Pun Salad

Via Paul Hsieh at GeekPress:

A mathematician Pope going up against a machine god superintelligence is the most cyberpunk thing ever. https://t.co/NBLRRyCf9f

— Will Kinney (@WKCosmo) May 11, 2025

Complete text of the Vatican News tweet:

Explanation (that I had to look up): He was a math major at Villanova.

But (ahem): "defence"? "labour?" Your Holiness, I thought you were an American?

Also of note:

• Also, don't call me Shirley. Jonah Goldberg suggests you watch your language: Don’t Call This Conservatism.

  Is the “New Right” conservative?

  If you spend any time following the most vocal defenders of Donald Trump or various populist causes generally, some version of this question may have occurred to you. If you find yourself listening to defenders of a supposedly extreme right-wing Republican president’s signature policies, and then wondering aloud, “Wait, I thought conservatives were in favor of free markets?” you have an idea of what I am getting at. If you’re perplexed by the way many on the right celebrate and lionize a rogue’s gallery of libertines, scapegraces, sybarites, caitiffs, roues, abusers, and cads, you might wonder why you didn’t get the memo explaining that the right no longer cares about “moral rearmament,” or “family values.”

  In short, if you’re a lifelong conservative, you might be struggling with the question of whether “the right” is where you belong. If being a principled defender of the constitutional order, limited government, free markets, traditional values, and an America-led world still makes you a conservative, are you still on “the right” when the loudest voices on the right reject most or all of those positions?

  Confession: I had to look up a couple of those words.

• Just say no. Jim Geraghty channels his inner Laocoön: Beware of Foreign Powers Bearing Gifts. And cleverly juxtaposed with with past GOP outrage over the Chinese "donations" to the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania…

  We all agree that backdoor payments and cash contribution to the president and his family are bad, right?

  Right?

  Because while we’re at it . . .

  . . . the president of the United States should not be accepting a “new Air Force One” from the government of Qatar:

  In what may be the most valuable gift ever extended to the United States from a foreign government, the Trump administration is preparing to accept a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar — a gift that is to be available for use by President Donald Trump as the new Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office, at which time ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, sources familiar with the proposed arrangement told ABC News.

  The gift is expected to be announced next week, when Trump visits Qatar on the first foreign trip of his second term, according to sources familiar with the plans.

  Trump toured the plane, which is so opulently configured it is known as “a flying palace,” while it was parked at the West Palm Beach International Airport in February.

  ABC News reports, “The highly unusual — unprecedented — arrangement is sure to raise questions about whether it is legal for the Trump administration, and ultimately, the Trump presidential library foundation, to accept such a valuable gift from a foreign power.”

  "What do I have to do to put you into this slightly used, but very opulent, 747 today?"

• I suppose I should post something about New Hampshire's own David Souter. All seemed to agree he was a nice guy. Damon Root has analysis: David Souter shaped the Supreme Court through the backlash he inspired.

  Supreme Court Justice David Souter, who died last week at age 85, will probably not be remembered as the author of any truly momentous majority opinions, because he never really wrote any of those. Nor will Souter be remembered as one of the Court's great dissenters, because none of his dissents inspired the next generation to keep the faith about unpopular ideas. Souter's career will likely be remembered for a more unusual reason: the severe and enduring backlash that he inspired.

  Appointed to the Supreme Court in 1990 by Republican President George H.W. Bush, Souter quickly emerged as a consistent "liberal" vote in high-profile cases about hot-button issues such as abortion and affirmative action. This was supremely disappointing to conservative legal activists, who had hoped Bush would pick someone in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia, the outspoken conservative tapped four years earlier by President Ronald Re[a]gan.

  But…

• Worst rom-com ever. Paul G. Kengor recalls: When Biden and Rudman Wept. Recounting NH Senator Warren Rudman's tireless push to get Souter confirmed:

  Rudman had pushed the Souter nomination. He ensured [sic] liberal colleagues that Souter was their guy. Rudman, a pro-choice Republican, had been Souter’s boss at the New Hampshire office of attorney general. He privately concluded that Souter would not vote against Roe. Rudman’s reasons, which he acknowledged only after he left the Senate, ranged from the legal to humanitarian: Given that Souter was “a compassionate human being,” averred Rudman, he would naturally support continued legalization of abortion—which has produced the deaths of over 40 million unborn babies since 1973.

  But Rudman’s allies on the Democratic side weren’t so sure. And Rudman had to walk a fine line, since his pro-life president wanted a pro-life justice. So, Rudman quietly sought to assuage liberals. He urged them to trust him.

  That silent trust was critical, since Souter’s position on abortion had to be dealt with stealthily. In fact, it was handled so delicately that the nominee’s true thinking was apparently unknown even to the White House.

  Alas, with Casey v. Planned Parenthood, America had its answer, as Souter authorized the sanctity of Roe v. Wade.

  As fate would have it, on that same day Senator Rudman and Senator Joe Biden bumped into each other at the train station, not in Washington, DC but in Wilmington, Delaware.

  “At first, I didn’t see Joe; then I spotted him waving at me from far down the platform,” Rudman later recorded in his memoirs, Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate. “Joe had agonized over his vote for David, and I knew how thrilled he must be. We started running through the crowd toward each other, and when we met, we embraced, laughing and crying.”

  An ecstatic Biden wept tears of joy, telling Rudman over and over: “You were right about him [Souter]! … You were right!”

  The two men were so jubilant, so giddy—practically dancing—that Rudman said onlookers thought they were crazy: “[B]ut we just kept laughing and yelling and hugging each other because sometimes, there are happy endings.”

  Except for all those dead babies, who didn't even get beginnings, let alone happy endings.

• Lest we forget… Tyler Cowen provides Sentences to ponder, excerpting from. Richard Hanania's substack.

  In fact, it was the Obama administration that paused funding for high-risk [gain of function] studies in 2014. The ban was lifted by none other than Donald Trump in 2017. At the time, outlets like Scientific American and Science covered the decision, in articles that quoted scientists talking about what could go wrong.

  To be fair, "was lifted" points to an NIH press release authored by Francis Collins, and the first person singular pronoun is prevalent there. Sure, it happened under Trump, but …