"I am quite certain that neither love nor grief can ever be excessive; each is its own absolute measure, and knows its own proper proportions. And, as a rule, we generally fail to love or grieve nearly as much as we ought to do." ~David Bentley Hart

"We should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of the universe." ~Simone Weil

This is the story the Trump admin has told: June 2025 US destroys Iran's nukes with a few bombs. April 2026 US destroys Iran's nukes again. This time it cost ~$30B. May 2026 Iran closes Hormuz, nobody can get in or out. June 2026 US pays Iran $24B and asks them not to build nukes again. What happened here except that we are now out the $30B we spent bombing Iran, plus the $24B we're sending them this week? Why do we pay Iran every 10 years when we ask them to stop with the nukes?

1. Mid-century Modern 2. Farmhouse 3. IKEA I guess there's no other interior styles anymore? Everything that's manufactured fits into one of these three baskets?

Typical Facebook Marketplace post in North FL.

The one thing we owe absolutely to God is never to be afraid of anything. ~St. Charles de Foucauld

I went here today. The orthographic and phonetic representation of "Buc-ee's" is an affront to the English language, and even to human decency. No, I will not explain. If this isn't obvious to you already, then you'll probably never understand.

In six months we’ll find out he’s been negotiating with a prank calling teenager from Jersey this whole time.

"These are all metaphors. None of them is a metaphor for God's wrath condemning you to eternal suffering." David Bentley Hart Rainn Wilson, in conversation ❤️ youtu.be/DPSipiwAteg?si=SVuA…

This is a new angle for POTUS, so openly positioning his preferences opposite those of "America."

"Those with children have a bigger stake in the future." I understand why people say this. Elon says it. And I think it's true. But I'm not convinced that having a bigger stake in the future is necessarily a good thing. Family obligations can distract from higher-order ideals. I think, and know from experience, that being a parent can also make one more risk-averse in negative ways. And it can have us privilege our own family's safety and security over others. St. Paul warned against this very tendency in no uncertain terms: "An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord's affairs – how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world – how he can please his wife – and his interests are divided." The real, fundamental issue here, I think, is the role of apocalypse in our thinking. Raising children is a very "future-oriented" task. But per the New Testament, the future is not guaranteed – we should even live as if there is no future on this earth. Here's St. Paul again: "Let those who have wives live as though they had none ... those who buy as though they had no goods ... those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it." That's pretty extreme. What does it mean to raise children in light of the eschaton? How should apocalypse affect our political opinions? I tend to think that living ever-conscious of an eschatological horizon leads us to value social justice *here and now* over and above compromises for the sake of a stable and predictable future. Just something to think about in regards to whether it's *really* true that those with children are better equipped to make decisions about things. Indeed, the Church has pretty consistently taught that those *without* children have a bigger stake in things, spiritually. The discipline of celibacy is a sacrifice made in light of the eschatological horizon. Is it really true, then, that when it comes to politics, the opinions of those with children matter more?

we live in age of great moral panics about things that don’t matter and zero moral outrage over some of the most egregious societal sins we’ve ever seen

Imagine if the Fed had caved to Trump and cut rates like he wanted. Imagine if his tariffs hadn't been struck down. Inflation would be even worse, and probably much worse! Separation of powers is a good thing, most of the time. If Congress had done its job and prevented this War in Iran, this inflation report would be much better.

It is nice here. But please don't tell anyone 😉

From David Bentley Hart today – a comment on the nature of LLMs, and a criticism of the sort-of "analytically propositional thinking" that gives rise to the impoverished conclusions of thinkers like Richard Dawkins, whose methods all-but oblige him to conclude that Claude is "conscious." This is a paid Substack. I'm sharing only a small selection here. I highly recommend subscribing, if you find this kind of thing interesting. "LLMs in general seem to me an obvious occasion for remarking not only the vast difference between mental agency and machine function, but also a certain tacit metaphysical presupposition in the practice of analytically propositional thinking that too often condemns it to the status of a secondary and ultimately inadequate methodological predilection rather than a serious style of rational reflection. Viewed from the perspective solely of the Turing test, there is no need to discriminate between what might be called tokens of genuine semantic meaning with intentional content and tokens simply of syntactic order and statistical frequency. As a system of cumulative autoregressive data, an LLM is a kind of ouroboros, consuming its own tail in a perpetual cycle; it contaminates virtual space continuously with its own aimless generation of textual echoes and then continuously ingests and metabolizes what it has produced into an ever vaster collection of ‘information’, in the purely Shannon-bits sense of that word, which means into an ever more errant flow of misinformation. This may prove to be an incorrigible defect of the system precisely because there is no intentionality there that will ever have the power to grasp such words as 'truth' or 'falsehood' as actual values rather than as mere periodic syntactic constants. There is no act of thinking in an LLM, of necessity but also on principle, since meaning is precisely what must be set aside in order for the system to process its data. There is not even anything that might plausibly be called a linguistic act in its functions, since intentional content obviously cannot be quantified in terms of statistically measurable syntactic recurrence. The system merely exploits the predictable sequences of that recurrence, setting it off against a background of absolute entropic randomness. In the end, the appearance of semantic intention is one that arises out of total semantic vacuity, which is why much of the virtual world will soon be AI talking to AI—or not talking at all, in fact, but merely appearing to do so—since the organic substrate of all that psychopathic babble will have become superfluous. In that sense, LLMs have produced the most rigorous analytic reduction of language possible precisely by evacuating it of meaning and converting it entirely into formal and structuralist rules of order."

On Catholic traditionalism, from the late Stratford Caldecott 👇 "The temptation to set the authority of tradition against that of Rome was felt by many of the most devout, precisely because they felt they understood the tradition so well. Yet the two authorities cannot be so divided. The mistake is partly due to a foreshortened view of tradition, since looking back through history we are apt to tidy up and gloss over the imperfection and instability that are all too apparent when one is living through those times, and in this way we idealize a past state of the Church."

"The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by the overwhelming credentials of science, the beauty and elegance of the scientific method, the triumph of modern medicine over physical ailments, and the technological transformation of the very world itself, the self finds itself in the end disappointed by the failure of science and technique in those very sectors of life which had been its main source of ordinary satisfaction in past ages." ~Walker Percy

Alternative take: It's kind of cool to have your own line-item. I mean, "Jesus Christ" is in the name, for Pete's (I mean Joe Smith's) sake. Just own it. Mike Lee is a big baby.