POV: When the bishops of your country consecrate the nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and suddenly this happens.

I love that we’re the new Rome. Peace with Persia in the afternoon and a gladiator fight in the evening, all on the Emperor’s birthday. Another 1,000 years.

always many new people to reintroduce myself to. if you're new to my operation, i run a small theological art studio. here's the most popular project i've done: a traditional catholic liturgical calendar. i'll show you in this thread. in my shop here: owen-cyclops.myshopify.com

Pope Leo's views on immigration should be completely non-controversial. He says he is against open borders. Countries have a right to decide who enters. Mass immigration is a problem to be solved. People should stay in their own countries. But that if people do come, they should be treated like human beings with dignity. He also says if they come, they should learn the language and respect the laws. But because people's brains are broken by American politics they cannot understand this nuance.

It's rare that AI video makes me feel any emotion. But these "nostalgiamaxxing videos" really do capture what it's like to grow up in the 90's Credit: homeforchristmasofficial

Gordon Wood - the eminent historian of early America who just died - was a forceful critic of the NYT ‘1619 Project,’ which was a cheap propaganda effort to convince Americans that slavery was what this country is all about. He dismantled the project methodically. Link next post.

This is HUGE news. PhD astronomer and former NASA engineer Ivo Busko has single-handedly driven a final nail into the coffin of the contamination-based hypotheses (e.g. plate defects and cosmic rays) proposed to explain the VASCO transients. He did so using one of the most creative approaches in astronomy I have ever seen: by analysing pre-Sputnik photographic plates from a German telescope known to suffer from severe optical distortions (aberrations), he demonstrated that the transients appear on these plates and exhibit the same optical distortions as the stars themselves. They are slightly narrower and sharper than the stars, consistent with brief flashes. This is a crucial result. It shows that the transient light passed through the telescope optics, meaning the transients originate from real objects producing light, rather than from plate defects or cosmic-ray contamination that hit the plate. Dr Busko has also shown that the transients cluster spatially and are associated with periods close to nuclear tests. See the example of the triple transient with optical comas. This is the greatest gift. Congratulations, Ivo. I'm happy beyond belief. Read Ivo Busko's paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2606.08319

Today, Catholic church, lower Manhattan: Three people in wheelchairs, at least one person w Down syndrome. Quite a few elderly people, and quite a few older people who used to very sweetly bring their ailing parents to Mass before their parents passed. Little kids in the pew in front of us and the pew behind us. At least one other family who has lost a child in infancy. Dependence is all around; we all become dependent eventually, if we live long enough. It's the state we begin life in and the state we end it in; many of us pass through a state of dependence somewhere along the way as well (@LeahLibresco). Our physical dependence reminds us of our spiritual dependence. Though people sometimes want to paint religious pro-lifers as terrible extremist zealots, I'd offer something else: We recognize that dependence is all around; that caretaking is sanctifying; that hard days come for us all; that we must serve others when called. Today was just a normal Sunday, but I'm not sure other people realize how much we really do try to live out the gospel, how we know--as best we can--of what we speak.

On Sunday, my friend Gordon Wood was struck and killed in a car accident. Gordon taught history at Brown Univ. and was among the most accomplished historians America has produced. He won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for The Radicalism of the American Revolution, and his earlier book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 took the 1970 Bancroft Prize. He also received the National Humanities Medal. He was, in my view, the finest historian of America's founding—which makes it all the sadder that he did not live to see the nation's 250th birthday. His reputation reached popular culture, too. Matt Damon's character in Good Will Hunting invokes him by name in the famous bar scene, accusing a Harvard student of simply "regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about [...] the pre-Revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization." I feel fortunate to have collaborated with Gordon on several projects. In a 2019 anthology I compiled, he wrote an essay on the possibility of a shared American narrative. He centered his argument on equal rights as "the most radical and most powerful ideological force" the Revolution unleashed. "This powerful sense of equality is still alive and well in America," he wrote, "and despite all of its disturbing and unsettling consequences, it is what makes us one people." When I needed jacket blurbs for my new book Lincoln's Compass, coming out this November, I turned to Gordon. The fit was natural: the book argues that Abraham Lincoln took the Declaration's claim that "all men are created equal" as his guiding moral compass—and that he refocused the nation on that claim. Gordon, ever the gentleman, offered generous praise. He was, in many respects, the dean of American historians. He will be very hard to replace.

Spoke to a DoorDash driver the other day He makes $200k a year delivering food Incredible Asked him how (seemed way too high) He makes about 20 deliveries a day Gets paid an average of $7 per delivery That’s $35k a year Plus he delivers on a bicycle so his profit margin is basically 100% So where’d the rest of the money come from? Last month he got hit by a truck and got a $165k insurance payout Love that income hack Might have to try doing DoorDash myself

In 1991 during the Gulf War, American A-10 Warthogs mistakenly targeted and opened fire on a column of allied British armored vehicles. 9 British soldiers were tragically killed. 11 more were injured. Why haven't you heard about it? Why aren't there false-flag conspiracies? Why isn't Marjorie Taylor Greene posting on X about it? Because Jews weren't involved.

Earlier this year, I was very skeptical of the claim that smartphones reduced birthrates, because fertility declined so, so long before the arrival of smartphones. But @JesusFerna7026 changed my mind, and studies like this have confirmed that my mind should stay changed. The way I think about now is something like this: One set of factors best describes why birthrates declined toward 2 around the world in the last few decades—modernization, contraception, women's education and social freedom, etc. But another set of factors seems to better describe why birthrates have fallen toward 1 and below one in many places and among many groups. And smartphones belong in the second category.

Earlier this year, I was very skeptical of the claim that smartphones reduced birthrates, because fertility declined so, so long before the arrival of smartphones. But @JesusFerna7026 changed my mind, and studies like this have confirmed that my mind should stay changed. The way I think about now is something like this: One set of factors best describes why birthrates declined toward 2 around the world in the last few decades—modernization, contraception, women's education and social freedom, etc. But another set of factors seems to better describe why birthrates have fallen toward 1 and below one in many places and among many groups. And smartphones belong in the second category.

Ben Franklin didn’t plow through dozens and dozens of French whores so that you could abide by fireworks ordinances

Sam Harris has written the best thing you’ll read today. open.substack.com/pub/samhar…

Thomas Massie: “There is zero evidence that Iran was trying to build a nuclear weapon, Netanyahu is warmongering.” The Deputy Speaker of the Iranian Parliament: “We tried to develop nuclear weapons, but couldn't keep it secret.”

Billionaires in America already for the most part pay as much as billionaires in Nordic countries. But socialists want to pretend otherwise, so they pretend that unrealized gains are income.

This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine. In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on: - retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels - RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life - small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol - Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection - this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.

Using the evidence from Auckland's upzoning, we infer that a 1% increase in housing stock reduces rents by 3.6%. Rents fell by 21.6% and the housing stock increased by 6.9%, so the elasticity of rents to housing stock is ln(1-0.216)/ln(1 0.069) = -3.6.

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas