Two signs of the end of democracy

This first one is obvious and is a knife aimed at the heart of our country: the Trump administration is talking about suspending habeas corpus, and clearly their pet rat-weasel, Stephen Miller, is floating the idea to the press.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said Friday that the Trump administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the right of a person to challenge their detention in court.

If carried out by President Donald Trump, the suspension of habeas corpus would be a dramatic escalation of his administration’s immigration policy by significantly curtailing a right enshrined in the Constitution.

This is what tyrants do — they want the ability to silence critics by throwing them in prison while denying them the right to defend themselves. Never mind that they are busy draping themselves in the corpse of Abraham Lincoln, because he suspended the right during the Civil War (we are not in a war, no matter how insincerely they insist we are being “invaded”), this is a fundamental attack on the rule of law.

The second sign of imminent doom is that Dan Three Arrows is returning to posting video essays. The United States is so fucked right now.

I predict that there will be blood in the streets before this is over; if he suspends habeas corpus, why not suspend the 2026 elections next?

If all that isn’t enough for you…

ADepartment of Homeland Security (DHS) official confirmed Saturday that arrests of Democratic members of Congress “is definitely on the table” following a confrontation at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Newark, New Jersey.

This statement comes after Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested on Friday at the Delaney Hall detention center, sparking a dispute over what actually occurred during the incident.

We will never colonize Mars

Or anywhere else off planet for that matter. Jennifer Ouellette has an enlightening interview with Adam Becker, the author of a new book titled More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, which sounds like my kind of book — he tears apart the claims of the tech billionaires. They’ve become increasingly detached from reality since the days when I first stumbled across Yudkowski and Kurzweil, who were patently bonkers then, and since then have only increased in both influence and insanity.

More Everything Forever covers the promise and potential pitfalls of AI, effective altruism, transhumanism, the space race to colonize Mars, human biodiversity, and the singularity, among many other topics—name-checking along the way such technological thought leaders as Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, William MacAskill, Peter Singer, Marc Andreessen, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Jeff Bezos, and yes, Elon Musk. It all boils down to what Becker calls the “ideology of technological salvation,” and while its uber-rich adherents routinely cite science to justify their speculative claims, Becker notes that “actual scientific concerns about the plausibility of these claims” are largely dismissed. For Becker, this ideology represents a profound threat, not the promise of a utopian future.

“More than anything, these visions of the future promise control by the billionaires over the rest of us,” Becker writes in his introduction. “But that control isn’t limited to the future—it’s here, now. Their visions of the future are news; they inform the limits of public imagination and political debate. Setting the terms of such conversations about the future carries power in the present. If we don’t want tech billionaires setting those terms, we need to understand their ideas about the future: their curious origins, their horrifying consequences, and their panoply of ethical gaps and scientific flaws.”

That list of “thought leaders” is damning in itself — they aren’t champions of thought and science and technology, they’re cheerleaders for fantasy and greed. Every one of them ought to be dismissed from any consideration of respectability. The lunatic fringe is running the show, and prospering greatly.

One of the points of the interview is that they’re all out of touch with reality. They’ve absorbed all these wild ideas from science fiction, but never consider the science part. For instance, they apparently don’t understand thermodynamics.

I’ve got a magnet on my fridge right now that says the heat death is coming. Certain Silicon Valley visionaries hate the laws of thermodynamics. Others claim that their ideas are thermodynamically inevitable because they’ve misunderstood thermodynamics. But either way, they’ve got to grapple with it because it’s the ultimate source of these limits. If nothing else stops you, thermodynamics will stop you because entropy is always going to increase.

They are all fanatical capitalists, a philosophy founded on the premise of infinite and eternal exponential growth, so of course they reject the science, or fall for twisted, perverse wish-fulfillment versions of the science.

Part of this bad science is Elon Musk’s hype about colonizing Mars. It’s not going to happen.

…all of the interesting places in space are really far apart. Living on Mars sucks. Mars isn’t even mid. Mars is just crappy. The gravity is too low. The radiation is too high. There’s no air. The dirt is made of poison. There’s very little water. It gets hit with asteroids more often than Earth does because it’s closer to the asteroid belt. And the prospects for terraforming technology in any meaningful way are not great. Making Mars as habitable as Antarctica during the polar night would be the greatest technological undertaking humanity has ever taken by many orders of magnitude, in order to create a place that nobody would want to live, and where the gravity would still be too low. It’s a deeply unpleasant place.

From a biological perspective, humans are not in any way adapted for life in space or on Mars. We come from a long line, 4 billion years of optimization for life on a planet the size of Earth, with air and water freely available, under certain narrow ranges of temperature and pressure, and we simply lack the biochemical and physiological equipment to cope with a totally alien environment. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible for life to find a way, but if we did artificially modify ourselves to produce descendants who could live on Mars, they wouldn’t be human anymore. We’d probably have to scrap sentience and all the other baggage we’ve accumulated, that we consider so important to the human experience, to generate an ecosystem of creatures that could survive in some way on a mostly airless and waterless frozen ball of rock. There isn’t any point in aspiring to such an artificial state.

Don’t even get me started on Ray Kurzweil. I first read one of his hopelessly delusional books over 20 years ago. Hated it. He was just making shit up about the technological progression he imagined was going to occur, all in service of his pathological fear of death. We’re also not ever going to be immortal.

Kurzweil tries to get around this by saying that you’re not going to be immortal, but you can live as long as you want to. Sure, that gets around some of it. But Kurzweil also thinks that we’re going to find a way around the second law of thermodynamics, which we’re not. I do think that fear of death is at the root of a lot of this, if not all of it. I don’t know if I would go as far as to say that death is what gives life meaning. I would say that the human experience is defined by the limitations that death imposes, the fact that our time is limited. If you remove that constraint, that would fundamentally alter the human condition in ways that very well might not be pleasant.

Silicon Valley isn’t about technology, it’s about selfishness and greed, and weird little gnomes with stupid ideas who have made a niche for themselves by burrowing into junk science. We’re not going to become near-immortal short of turning ourselves into jellyfish. Well, maybe Henrietta Lacks is immortal, but at a price no one would want to pay.

Maybe that explains what’s going on: the worst and richest people in the world are working hard to become mindless, cancerous jellyfish.

None of these people have contributed anything to our understanding of the world, but are experts at accumulating personal wealth by leeching off everyone else.

An interesting psychological insight

Adam Conover notices that an awful lot of far-right weirdos and fanatics are addicted to group chats, and speculates that maybe the group chats themselves are responsible for the increasing insanity of our government. It’s clear that some people seem to be literally addicted to their phone chats — Mike Waltz was caught chatting under the table at a cabinet meeting, Pete Hegseth seems to have replaced alcohol with his phone, and Marc Andreesen has a reputation for non-stop chatting with multiple groups at all times.

It’s an interesting suggestion that group chats are wrecking the brains of all the participants, but it sounds a bit like the accusation that video games are damaging the youth. I am quite willing to consider an alternative, that all of these horrible people were fucked up in the head before they picked up an iPhone. Maybe certain kinds of personalities are simultaneously authoritarian and demanding a constant feed of approval and dominance?

The experiment is straightforward: enroll typical, normal people in one of these group chat thingies, and see if they turn into raging stupid assholes under their influence. I’d be a candidate, because I’m not involved in any of these real-time kinds of online conversations, and never have been. I’ve got a couple of email groups that are closed and confidential, but those tend to be low-key and focused on business. My biology discipline at the university has one — it’s all boring announcements and questions about classes and that sort of thing, there’s absolutely nothing particularly juicy about it, and if anyone tried to salt it with digressions and abuse they would be shut down with a face-to-face complaint.

I wonder if Facebook might have suffered from this phenomenon. It’s not quite real-time, but some people do have their strange little subgroups that they hover over, constantly refreshing, and they do get quite nasty and personal…and also some of them are annoyingly obsessed with their status. I left Facebook because of that ingrown stupidity having free reign.

Maybe the real problem is obsession with social dynamics, which is a real problem when the online tool’s purpose is to facilitate a real, practical project, like bombing Houthis or discussing classroom assignments.

No, don’t put me into your group chat. I might turn into a monster.

The Pope has a surprise for us all

Pope Leo XIV is a trans man.

X, of course.

You don’t doubt this conclusion, do you? How can you question a guy who has dedicated his life to superimposing the outlines of skulls on celebrity photos and deciding what sex they are? Also, they’re a Christian.

Bones never Lie, but people do ~ wake up from their Lies ~
Genesis 1:27, 2 Timothy 3:13 ~ Glory to God and praise to Jesus.

Browse his Xitter feed and you will discover that practically no one is the the sex they say they are.

Almost there!

Today is the day, the last day of finals week. My students will soon be finishing up their final exam, as of precisely 12:00 noon today, and then I spring into action and grade everything, and then plug the last numbers into a spreadsheet to calculate the final letter grade, and then I submit them to the registrar. Done! All done! No more teaching obligations until January!

To cap it all off, tomorrow is commencement. I’ll be putting on the silly cap and gown and saying goodbye to the students (and immediately after rushing home for a podcast).

But today…one last push.

Vandals get punished

That is a lovely tree. It’s been posing in a scenic location near Hadrian’s Wall for 150 years.

Then a pair of idiots came along with a chainsaw and did this to it:

The two vandals have been found guilty. They did it for a “laugh” and to fetch a souvenir for one of the men’s newborn daughter — I don’t think she’ll be taking pride in that as she grows up fatherless.

In a bit of good news, saplings have sprung up from the stump and a new tree may arise.

We have a new Pope, same as all the old Popes

It’s some American guy named Robert Prevost who has now accepted the purported mantle of infallibility and divine favor from an imaginary god. Just once I’d like to see one of these clerical nobodies admit that they don’t have any special powers and therefore need to turn down the unjustified honor. But no, this one is calling himself Pope Leo XIV and is already spewing pious declarations.

He does meet one of the necessary prerequisites to be a Catholic authority figure: he does have a distinguished history of concealing child-rape accusations against the priesthood.

OK, everyone, we can go back to ignoring and occasionally sneering at the ridiculous man at the top of the hierarchy.

I gotta get a better hobby

Huh. I woke up this morning to do as I usually do, browsing the news and commenting on it, and I just can’t. Nope. Nothing inspires me today.

My mistake might have been first reading about RFK jr’s policies.

Death is the policy

I can’t expand on that. The man is a walking catastrophe, an incompetent buffoon who has been shielded from the consequences of his actions by wealth and privilege, and now he’s inflicting his uninformed, insane opinions on everyone else. He’s a madman, given control of HHS and NIH and dictating policy on everything from autism to infectious disease, while we sit around gawping at the spectacle. Our elected representatives are doing nothing to stop the disaster, and in fact rubber-stamped his appointment. What am I supposed to do?

I have to wonder how such a pathetic creature could acquire so much power. Naomi Klein explains that we must blame the rich.

What they want is absolutely everything

Klein recently co-authored an essay for The Guardian, sounding alarm about the dark worldview of politically insurgent tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Klein views these men — who are guiding Donald Trump’s presidency — as abandoning any positive vision for our collective future, and instead retrenching in preparation for a dark, nearly end times-level social collapse, from which they and other elites emerge unscathed, and all powerful. “The governing ideology of the far-right in our age of escalating disasters,” she writes, “has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.”

So the guys with billions of dollars are telling people like me, who is facing existential uncertainty about personal issues like retirement and health with virtually no financial backup, that we don’t matter, that there is nothing we can do, that we might as well die and get it over with. I’d be happy to do so if I weren’t so full of rage and frustration. Unfortunately, writing on the internet does not relieve my anger. We need to literally destroy these monsters of greed.