[T]he Trump administration’s decision to bury the Epstein story is one of the biggest Mask-Off moments in history. Americans’ confidence in our government or our democratic process may ever recover.

And that’s okay.

Trump is not our populist messiah. He is our final, most painful lesson in the dangers of political messianism. “Do not put your trust in princes,” King David warned, “nor in a son of man, in whom there is no help” (Psalm 146:3).

In many ways, this is a tremendously liberating moment. The system is rigged; there’s no doubt about that. We can’t beat this system. All we can do is wait for it to collapse.

Put Not Your Trust in Princes (likely paywall, but an outstanding little piece).

Some video editor with too much time on his hands has made a impressive mash-up. I recognize Ray Charles. I see signs that the shirtless ones may be Van Halen. Van Charles - “Hit the Bottoms Jack” - YouTube (H/T Andrew Sullivan)

Religion Clause: Bishops Excuse Those Who Fear ICE Raids from Attending Mass

Like Home Depot parking lots, Catholic Churches are low-hanging fruit for the goons who promised a million deportations in 2025, and who can’t do it if they’re too particular about how.

Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial

I nominate Ross Douthat for the Nobel Prophecy Prize:

If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.

I read obituaries for several different reasons. Some of them are for colorful characters I didn’t know about. Julian Heicklen, a “Cantakerous Civil Liberties Advocate,” for instance. (Shared link)

Wife went to Amazon’s “Haul” page (super-discounts), and the first item was a nose-piercer for $5.

A potent reminder that it’s not really a bargain if you don’t need it.

Appropriate Role for AI:

• AI should be viewed as a tool that assists human judgment rather than replacing it.
• It can help process information, identify patterns, and generate options.
• But it cannot replace the nuanced human work of managing values, trade-offs, and uncertainty.

Partial summary WSJ

I surf an awful lot of news and commentary every morning. After a few weeks’ use, I can recommend the Voilà browser extension, which provides very good AI summaries of articles where writerly art is unimportant to me. It has been a delightful timesaver.

Reading Ephraim Radner, Mortal Goods. 📚

After his introduction, I’m wondering how he stretches his worthy point to so many pages and words. I shall see.

Christianity Today reports that the Trump Administration is targeting Iranian Christian migrants for deportation …

If deported back to  their country of origin, Iranian Christians face severe persecution at the hands of Iran’s radical Islamist theocracy. That persecution has actually intensified in recent years, and includes criminalization of the promotion Christianity, and severe punishments for Christians considered to be “apostates” from Islam. This persecution makes Iranian Christians obvious candidates for asylum or refugee status (for which applicants are eligible based on persecution on the basis of religion, among other possible criteria). At the very least, those who have filed such applications must not be deported until those applications have gotten proper consideration.

I’m old enough to remember a time when conservative Republicans saw themselves as defending Christians against radical Islamism. Today, a GOP administration wants to deport Christians to persecution by a radical Islamist regime. The only people Trump considers worthy of refugee status  seem to be white Afrikaner South Africans. While they may have a plausible case (and I don’t oppose admitting them), that of Iranian Christians - and many other severely oppressed groups - is much stronger.

…

People who genuinely oppose socialism and radical Islamism would not close the doors against those regime’s victims. Doing so is both unjust and harmful to the US economy (to which these immigrants contribute) and to America’s struggle in the international war of ideas against these regimes. It’s hard to credibly tell people we are better than these brutal despots when we callously deport their victims back to them, thereby facilitating the very oppression we claim to oppose.

Ilya Somin

If only Mr. Musk would think less like a tapeworm and more like a human being.

J Budziszewski

Finished Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West. 📚

@JohnBrady I loved it and recommend it, though there were a couple of chapters I read with eyes glazed over: Plato versus Aristotle and, later, some guy named Plethon.

Other chapters full of surprises and nuances I’ve long missed.

Is Alexandra Petri always this good at satire?

I guess I’ll give Cooper Flagg a pass for not being able plausibly to wear a suit and tie, though I was doing that long before I was 18.

Interesting that Rutgers had two guys in the top ten of the NBA draft. Those two were hard to stop, but Rutgers as a team didn’t do all that well in “B1G.”

Thought from my daily devotional:

Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

Matthew 10:28

Alexandra Petri, It’s Me, God. Keep Me Out of This. (gift link)

Audiences Prove that the Experts Are Dead Wrong: Ted Gioia on the return of long-form music and writing.

Happy is England, just because it’s lovely and seasonal.

My weight loss has been very slow. I have been on Mounjaro now for eight weeks, having taken my ninth injection last night. As of this morning, I have lost 6 ½ pounds. Considering the extent of my obesity at the beginning, I definitely anticipated initial weight losses at a more rapid pace.

I think the underlying problem has been that when I found my appetite quite suppressed and found myself experiencing fewer cravings between meals, I almost explicitly decided that I could eat what I wanted (sweets excluded) and that the drug would limit my quantities sufficiently to promote rapid weight loss. (I also tried to avoid snacks or to keep them down to just enough to take the edge off my appetite.) And what I wanted was sandwiches on good bread. What I wanted was my favorite tasty food at my favorite restaurants, which invariably serve large portions which I somehow felt obliged to finish.

I have now turned back toward lowered carbohydrates and, what I surprisingly find more difficult, avoiding restaurants because of their portion size, and I think things are turning downward again. That last half pound out of 6 ½ put me at a new low.

I remind myself that I asked for Mounjaro not expecting to get a beach bod by August, but expecting that BP, lipids and T2D - the whole metabolic syndrome army - would also be improved eventually - perhaps to the point of dropping most of my other meds.

Harvard is unique both in the volume of its research output and the extent of these cuts — the government has threatened to end every research dollar to the university. The canceled grants accounted for here add up to about $2.6 billion in awarded federal funds, nearly half of which has already been spent according to government data.

“Even ‘grant’ is a problematic word, because people think they’re just sort of handing this money out for us to do what we want with,” said Marc Weisskopf, who directs a center for environmental health at Harvard that lost its funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

On the contrary, the government is much more explicit in competitive research applications and grant reviews: It wants more neuroscientists. It wants better opioid treatment. It wants to know how lightweight origami-inspired shelters and antennas can be unfurled in war zones.

The money the government sends to Harvard is, in effect, not a subsidy to advance the university’s mission. It’s a payment for the role Harvard plays in advancing the research mission of the United States.

This is the science model the U.S. has developed over 80 years: The government sets the agenda and funds the work; university scientists design the studies and find the answers. The president’s willingness to upend that model has revealed its fragility. There is no alternative in the U.S. to produce the kind of scientific advancements represented by these grants.

Emily Badger, Aatish Bhatia and Ethan Singer, Here Is All the Science at Risk in Trump’s Clash With Harvard (shared link)

FedEx was conceived in a paper that Mr. Smith wrote as a Yale University undergraduate in 1965. He argued that an increasingly automated economy would depend on fast and dependable door-to-door shipping of small packages containing computer parts. He got a C.

Fred Smith, Billionaire Founder of FedEx, Is Dead at 80

Who Knew Basketball Needed an Interactive LED Floor? | WIRED

For several years, WaPo was completely blocking me because I no longer subscribed. Now they’re bombarding me with clickbaity headines - but they won’t allow me to read beyond a paragraph or two unless I subscribe.

I’d appreciate the approach of a few freebies per month, as works elsewhere.