J. L. Palacios

Statement from Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, Archbishop of Newark. @CardinalJWTobin

On another planet, a million years ago.

I doubt Pope Leo XIV will lose any sleep over this, before he begins his pilgrimage to Africa tomorrow. But the rest of us should. Because it is unhinged, uncharitable and unchristian. Is there no bottom to this moral squalor?

Trump just posted a photo depicting himself as Jesus. He is depicting himself as God. He is not mentally fit to serve. MAGA Christians: How could you POSSIBLY defend this?

Pressure is building in Venezuela. Unlike China, the USA cannot fully supply Venezuela with the goods it needs. America lacks the production capacity and the supply networks required to support the entire country. The key issue is thay even with American sanctions in place, Venezuela under Maduro was still able to trade with China. They exchanged oil for products, medicines, and other essential goods on a barter basis. After relations with China broke down, inflation exploded. It reached 649.5 percent by March 2026. The International Monetary Fund expects it to go above 682 percent by the end of the year. Right now Venezuelas oil money is being sent to a special account controlled by the US Treasury. Remember that the United States has also essentially seized Venezuelas gold reserves. These moves are speeding up the collapse of the national currency. The situation is spiraling out of control.

“To splice together movie cuts with actual bombing and targeting of people for the purposes of entertainment is sickening. This is not who we are,” says Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, criticizing what he calls the White House’s “gamification” of the war on social media. cbsn.ws/4tO90K5

El teléfono se inventó en 1876. Dos años después, en 1878, ya había uno en México. Eso no es poco: significa que mientras Graham Bell todavía estaba perfeccionando su invento, Porfirio Díaz ya lo estaba instalando en el Palacio Nacional. El ministro de Fomento, el escritor Vicente Riva Palacio, conoció al empresario Alfred Westrup y de inmediato convenció a Díaz de que ese aparato era el futuro. Se contrató a Westrup con una misión muy concreta: enlazar telefónicamente el Palacio Nacional con el Castillo de Chapultepec, las seis comisarías de policía con la Inspección General y las oficinas del gobernador y del ministro de Gobernación. La primera llamada oficial en México ocurrió el 13 de marzo de 1878, entre la gendarmería de Tlalpan y la Inspección General de Policía, 18 kilómetros de distancia, y la comunicación duró sesenta minutos, convirtiéndose en la primera llamada telefónica de larga distancia de toda América Latina. Y ese mismo año, el 16 de septiembre, Porfirio Díaz tomó el auricular en el Palacio Nacional y habló con alguien en el Castillo de Chapultepec. Antes de esa llamada, escuchó a través del aparato el Himno Nacional que se interpretaba en otro punto de la ciudad, y quedó tan convencido que ordenó instalar la línea permanente ese mismo día. Lo que vino después es igual de fascinante. Díaz se convirtió en el número 64 del primer directorio telefónico de México, que se publicó en 1888 cuando el servicio ya tenía 800 suscriptores. La ciudad crecía conectada, pero Díaz tenía algo más en la cabeza: quería que la telefonía fuera mexicana. Cuando una empresa intentó registrarse como Mextelco pero resultó ser filial de una compañía estadounidense, Díaz se negó a darle la concesión y esperó hasta que inversionistas mexicanos compraron el negocio y la rebautizaron Cotelmex. En 1884 les dio la primera concesión formal, y en 1883 esa misma empresa ya había logrado la primera llamada de larga distancia internacional entre Matamoros, Tamaulipas y Brownsville, Texas. Para cuando estalló la Revolución en 1910, México tenía 16,000 teléfonos instalados. Y como curiosidad histórica que usamos todavía hoy: el "bueno" con el que los mexicanos contestamos el teléfono nació en aquella época, cuando las operadoras preguntaban si la línea estaba en buenas condiciones y el usuario respondía exactamente eso. Porfirio Díaz nos dejó el Ángel de la Independencia, el ferrocarril, la UNAM y también el "bueno". Fuentes: El Devenir, El Universal, Quién Habla, WikiCity, Apuntes para la Historia de la Telefonía en México, Infobae, La Voz del Desierto.

Those were the days…

JD Vance le dio el beso de la muerte.

Kiedy w 2003 roku USA rozpoczynały wojnę w Iraku, wielu Amerykanów krytykowało Jana Pawła II, że stanowczo i konsekwentnie przeciwstawia się wojnie. Dziś Papież Leon przypomniał jego stanowcze słowa. "Św. Jan Paweł II, niestrudzony świadek pokoju, powiedział ze wzruszeniem w czasie kryzysu irackiego w 2003 r.: 'Ja należę do tego pokolenia, które żyło w okresie II wojny światowej i ją przeżyło. Mam obowiązek powiedzieć wszystkim młodym ludziom, młodszym ode mnie, którzy nie mają za sobą tego doświadczenia: «Nigdy więcej wojny!», posługując się słowami wypowiedzianymi przez Pawła VI w czasie jego pierwszej wizyty w siedzibie Narodów Zjednoczonych. Musimy zrobić wszystko co w naszej mocy! Dobrze wiemy, że nie istnieje pokój za wszelką cenę. Lecz wszyscy wiemy, jak wielka jest to odpowiedzialność' ( Anioł Pański, 16 marca 2003)." "Dzisiejszego wieczoru przyjmuję jego apel jako własny," powiedział Papież Leon, dodając: "apel jakże aktualny." "Dość bałwochwalstwa samego siebie i pieniądza! Dość epatowania siłą! Dość wojny! Prawdziwa siła objawia się w służbie życiu," apelował papież w jednej z najmocniejszych przemów jego pontyfikatu (te ostatnie słowa w załączonym video) Całość po polsku tutaj: vatican.va/content/leo-xi… Video: Vatican Media

The Surrender Summit: Trump Sends His Son-in-Law to Lose a War ‘Vance brought his wife. Not a deputy secretary. Not a general. Not even a halfway competent mid-level State Department lifer who at least knows what the Strait of Hormuz is on a map. He brought Usha. His wife. To a war negotiation. The most consequential diplomatic moment since the end of the Cold War and JD thought, yeah, I’ll make a long weekend of it, bring the missus, see Pakistan. Pakistan received the Iranians with their Foreign Minister, their Army Chief, their National Assembly Speaker, and their Interior Minister all standing on the tarmac in full ceremonial dress. America sent the guy who wrote a book about how sad it is to be from Ohio. And then there’s Jared Kushner. Jared fucking Kushner. A man whose entire qualification for any of this is that he married into the right family, which, by the way, is also his business model, his foreign policy experience, and apparently now his military strategy. Jared has the energy of a guy who’s never been told no in his life because everyone around him was either paid not to or too scared to. He walked into the Middle East peace process last time and achieved absolutely nothing except making himself several hundred million dollars richer. So naturally Donald called him again. Jared Kushner at peace talks is like bringing your plumber to do brain surgery because he’s good with pipes and you trust him.’ ifloz.substack.com/p/the-surrende…

NEW: Pope Leo XIV’s close ally Cardinal Robert McElroy received a standing ovation at the end of his homily, where he called on Catholics to take up civic action to help end the “immoral” war against Iran. “When we leave this church tonight, we must move beyond prayer. As citizens and believers in this democracy that we cherish so deeply, we must advocate for peace with our representatives and leaders. “It is not enough to say we have prayed. We must also act. For it is very possible that the negotiations will fail because of recalcitrance on both sides, and the president will move to re-enter this immoral war. “At that critical juncture, as disciples of Jesus Christ called to be peacemakers in the world, we must answer vocally and in unison: “No. Not in our name. Not at this moment. Not with our country.”

Too on point not to share, “Aussie reply to Trump rant about NATO not being there for us. Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage. You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail. Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates. Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you. And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again. And you're calling Greenland poorly run? Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no. "NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years. And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess. So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your fucking mouth. Credit (borrowed from) Jim Scroggins - original author 📷 unknown”

In 1948, a 32-year-old at Bell Labs published a paper nobody fully understood. Engineers found it too mathematical. Mathematicians found it too engineering-focused. One prominent mathematician reviewed it negatively. That paper - "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", became the founding document of the digital age. The man was Claude Shannon. Father of Information Theory. At 21, he wrote the most important master's thesis of the 20th century. Working at MIT on an early mechanical computer, Shannon noticed its relay switches had exactly two states - open or closed. He had just taken a philosophy course introducing Boolean algebra, which also operated on two values: true and false. Nobody had ever connected these two things. His 1937 thesis proved that Boolean algebra and electrical circuits are mathematically identical, and that any logical operation could be built from simple switches. Howard Gardner called it "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century." Every digital computer ever built traces back to this insight. At 29, he proved that perfect encryption exists. During WWII, Shannon worked on classified cryptography at Bell Labs. His work contributed to SIGSALY, the secure voice system used for confidential communications between Roosevelt and Churchill. In a classified 1945 memorandum, he mathematically proved the one-time pad provides perfect secrecy, unbreakable not just computationally, but provably, permanently, against an adversary with infinite power. When declassified in 1949, it transformed cryptography from an art into a science. It laid the foundations for DES, AES, and every modern encryption standard. At 32, he defined what information is. His 1948 paper introduced one equation: H = −Σ p(x) log p(x) Shannon entropy. The average uncertainty in a probability distribution. The minimum bits required to encode a message. Three things followed: > He defined the bit - the fundamental unit of all information. His colleague John Tukey coined the name. > He proved the channel capacity theorem, every communication channel has a maximum rate of reliable transmission. You can approach it. You can never exceed it. > He unified telegraph, telephone, and radio into a single mathematical framework for the first time. Robert Lucky of Bell Labs called it the greatest work "in the annals of technological thought." Where his equation lives in AI today: Cross-entropy loss - the function training every classifier and language model, is derived directly from H. Decision tree splits use information gain, which is H applied to data. Perplexity, the standard LLM evaluation metric, is an exponentiation of cross-entropy. Every time a neural network trains, Shannon's formula runs inside it. He also built the first AI learning device. In 1950, Shannon built Theseus, a mechanical mouse that navigated a maze through trial and error, learned the correct path, and repeated it perfectly. Mazin Gilbert of Bell Labs said: "Theseus inspired the whole field of AI." That same year he published the first paper on programming a computer to play chess. He co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop, the founding event of AI as a field. The man: He rode a unicycle through Bell Labs hallways while juggling. He built a flame-throwing trumpet, a rocket-powered Frisbee, and Styrofoam shoes to walk on the lake behind his house. He called his home Entropy House. When asked what motivated him: "I was motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together." In 1985, he appeared unexpectedly at a conference in Brighton. The crowd mobbed him for autographs. Persuaded to speak at the banquet, he talked briefly, then pulled three balls from his pockets and juggled instead. One engineer said: "It was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference." He died in 2001 after a decade with Alzheimer's, the cruel irony of information slowly leaving the mind of the man who defined what information was. Claude, the AI model, is named after Claude Shannon, the mathematician who laid the foundation for the digital world we rely on today.

Look at this astronaut's face during reentry, knowing the capsule exterior is at 5,000°F. The physics of why he's alive are wild. The air in front of the capsule compresses so violently at Mach 25 that it turns into plasma. 5,000°F on the surface. Half the temperature of the sun. The heat shield absorbs that energy by literally burning itself away, layer by layer, carrying the heat with it as gas. One inch of material is the entire margin. On the outside of that inch: 5,000°F. On the inside: 75°F. Room temperature. The thermal gradient across that single inch is the steepest temperature drop humans have ever engineered. The orange glow in the window is ionized nitrogen and oxygen. That plasma is why comms go black for six minutes during reentry. Ground control can't reach the crew. The astronauts are alone inside a fireball, falling at 25,000 mph, watching the laws of thermodynamics keep them alive through a 1-inch wall. Artemis II did exactly this last night. Four astronauts hit Earth's atmosphere at 24,664 mph, rode a 4,900°F plasma sheath for six minutes of radio silence, and splashed down a mile from target. The heat shield is now being inspected for cracks. They found over 100 on the last unmanned test.

🚨 The Pentagon summoned the Pope’s ambassador to a closed-door meeting and threatened him. Named official. On record. Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby called Cardinal Christophe Pierre to the Pentagon and delivered this message: “The United States has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.” Then a U.S. official invoked the Avignon Papacy — the 14th century moment when the French monarchy used military force to physically remove the Pope from Rome and bend the Church to its will. The Vatican understood the reference immediately. The Pope’s planned visit to America for the 250th anniversary celebration was cancelled. And then something remarkable happened. The Pope didn’t retreat. He pressed harder. He called the war unjust. He called Trump’s threats unacceptable. He told Americans to call Congress.

Today, the Iranian regime is still in place. They still have thousands of missiles and retain their highly enriched uranium and now they're negotiating for a firm grip on the Strait of Hormuz in perpetuity to end the war. Meanwhile, we've lost 14 U.S. servicemen and women and hundreds more have been wounded; spent tens of billions of dollars; and badly depleted our supplies battering Iran. At the same time, inflation is raging again and gas is at $4.15 a gallon and rising--$1.20 more than the day before we decided to launch a war against Iran. Remind me again why this was a good idea?

Ha fallecido en Gernica el muy apreciado Alberto Amorebieta Zuñiga, seguramente muchos tuiteros de mi TL lo conocieron en su restaurante La Cita en La Candelaria, Caracas (Goian Bego, QEPD) , información vía @jazoera .

BREAKING: Megyn Kelly on MAGA: Megyn Kelly: “After 14 years inside Fox News, I’m exposing what viewers refuse to see—how the network morphed from news into a propaganda machine designed purely to cheerlead wars, worship Trump, and feed you manufactured rage instead of facts.” Truth.

Trump’s Strategic and Moral Failure in Iran newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…