.
