RhodeIslandAspie

@Anna_Giaritelli Christianity, or at least the Republican Party version of it, is looking a lot like the 15th, 16th century Catholic Church. Decadence, orgies, corruption. Evangelical Christianity is definitely in need of a New Reformation.

EXCLUSIVE — The national chief of the Border Patrol, Michael Banks, was known among colleagues for taking regular trips abroad to engage in sex with prostitutes, according to six current and former Border Patrol employees who spoke with the Washington Examiner. Banks “bragged” to colleagues while in his previous management role at Border Patrol about paying for sex with prostitutes while traveling in Colombia and Thailand over the course of a decade. Banks’ behavior was said to have been investigated by Customs and Border Protection officials twice, including last year, but the investigation ended abruptly while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was in office, leading to more questions. washingtonexaminer.com/news/investiga…

@ihtesham2005 This great man deserved better. The powers that were decided not to notice his homosexuality when they needed his skills. And when they no longer needed him, he was tossed aside as a fa****.

A British mathematician invented the computer at 24, won the war at 30, was chemically castrated at 40, and was dead at 41. I went down this rabbit hole expecting a story about science. What I found was the most brutal betrayal in the history of modern technology. His name was Alan Turing. In 1936 he was a 24-year-old graduate student at Cambridge working on an obscure logic problem nobody outside academia cared about. The German mathematician David Hilbert had asked whether a single procedure could exist that, given any mathematical statement, would tell you whether it was provable. Turing answered no. But to prove the answer was no, he first had to define exactly what a procedure was. So he invented an abstract machine to capture the idea. The paper is called On Computable Numbers. It is 36 pages long. It is the most important paper in the history of computer science. What he sketched on paper that year is now called a Turing machine. A device that reads instructions off a tape, modifies what it reads, and moves to the next instruction. Every CPU on Earth is a physical implementation of this idea. Every programming language is a way of writing instructions for one. He proved, on paper, that there could exist a single universal machine capable of simulating any other machine. That single proof is the reason your laptop can run thousands of different programs without being redesigned for each one. Hardware and software are different things because Turing proved they could be, nine years before there was such a thing as a stored-program computer. Then the war happened. In 1939 he was recruited to Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking center where the most secret work of World War II was done. The Germans were using a cipher machine called Enigma to encode every military order moving across Europe. The number of possible Enigma settings was 158 quintillion. The Polish had cracked an earlier version. The new German naval Enigma was considered unbreakable. Turing led the team that broke it. He designed a machine called the Bombe that could systematically eliminate impossible cipher settings until only the correct one remained. By 1943 his team was decrypting roughly 84,000 German messages per month. The British Admiralty could read U-boat positions in the Atlantic before the U-boats reached them. Historian Sir Harry Hinsley, who served at Bletchley Park and later wrote the official British intelligence history of the war, estimated that the work shortened the war by two to four years. Millions of people who would have died are alive because of what one small team did in a country house outside London. Almost none of them ever knew his name. The work was classified for 30 years. Turing went back to civilian life, took a position at the University of Manchester, and in 1950 wrote a second paper that would do for artificial intelligence what his 1936 paper had done for computing. It is called Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The opening line is famous. "I propose to consider the question, can machines think." Then he did something nobody had ever done with that question. He pointed out that the question itself is meaningless until you define what thinking is, and that nobody can define what thinking is even for humans. So he proposed replacing it with an operational test. If a machine could hold a conversation indistinguishable from a human conversation, the question of whether the machine "really" thinks becomes a philosophical preference, not a scientific one. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, every large language model in production today, every conversation about AI alignment, every benchmark measuring whether a model has crossed some threshold of capability all of it traces back to the test he proposed in that single 1950 paper. He defined the entire vocabulary of the field he never lived to see exist. In 1952 he was arrested. A young man named Arnold Murray had stayed at his house. Murray's friend later broke in to steal something. Turing reported the burglary to the police. Under questioning, he admitted he had been in a relationship with Murray. Homosexuality was a crime in Britain under the 1885 gross indecency law, the same statute that had been used to imprison Oscar Wilde 57 years earlier. Turing did not deny what he had done. He told the police it should not be against the law. He was convicted. The court gave him a choice. Prison, or a year of forced estrogen injections to chemically suppress his sex drive. He chose the injections so he could keep working. The treatment caused weight gain. It gave him breasts. It stripped his security clearance. The country that had used his mind to win the war was now using its laws to destroy the body that mind lived inside. On the morning of June 8, 1954, his housekeeper found him dead in his home in Wilmslow. He had died the previous day, June 7. He was 41 years old. A half-eaten apple was on the bedside table. The autopsy found cyanide in his system. The inquest ruled it suicide. Some historians dispute the ruling. Jack Copeland, a leading Turing scholar at the University of Canterbury, has argued that the apple was never tested for cyanide, that Turing was in good spirits in the days before his death, that he had been making plans for the week ahead, and that the cause of death is consistent with accidental inhalation of cyanide vapor from a home electroplating experiment he had been running in his spare bedroom. We will probably never know which version is correct. What is certain is that he died alone, in a small house outside Manchester, a year after the British government finished injecting hormones into his body, in a country whose existence depended on the work he was no longer allowed to do. In 2009 the British government issued an official apology. Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote that the treatment Turing received was "appalling" and that he deserved "much better." In 2013 Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous royal pardon. In 2021 his face was placed on the Bank of England's 50 pound note. Sixty years. That is how long it took the country that owed him everything to put his face on its money. The 1936 paper is free online. The 1950 paper is free online. Both have been read by every serious computer scientist who has ever lived. The man who wrote them did not live to see a personal computer, did not live to see the internet, did not live to see a single one of the machines whose architecture he had defined while still in his twenties. Every algorithm running on every machine on Earth right now traces back to a graduate student who got 41 years on this planet before the country he saved decided they could no longer tolerate the way he loved.

@ihtesham2005 He didn't quite invent the computer, but he sure took some giant steps that brought us in that direction. I'm sure, that in a different reality. he'd of been one of the pioneers in helping to create those first mainframes.

@projo They told us we needed a CEO to run this country. How's that worked out. I'm sure her governance will be very good for CVS, and for her own wealth. I'm not by any means, a hard line progressive. I"m center left. But I've seen what six years of Trump has done to this country.

Foulkes proposes $100M for career and technical education in RI providencejournal.com/story/news/pol…

@davidfrum Anyone is entitled to sue the government if they think they've been harmed. But they've got to prove their case. Unless of course, plaintiff is the Trump or his buddies, which in that case, no trial is needed, because the government will cave in as ordered.

"Trump administration is said to be considering massive kickback to President Trump."

@SenWarren Hillary Clinton posted this, and I immediately thought Congress can stop this right now. She doesn't let people comment on her posts, so I'll do it here. The repubs blocks this, it needs to be out there in ads come this fall.

Donald Trump thinks the U.S. Treasury is his personal piggy bank. Let's be clear: the President is trying to steal $10 BILLION of taxpayer money - before a court rules. This is a massive, unprecedented scandal. Congress must stop him. I have a bill for that.

@projo It's hard enough to believe that most priests are celibate, but it becomes even harder with someone in their 50s.

The co-founder is set to become ordained on May 23. providencejournal.com/story/money/20…

@BillKristol In a world of Trumps, Napoleons and Tituses, be a - fill in the name of any US President that didn't leave a legacy of disgrace.

Really an excellent video. Should, IMHO, be shared far and wide. newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-a-vietnam…

@Mimimouse37 @BillKristol Obviously, there is nothing rational people would say that you want to hear, and nothing you say that rational people want to hear.

@RIAspie @BillKristol The problem there is that while we “saw” them as allies, now we know they are not.

"For Europe, Greenland was traumatic, and it changed things so that Europe was different after the Greenland crisis than before...I think Greenland was like, 'Oh, the United States actually is no longer just not our friend. It could be a potential foe.'”

@Mimimouse37 @BillKristol American conservatives used to honor our alliances and saw our European allies as kindred spirits against the likes of Russia. Now they are seen as the Enemy, while they don't seem to think Russia all that bad.

@RIAspie @BillKristol Really? They are all upset now that they decided to wage war against the elected President of the United States? There were choices made by them. If they are afraid, it’s only because they know the US saw the knife they tried to put in our back.

@KenRoth He'll find safe harbor in the US, and will be harbored as long as there is an R President.

Poland’s former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro flees Hungary for the US. He faces up to 25 years in prison in Poland if convicted for allegedly using funds meant for crime victims to buy Israeli Pegasus spyware, allegedly to monitor political opponents. trib.al/oUeQFmD

@EggerDC What should be a red flag in the narrative is that large amounts of cash in this age would not be transferred on "pallets," but electronically. If he lies about something so basic...

The theatrical, florid way Trump lies--not just that Obama sent cash, but that "Every Bank in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland was emptied out" to get it together--has always been among the strongest indicators that the guy is truly sick in the head.

@HoneyBoy103109 @mccaffreyr3 When I hear the world globalism spat out, it's usually infused with the flavorings of hate, paranoid, and a conspiratorial view.

@RIAspie @mccaffreyr3 The nation that over 80 years sold its soul to globalism

Trump is destroying our global alliances. We will face a dangerous future…. alone.

@HoneyBoy103109 @mccaffreyr3 There was an agreement in place 11 years ago that was aimed to prevent that. it was working. No guarantee it was going to continue to work, but it was never given the chance to work, so we will never know if it was going to work.

@RIAspie @mccaffreyr3 Better think about what the world would look like with a nuclear Iran

@AdamJSchwarz I've been using a snippet of that for my ring tone showing I'm with Europe against her enemies, where they be to the East, or to the West across the pond.

Hungary’s parliament sings “Ode to Joy” — the anthem of Europe — after Péter Magyar is sworn in as prime minister. Hungary is once again a proud member of the European Union.

@JenniferEValent Are these people really Protestant in the Reformation sense? They seem to be a do-it-your-self religion, with every pastor a mini-Pope, that's taken some of worst of both Protestantism and Catholicism, and little of the good of either.

I’m still just dumbfounded by this. Exodus 32 is a cautionary tale, not a how-to guide. How do you not see your idolatry when it’s towering over you?

@SenWhitehouse He wouldn't have wanted to become mayor of Cicero. He didn't need to. He ran it.

Most decent career professionals don’t want to work for a corrupted Department of Justice in a corrupt executive administration. Sort of like working in the law department of Mayor Capone, if he’d gotten elected. newrepublic.com/post/209914/do…

@BillKristol So he's ready to take on the Kligons and Romulans. Doesn't want to take on the Russians. They are his buddies. Speaking of Star Trek, is Trump Kahn?

Hegseth's Department of War [sic] is committed to "unparalleled transparency" about flying saucers. But not to transparency about attacks on U.S. bases here on earth, injuries to U.S. service members, or whether other nation's nuclear programs have been "obliterated."