14 Jun 2025 Search

icymi:

I will speak of Thomas Aquinas instead. I will tell you my dim memories of what he said about the hierarchy of laws on this planet, which was flat at the time. The highest law, he said, was divine law, God’s law. Beneath that was natural law, which I suppose would include thunderstorms, and our right to shield our children from poisonous ideas, and so on.

And the lowest law was human law.

Let me clarify this scheme by comparing its parts to playing cards. Enemies of the Bill of Rights do the same sort of thing all the time, so why shouldn’t we? Divine law, then, is an ace. Natural law is a king. The Bill of Rights is a lousy queen.

The Thomist hierarchy of laws is so far from being ridiculous that I have never met anybody who did not believe in it right down to the marrow of his or her bones. Everybody knows that there are laws with more grandeur than those which are printed in our statute books. The big trouble is that there is so little agreement as to how those grander laws are worded. Theologians can give us hints of the wording, but it takes a dictator to set them down just right–to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. A man who had been a mere corporal in the army did that for Germany and then for all of Europe, you may remember, not long ago. There was nothing he did not know about divine and natural law. He had fistfuls of aces and kings to play.

Meanwhile, over on this side of the Atlantic, we were not playing with a full deck, as they say. Because of our Constitution, the highest card anybody had to play was a lousy queen, contemptible human law. That remains true today. I myself celebrate that incompleteness, since it has obviously been so good for us. — Kurt Vonnegut

and some recent links…

Hurricanes are getting so bad, we need a new category, expert warns by Tom Howarth. Hurricanes are a redistribution of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere. Essentially, you need more heat to be distributed before you can push through that lid and cause a hurricane. That means they might become less frequent, but when they go, they really go. At the same time, rising sea levels mean that even storms of the same strength can now push further inland, causing more widespread damage.

Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash by Emanuel Maiberg. (From what I can see, obvious use of generative AI is, more and more, a political signal. Generative AI is seen as part of a program to de-value human creativity and shift the balance of power toward central points of control and away from distributed decision-making methods like peer production and markets. See Toolmen by Mandy Brown. Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the fool—it’s to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground, breaking up bedrock, poisoning the soil, reaching far and wide to capture, uproot, strangle, and steal everything within its reach. and A plausible, scalable and slightly wrong black box: why large language models are a fascist technology that cannot be redeemed by Benjamin Gregory Carlisle. In what follows, I will argue that being plausible but slightly wrong and un-auditable—at scale—is the killer feature of LLMs, not a bug that will ever be meaningfully addressed, and this combination of properties makes it an essentially fascist technology. By “fascist” in this context, I mean that it is well suited to centralizing authority, eliminating checks on that authority and advancing an anti-science agenda.)

Possibly related: Please tell us Reg: Why are AI PC sales slower than expected? by Paul Kunert, and Utah Study on Trans Youth Care Extremely Inconvenient for Politicians Who Ordered It by Madison Pauly. It is our expert opinion that policies to prevent access to and use of [gender-affirming hormone therapy] for treatment of [gender dysphoria] in pediatric patients cannot be justified based on the quantity or quality of medical science findings or concerns about potential regret in the future, and that high-quality guidelines are available to guide qualified providers in treating pediatric patients who meet diagnostic criteria. (That’s the problem with using human experts. Next time the politicians will use an LLM.)

X’s Sales Pitch: Give Us Your Ad Business or We’ll Sue - WSJ by Suzanne Vranica, Dana Mattioli, and Jessica Toonkel. Late last year, Verizon Communications got an unusual message from a media company that wanted its business: Spend your ad dollars with us or we’ll see you in court….It worked. Verizon, which hadn’t advertised on X since 2022, pledged to spend at least $10 million this year on the platform, a person familiar with the matter said. (more coverage: Musk’s threat to sue firms that don’t buy ads on X seems to have paid off by Jon Brodkin. The WSJ article said that Verizon, which hadn’t advertised on X since 2022, was told late last year that it would be added to the lawsuit if it didn’t buy ads. Verizon subsequently pledged to spend at least $10 million on the platform this year, the article said.)

Start your own Internet Resiliency Club – Bow Shock Systems Consulting (If we get some interested people turning out at the Alameda Linux Installfest who are looking for a project…)

Texas Legislature Beats Back Assault on Clean Energy by Gabrielle Gurley. It may surprise some people that Texas is the American poster child for clean energy. But a fortunate mix of climatic and topographic elements has made it the leading state in the nation for wind energy generation, while second for solar and battery storage. Billions and billions of dollars of investments unlocked those resources, and its business-friendly opportunities (no corporate or personal income tax!) for all comers, from entrepreneurs to fossil fuel giants to small landowners, have sparked one of the strangest regional energy revolutions in the world. (another contender: Solar power in Pakistan) and Texas Right to Repair bill passes, heads to the governor’s desk by Richard Lawler. (It’s not about red states vs. blue states, it’s about tech oligarchs vs. everybody)

Children need the freedom to play on driveways and streets again – here’s how to make it happen by Debbie Watson, Lydia Collison, and Tom Allport. In many places, children’s freedom to roam has been diminishing for generations, but the pandemic has hastened the decline of this free play. Since the pandemic, children’s physical activity has become ever more structured. It now mostly happens in after-school or sports clubs, while informal, child-led play continues to decline.

A Letter to Europe by Paul Krugman. Above all, Europe needs to overcome its learned helplessness and act like the great power it is — especially given America’s apparent determination to destroy the pillars of its own strength. (fortunately, the US IT exports of today are not the dominant products of Windows XP days. They’re full of growth hacking and enshittification, and ready to be replaced.)