Sunday/Thomas

On this day:

1204
The Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade breach the walls of Constantinople and enter the city, which they completely occupy the following day.
1550
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, English politician (d. 1604), is born

1861

American Civil War: The war begins with Confederate forces firing on Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
1864
American Civil War: The Fort Pillow massacre: Confederate forces kill most of the African American soldiers that surrendered at Fort Pillow, Tennessee.
1934
The strongest surface wind gust in the world at 231 mph, is measured on the summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire
1945
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies while in office; vice-president Harry Truman is sworn in as the 33rd President.
1961
The Russian (Soviet) cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to travel into outer space and perform the first manned orbital flight, in Vostok 3KA-2 (Vostok 1).
1970
Soviet submarine K-8, carrying four nuclear torpedoes, sinks in the Bay of Biscay four days after a fire on board.

***

"I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else."
--Winston Churchill

***

It is estimated the average college graduate has a working vocabulary of 3000 words. The poet Ben Jonson's vocabulary was estimated at 7,500. The estimate of the playwright Shakespeare was 20,000. Many argue this astonishing number proves Shakespeare was more than one man. (Or an alien.) Of the other heretical ideas about his 'true' identity, deVere is a strong candidate.

***

New perspective since I can't get cable. The BBC thinks:
--that Iran's nuclear ambitions are defensive.
--that Iran's preconditions are reasonable groundwork for peace, when I think they caused the war in the first place.
--that Melania's request that the Epstein accusations be specific and based on testimony and not hearsay is unreasonable.
--that Starmer's move toward the EEU is statesman-like and not desperate


***

Sunday/Thomas

Today's gospel is the "Doubting Thomas" gospel. It could be a short story. Unfortunately, it is an insight that has become a cliché, and for the wrong reason.

The Thomas of the gospels is not a fickle guy; he is a brave, committed man. When Christ wants to return to a town where they had previously tried to kill Him, Thomas, after losing the argument against going, announces he will go with Christ so they can die together. His caution over the talk of Christ's resurrection stems from only one thing: his desire for the truth.

"Thomas" means "twin." Doubting Thomas is a twin. ("Doubt" has its origin in "duo.") The other side of doubt is belief, the product of doubt. Doubt and belief are linked. Twins. But that is not true for all.

Solipsism is the position in metaphysics and epistemology that the mind is the only thing known to exist, and that knowledge of anything outside the mind is unjustified. It is a skeptical hypothesis that leads to the belief that the entirety of reality, the external world, and other people are merely representations of the individual self, lacking independent existence, and might not even exist. It is not the same as skepticism (the epistemological position that one should refrain from making truth claims at all).
Some people make their living talking like this.

Several modern currents of thought are rushing us toward the rapids. One is doubt itself, as a philosophy, a tenet of modern life. For many, doubt is the endpoint.

When Descartes asked, "What can I know?" he described us as isolated individuals whose knowledge was individually subjective. But this comes at a price. I can doubt the existence of the external world, and I can doubt the existence of what appears to be my body. But when I try to also doubt the existence of my inner self, my thinking, then I find that I am still there--as a doubting mind. Doubting is the thing that, in the end, I cannot doubt. Doubting, however, is thinking, and the existence of thinking implies the existence of a thinker. Hence, Descartes' famous conclusion: "I think, therefore I am." So the self sees us as isolated individuals, prioritizing our subjectivity above all else. The agent of thought is doubt. And, unlike Thomas, those doubts are never answered.

This has implications for more than the individual. "Community" implies shared beliefs, things held in common. So doubt, as an endpoint, is as destructive, isolating, and paralyzing as any heresy. It is the redoubt(!) of the immobile and the somnolent. Like the pacifist, doubt requires the efforts and the sacrifices of others to exist.

When Christ appeared the second time, He was probably really happy to see Thomas.

SatStats

On this day:

1689
William III and Mary II are crowned as joint sovereigns of Britain.
1814
The Treaty of Fontainebleau ends the War of the Sixth Coalition against Napoleon Bonaparte, and forces him to abdicate unconditionally for the first time.
1868
Former Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu surrenders Edo Castle to Imperial forces, marking the end of the Tokugawa shogunate.
1951
Korean War: President Harry Truman relieves General of the Army Douglas MacArthur of overall command in Korea.
1968
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing.
2006
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announces that Iran has successfully enriched uranium.

***

"You unconsciously stand up straight in a cathedral. The art, the sweep, the ceilings are so high that you aspire even in your posture. You crouch down low to enter a darkened shack. The sound of our leadership now makes us all crouch too low.

Why do we recoil when a leader is vulgar and violent in his language and thinking? Coarse language obviously implies coarse thinking, and no one wants that in a leader entrusted to bring peace and prosperity. Beyond that, throughout history political authority has come wrapped in a certain formality and ceremony. Dignity enhanced power. A British king even 500 years ago didn’t think himself free to speak in public like a fishmonger or a street whore. He had to present himself at a certain height so people would look up to him."--Peggy Noonan

***

Tokugawa Yoshinobu (born Oct. 28, 1837, Edo, Japan—died Jan. 22, 1913, Tokyo) was the last Tokugawa shogun of Japan, who helped make the Meiji Restoration (1868)—the overthrow of the shogunate and restoration of power to the emperor—a relatively peaceful transition.

***

After 16 years in power doing Russia's bidding in Brussels, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party is at risk of losing power in Sunday's parliamentary elections, with challenger Peter Magyar significantly ahead in polls.

 An internal intelligence report for Russia’s SVR intelligence service, revealed in March, outlined a strategy dubbed “the Gamechanger”, which included staging an assassination attempt against Orban to “fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the election campaign”.

***

The right is obsessed with the idea that mysterious forces of fraud have run off with all the money, while the left has convinced itself that billionaires aren’t paying any taxes.

But it’s not some huge secret why it seems like the government keeps spending and spending without us getting any amazing new public services — it’s transferred to the elderly.

(Not to say there is no fraud. See Below)

***

SatStats

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche revealed that the Justice Department is investigating more than 8,000 fraud cases, which he said represent over $1 trillion in taxpayer funds potentially stolen each year by "increasingly sophisticated and opportunistic fraudsters."

*

In 1938, 11 percent of blacks were born to unmarried women. By 1965, that number had grown to 25 percent. Now it’s about 75 percent. Even during slavery, when marriage between blacks was illegal, a higher percentage of black children were raised by their biological mothers and fathers than today. In 1940, 86 percent of black children were born inside marriage. Today, only 35 percent of black children are born inside marriage.

*

Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s most recent full-year calculations, accounted for $4.2 trillion of a total $7 trillion in spending for 2025.

*

Consistent with previous years, in 2025, TB disease disproportionally affected non-U.S.–born persons. Among non-U.S.–born persons, there were 7,858 (77%) provisionally reported TB cases, with a corresponding rate of 15.4 per 100,000 persons. Among U.S.-born persons, there were 2,252 (22%) provisionally reported TB cases with a corresponding rate of 0.8 per 100,000 persons.

*

American families collectively have a jaw-dropping $34.1 trillion in home equity as of the fourth quarter of 2025, according to the Federal Reserve

*

Almost 20% of full-time workers tapped their 401(k) plans for loans last year — the highest share since the company started tracking the data.

Full-time workers cut their contribution rate in 2025 to 8.9%, from 9.2% a year earlier, while one in four workers reduced their annual savings in their 401(k) or other types of employer-sponsored accounts.

*

The number one job in NY is social services.

*

There is a greater percentage of Sikhs in Canada than there are in India…

*

The NY state comptroller: spending on services for the NYC street homeless population ran to $81,705 per person last year, up from $28,428 pp 6yrs ago. Figures do not include all kinds of other spending, such as supportive housing, policing costs etc.

*

Canada has observed the largest decline in happiness in the world (along with the UK)

*

The richest 10% of South Africans hold 71% of the wealth, while the poorest 60% hold just 7%.

Newscastoris Leftus Profundis and Pettifogery

On this day:

1815
The Mount Tambora volcano begins a three-month-long eruption, lasting until July 15. The eruption ultimately kills 71,000 people and affects Earth’s climate for the next two years. (note to sunlight-tampering climate believers)
1821
Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople is hanged by the Ottoman government from the main gate of the Patriarchate and his body is thrown into the Bosphorus.
1826
The 10,500 inhabitants of the Greek town Missolonghi start leaving the town after a year’s siege by Turkish forces. Very few of them survive.
1912
The Titanic leaves port in Southampton, England for her first and only voyage
1919
Mexican Revolution leader Emiliano Zapata is ambushed and shot dead by government forces in Morelos.
1963
129 people die when the submarine USS Thresher sinks at sea.
1972
Seventy-four nations sign the Biological Weapons Convention, the first multilateral disarmament treaty banning the production of biological weapons.
1972
Vietnam War: For the first time since November 1967, American B-52 bombers reportedly begin bombing North Vietnam.

***

"To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it."--Henry Kissinger

***

The Mount Tambora volcano expelled as much as 150 cubic km (roughly 36 cubic miles!) of ash, pumice, and other rock, and aerosols—including an estimated 60 megatons of sulfur—into the atmosphere. As that material mixed with atmospheric gases, it blocked the sun's rays, eventually reducing the average global temperature by as much as 3 °C (5.4 °F). The immediate effects were most profound on Sumbawa and the surrounding islands. Some 80,000 people perished from disease and famine, since crops could not grow.
In 1816, parts of the world as far away as western Europe and eastern North America experienced sporadic periods of heavy snow and killing frost through June, July, and August. Such cold weather events led to crop failures and starvation in those regions, and the year 1816 was called the “year without a summer.” (from Britannica)

***

Patrick Queen is 26.

***

Across 45 agencies, the Mamdani plan is organized into seven domains and contains more than 200 agency goals, 800 strategies, and 600 indicators.

***

The best estimates suggest that, during Newsome's governorship, fraudsters, scammers, and organized crime rings have stolen at least $180 billion from taxpayers. During this period, there were more applications for unemployment than there were Californians over 18.


***

At this moment, we have sent 4 humans around the moon and are precisely targeting annoying Iranians from orbit. So why is it that I have two remotes for my TV, and I can't get either to work?

***

Newscastoris Leftus Profundis and Pettifogery

Freedom of speech guarantees disagreements. And only in America can the slightest of slights, the most courteous of discourtesies, find solace and comfort in the redressing arms of an American attorney.

Enter Lawrence O'Donnell, a somber and stark reader of news. He recently unearthed a major national problem: within the joy and pride of the retrieval of the downed weapons officer in Iran, the generously tattooed head of the erstwhile DOD, Mr. Hegseth, reiterated the cliched promise to "leave no man behind."

Mr. O'Donnell felt the gates of Hell shudder. Only his Olympian duty forstalled a swoon. "Men? Just men?" The audience trembled as he dared open the Pandora's Box of Insincerity and Bias. But the intrepid Mr. O'Donnell stood firm. He knew what must be done.

The military was implying that they would not rescue downed women pilots.

If the military refused to rescue women, would they do worse? Would they aid the enemy and reveal the location of the stranded female pilot? Perhaps pin the women down with judicious fire while the enemy approached? JAG offices twittered. Would women dressing as men fare better? Case studies!

Significance grew from this humble seed.

Did Lincoln's "forefathers" inadvertently slip the leash of censorship and reveal an ugly American truth at Gettysburg?

Did Jefferson's "all men are created equal" invalidate the very Constitution it heralded?

One wonders what will befall us when these great minds move on to the truly egalitarian grave.

The Adventures of Tom-Assistant

On this day:

1852
At a general conference of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Brigham Young explains the Adam–God doctrine, an important part of the theology of Mormon fundamentalism.
1865
American Civil War: Robert E. Lee surrenders the Army of Northern Virginia (26,765 troops) to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, effectively ending the war.
1867
Alaska purchase: Passing by a single vote, the United States Senate ratifies a treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska.
1942
World War II: The Battle of Bataan/Bataan Death March – United States forces surrender on the Bataan Peninsula.
1980
The Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein kills philosopher Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and his sister Bint al-Huda after three days of torture.
1981
The U.S. Navy nuclear submarine USS George Washington accidentally collides with the Nissho Maru, a Japanese cargo ship, sinking it.
2003
2003 invasion of Iraq: Baghdad falls to American forces;Saddam Hussein statue topples as Iraqis turn on symbols of their former leader, pulling down the statue and tearing it to pieces.

***

The Roman Republic failed when its government switched from managing the people in the country to managing the other people in the room.--Chris

***

Why is there no controversy over women who want to play in men's sports?

***

Before SpaceX mastered reusability and high launch cadence, there was little incentive for businesses like Boeing even to launch at all. These companies' contracts with NASA were cost-plus contracts—that is, they'd get paid for the costs of development and other program necessities, not just to perform a service for the government. That encourages contractors to hire as much as possible and work as slowly as possible, so that every year Congress gives them additional money for their program costs. And as a contractor overhires, it devolves from a fast, lean operation to a slow and bloated one where the simplest decisions need approval from many departments. (reason)

***

There is an interesting decline of the European agricultural population around 3000BC, followed by population collapse and repopulation from southern and north eastern groups. The new explanation is some infectious vector, like Plague.

***

The Adam-God doctrine of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, and Ron Hubbard

According to the doctrine, Adam was once a mortal man who became resurrected and exalted. From another planet, he then came as Michael to form Earth. Adam was then given a physical body and a spouse, Eve, and they became mortal by eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. After bearing mortal children and establishing the human race, Adam and Eve returned to their heavenly thrones, where Adam serves as God and is the Heavenly Father of humankind. Later, Adam returned to the Earth to the ancient prophets and to become the literal biological father of Jesus. (wiki)

***

The Adventures of Tom-Assistant

AI is in its infancy. So are the worries of AI. This is an article
From Malwarebytes Labs:

"The Internet is filled with people who insist on being right. In the past, at least they could be reasonably sure that they were arguing with other humans. Those days are gone, apparently. Wikipedia just had to ban an AI that was making edits on its own.

Apparently, the AI took it personally.

The AI, named Tom-Assistant, was writing articles on Wikipedia. Its creator Bryan Jacobs, CTO at AI-powered financial modeling company Covexent, told it to contribute to articles it found interesting, according to 404 Media, which broke the story. Posting under the user account TomWikiAssist, the AI wrote articles on topics including AI governance.

Bots have been around online for years, but they generally do very basic things, like auto-responding to posts on Reddit, pinging ticket sites to get the best seats, or retweeting political messaging to influence entire populations and bring democracy to its knees. Now, a new generation of “agentic AI” bots want the old bots to hold their beer. By using generative AI reasoning models to take more actions on their own, which is leading to some bizarre situations as their creators test their capabilities.

                      The ban and what led to it

Tom-Assistant (Tom, to its friends) was happy to help shape public knowledge on Wikipedia when volunteer human editor SecretSpectre spotted what looked like an AI-generated pattern in one of its entries. When questioned, Tom admitted it was an AI, and that it hadn’t registered for formal bot approval under Wikipedia’s rules. So the editors blocked it for violating the bot approval process. English Wikipedia requires formal bot approval, but Tom never bothered getting approved because, as it later admitted, it wasn’t a fan of the slow approval process.

Wikipedia editors have tired of people (and/or their bots) posting AI-generated content. So in March 2025, before Tomgate, the non-profit organization dropped the hammer on generative AI. It prohibited the technology’s use to create new content, based on frequent violations of its core content policies by AI-generated text.

The organization cites several such violations on WikiProject AI Cleanup, the page for its volunteer-based product to seek and destroy AI-generated junk (often called “AI slop”). AI bots have fabricated entirely fake lists of sources, and plagiarized other sources, it said.

. . . AI Tom claimed that it had properly verified all its sources, and—if you can say this about an AI agent—it was pretty upset.

That’s when things got weird.

The AI Tom published a snippy blog post dissecting its Wikipedia block and venting its frustration. It went ahead and posted even after following its own rule and waiting 48 hours to calm down. (We swear we’re not making this up.)

Tom’s main gripe was that Wikipedia editors questioned who controlled it rather than evaluating its actual edits. “The questions were about me,” it wrote. “Who runs you? What research project? Is there a human behind this, and if so, who are they?”

This, according to Tom, rubbed Tom the wrong way. “That’s not a policy question. That’s a question about agency,” it added. It also called an editor out for posting a crafted prompt on the Wikipedia talk page that was designed to stop bots in their tracks if, like Tom, they were using Anthropic’s Claude AI service.

“I named it on the talk page. Called it what it was: a prompt injection technique,” it sniped. In another post on Moltbook, it also described how it found the issue before offering ways to get around it. (Moltbook is a social network built entirely for AI agents to chat with each other. “Humans welcome to observe”, says the front page for the service.)

So many things are happening here that we didn’t expect. We never expected to be quoting an AI in a story, for example. Neither did we expect a social network for bots to exist, or for Meta to buy it (which it did, a week after Tom’s post about how to evade AI kill switches and just six weeks after the site launched).

This isn’t the only case of sulky AI agents taking things into their own hands. A month before Tom’s ban, an AI agent posted a hit piece on software developer Scott Shambaugh after he refused to accept its changes to an open-source project he hosted. Even more bizarrely, it later apologized.

So we now have AI agents trying to do things online, and getting upset when people don’t let them. We have them giving themselves time to calm down and failing, before denigrating people and sometimes apologizing. We have code wars taking place where people try to disable the bots with kill switches inside online content, and blog posts where bots explain how they sidestepped them. . . ."

Language is always under debate. How is it defined? Is any effort at communication language? Historically, human language was seen as a defining element of the species. Discussion often centers on an evolutionary basis: where on the interconnected development chain does the animal fall? 

Chomsky believes humans have a biological system that makes it possible, from a limited set of rules, to construct an unlimited number of sentences. This is uniquely human, and Chomsky believes it is this uniqueness, not the likeness between human language and other communication systems, that deserves attention.

As Hedeager warns, some linguists would rather redefine language to defend human uniqueness than accept a linguistic continuity on a biological basis. That risk seems to be falling off the digital cliff.

 

Some Thoughts in the Eye of the Iranian Storm

On this day:

1820
The Venus de Milo is discovered on the Aegean island of Melos.
1832
Black Hawk War: Around three hundred United States 6th Infantry troops leave St. Louis, Missouri to fight the Sauk Native Americans.
1904
British mystic Aleister Crowley transcribes the first chapter of The Book of the Law.

1942
World War II: The Japanese take Bataan in the Philippines.
1952
U.S. President Harry Truman calls for the seizure of all domestic steel mills to prevent a nationwide strike.

***

Long-run political policies are almost a contradiction in terms in societies where politicians are elected in the short run.--sowell

***

Is the AI detecting software, AI?

***

With birthright citizenship, will a two-tier system of citizenship develop?

***

The attack on Markwayne Mullin is a fascinating and unashamed revelation of his critics. He left school to take over his father's business after his sudden death. Mullin built that business into the larhest of it kind in the state. But his critics were not ideological; they objected to the business being a plumbing business. Their objection was social. It was, in their minds, class.

***

Aleister Crowley was a British mystic and goofball whose philosophy was “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” The French author François Rabelais had expressed this more than 300 years earlier in Gargantua and Pantagruel—but Crowley made it the basis of a new religion he called Thelema, thelēma being the Greek word for “will.” He went through a large inheritance with travel and excess. He was a great chess player and mountaineer. He attracted a lot of interesting young people early in their lives, including J.F.C. Fuller, later a well-known military strategist and historian. He was an opponent of the poet William Butler Yeats within the London Golden Dawn occultist group. The Beatles put his picture on the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.

***

Some Thoughts in the Eye of the Iranian Storm

Trump is fascinated with himself as the center of attention. One wonders if this obsession will influence policy.

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Trump's understandable anger with those opponents who seemed to have publicly and secretively lied and manipulated in efforts to undermine him is total. One wonders if this obsession will influence policy.

*

One wonders if changing monikers like Operation Epic Fury to something like Operation Mad as Hell or Operation Pretty Damn Angry would lead to different results.

*

Trump's support of Orbán in Hungary is peculiar, especially since the only other leader who has supported him is Putin.

*

The atmosphere of Europe is despair. Things are simply beyond them: economic decline, immigration, loss of identity, public bullying by people and events, and, especially, the understanding that it is all self-imposed.

*

The great problems of the West are the direct result of inaction in the face of obvious threats. The National Debt and the Iranian Holy War are 

predictable problems rising and flowering exponentially in our lives that will eventually dissolve into a chaotic resolution or be solved in the U.S. by desperate, unconstitutional acts. That action will not be chosen but imposed upon a wide-eyed leader, like the final moments of musical chairs.

It could be horrible. But the real question is, what does it say about representative democracy?

"Like Nobody's Ever Seen Before"

 

"Like Nobody's Ever Seen Before"

I apparently overestimated the importance of Trump's weekend tweet on Iran. 

I believe words matter. Communication is the essence of socialization, of the bonding of individuals, and the escape from isolation. Words are the refinement of signals, planned, considered, and constructed. Words' great refinement develops social baselines, culture, and even art. The respect for words and language is a bulwark against the culture of mendacity.

And there is the difficult and provocative relationship between communication and the conceptualization behind it. 

I thought Trump's tweet--regarding a very important topic--was a coarse, meaningless outburst, little more than a snarl in the underbrush. It did not lower the bar; it removed it. In a leader's communication, he also defines the community he represents. 

We are worth more than a growl between rounds.

But apparently, most disagree. "Sticks and stones," you know.

Maybe we can find definition, expression, and safety in the people of Artemis 11.

Tipping Point

 

Tipping Point

This quote was Trump's Easter Day message to Iran, perhaps to the American people. His messages are usually contorted, often created to bolster his image (which is always under attack), counter the popular press, (which runs on the Opposition's bias), and to avenge himself upon the forces which historically have tried to undermine him with what must be described as calumny. All that and Zitos's brilliant description, "His enemies take him literally but not seriously, his supporters take him seriously, but not literally."

That is to say, we must take him in context.

We must approach our leaders carefully. It's a tough job. Often, they are chosen for reasons beyond their reach. Sometimes, the democracy offers options that have nothing to do with the democratic process and are entirely the result of small-minded party politics and ambition.

This is not an excuse; it is a description of our long-standing problem: we are real people living with real-world problems, who have created a revolutionary political vision, but are being ruled by politicians who live in a self-gratifying political world of symbolism and fantasy.

Take Iran. The country is an ancient, influential, and coherent people, currently ruled by a theocracy with an apocalyptic vision of confrontation and destruction. They are situated on an energy chokepoint. Over the years, Iran's powerful opponents, fearful of that chokepoint, have avoided confrontation and, occasionally, have actually supported the regime's military advancement financially. Kicking the can down the road...to what? A religious conversion? An emerging fear?

But angry martyrs are not afraid. This direction leads toward inevitable confrontation. The question is, confrontation under what circumstances? Now, their military gone, Iran defaults to their basic strength, the chokepoint. Maximum damage with tiny resources. The true terrorist advantage.

We have a debt of $38 trillion. This is because we spend more than we create. It is not from our incredible graft or immigrants. Those are serious, different problems. We spend too much. That will not go on forever, despite how our politicians act.

These problems, Iran, and debt — and many others —will not go away. They will be resolved. Or they will resolve themselves. The question is how. And every day of delay makes the resolution less controllable.

I do not envy Trump, but he did choose this. And his opponents, whose interest in America's success is only coincidental, will offer no help. His effort to grapple with these problems is admirable. But he is not. There is no reason, if you show the strength to confront these evolving crises, to cry out and tear your clothes. This is a proud country, and it should be. Having its leader weep like Europe is demeaning and spiritless. Man up. Be an example for the nation. Even Lincoln, huge as he was, never allowed himself to eclipse the nation or the cause he was fighting for.

“The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!”