chaddattilio

I’m already against the next war.

[chaddattilio @chaddattilio]

@WhiteHouse Oh you mean having to throw another $8B onto our national debt because of your stupid policies. Got it.

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

I don’t understand why farmers need an endless series of welfare payments from the rest of us since Trump took office. Aren’t his policies working for you? You need us to pay you so you will keep voting for the guy who is failing you? Don’t you believe in free market capitalism?

[chaddattilio @chaddattilio]

@judge_jen @anilkseth @De_dicto The question isn’t “is AI conscious”… we always think of this as the way we are conscious (qualia, emotions, etc)… but will we see an emergent way of thinking that goes beyond what we think they’re doing now, beyond pattern matching…

[Ash ✝️ @ashthom199]

Elon should invent a car that releases the Epstein files.

[chaddattilio @chaddattilio]

@SamCKx @70sBachchan Exactly. LeCun pointed out that this is a toy demo and we’re not gonna have flying cars anytime soon (unless you’re a rich guy that bunny hop one of these around your own track). Also the political callouts are spot on.

[Dr. Abdul El-Sayed @AbdulElSayed]

He says the name just fine when he’s begging the Qataris for a personal jet or the Saudis for funding for his son-in-law’s private equity firm.

Wonder what’s changed?

[chaddattilio @chaddattilio]

@RandomHvacGuy @thatguy_Ty6 Aahhhh there’s the racism. Knew if I scrolled down a few tweets I’d see it.

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say. But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

To understand why this is so appalling, it’s important to know the facts. Congresswoman Omar came to this country with her father when she was 12 years old. Five years later, her father became a naturalized citizen. If Ilhan had been 18 at the time, she would have had to apply for citizenship separately. But because she was 17, she became a naturalized citizen automatically.

Congresswoman Omar went on to graduate from college, work as a community organizer, become the first Somali-American legislator elected to public office in the U.S., and win a seat in Congress. There, she has been one of the Trump Administration’s fiercest critics, which has led the president to repeatedly single her out as someone who he believes does not belong in this country.

Now the Administration is actively trying to deport Congresswoman Omar, seemingly based solely on the unsubstantiated theory that she was actually 18 when her father was naturalized, and therefore is not a citizen. Federal agents have raided her home, confiscated personal records, and seized her phone — all to try and uncover a nonexistent smoking gun from 20 years ago that will somehow make their case.

Think about that. The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president. And it’s not the first time this has happened. Under President Trump, the Justice Department has repeatedly gone after those he considers his political enemies — from the Attorney General of New York, to the former head of the FBI, to members of the Federal Reserve.

In those cases, the prosecutions either stalled or were dismissed for having no basis in law, and the same is likely to happen in this case. But not before Congresswoman Omar’s life has been turned upside down, her legal bills have piled up, and she’s been forced to spend time fighting unsubstantiated charges instead of serving the people of Minnesota.

The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views. Because if this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her — or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.

[chaddattilio @chaddattilio]

@cptnjamescook @gmkurtzer

[chaddattilio @chaddattilio]

@GodlyAction Actually there won’t be people who hate other people.

[chaddattilio @chaddattilio]

@bryanrbeal @ohhabibihayati You’re aware we all pay into these programs our whole working lives right

[chaddattilio @chaddattilio]

@RandPaul Immigrants pay in more than they take out and you would know that if you took 5 fuckin minutes and did some research.

[chaddattilio @chaddattilio]

@theliamnissan Back in my day pedos were bad guys

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

The U.S. is $40 trillion in debt with capitalism.

[chaddattilio @chaddattilio]

@StephenM I don’t know that I’ve seen such a sad weak man as you in my life. I pray you get some peace at some point.

[chaddattilio @chaddattilio]

@GuntherEagleman Socialism

[Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 @FmrRepMTG]

Late stage MAGA is so disgusting and unrecognizable to me, and I find this shocking as one who attended more Trump rallies than I can count.
A woman with a “Release The Epstein Files” shirt stands at a Trump rally shouting at Trump to release the Epstein files and gets physically beaten by the MAGA men around her, who probably call themselves Christians.
Then our obese President makes fun of her calling her “fat” and “him” claiming she’s a paid protestor.
She got thrown out and the men who attacked her got to stay.
MAGA rallies used to be filled with people who agreed with releasing the Epstein files, defended women, and would step in if a woman was attacked.
Now the dying remnant of MAGA is made up of people who emulate their cult leader.
Attacking women, making fun of their looks, and turning on the victims of the elites.
It’s a cult, an ugly grotesque cult that does not display Christian values because the cult leader himself is not a Christian even though the vast majority who attend his rallies would identify as Christian.
Know them by their fruit.
The fruit is rotten.
Because the cult leader himself is a wolf in sheep’s clothing who has led the flock astray.

[Catherine Rampell @crampell]

Billions of dollars’ worth of contracts predicting oil would fall and the S&P 500 would rise were placed about 15 minutes before Trump announced a U-turn on Iran in a post on Truth Social. CFTC staff began to investigate-- then were told to lay off. https://t.co/cpIBv4aSo5

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops @USCCB]

The Catholic Church in the United States will observe National Migration Week beginning September 21 and culminating with the 112th World Day of Migrants and Refugees on September 27.

For over 45 years, the U.S. Catholic Church has celebrated National Migration Week by reflecting on its history as an immigrant Church and the ways in which the country has been enriched by generations of immigrants, including the many Catholics who have adopted this land as their own.