This situation has happened to me twice in recent months. I meet a guy around my age (50s, 60s). We talk and find we have things in common. I’m excited to possibly make a new friend.

In both cases, there was no political discussion. I didn’t say anything about politics. And they didn’t either, which was a welcome relief.

These guys should be playing golf and awaiting grandchildren, not defending trans activism or walking in Pride parades.

In both situations, the subject of children eventually came up. I don’t have any. They both did.

That’s when things got tricky. One of them announced he had a gay daughter. And the other informed me that he had a trans son.

Supporting the supporters

In both cases, I nodded my head when they told me this, as if their children’s sexuality were a normal thing to bring up, which it is, in my progressive coastal city.

I also saw, in both cases, that these fathers were genuinely supportive of their gay or trans kid. Of course they were. It’s their kids!

I nodded along with them, showing that I was supportive of their kids, too, and that I supported them for supporting their kids.

At the same time, I know from experience that these situations are often more complicated than they appear. Like, are their kids actually gay or trans? Or are they just thinking about it? Or talking about it? Or experimenting with it?

Whenever I hear a parent say his high school or college-age kid is gay or trans, I think to myself: Let’s see what the kid tells you in a year or two.

The truth is that it has become almost mandatory for even the most well-adjusted young people to question their sexual preference and gender identity.

They’ve been receiving this messaging for decades now. Their schools, their teachers, and the entire society have told them: “Being gay is great. Being trans is awesome. Why not consider becoming one of those yourself? You might like it. You might discover it’s your true nature.”

But is that accurate? Most people turn out to be heterosexual. So why are our schools and educators so eager to get young people going off in all these different directions?

Why are these people involved in any aspect of a young person’s sexuality?

Forced participation

Another thing I notice: Nobody talks about the toll these situations take on the parents. Having a trans or gay child can be quite a lot to deal with.

It forces parents to concede — at least implicitly — that all this sexual identity talk is a good idea. In effect, it turns them into progressive Democrats.

Also, it’s a lot of stress. Older people didn’t have to navigate sexual identity when they were young. They don’t have any experience with these situations. Most of them just got married and had kids. And some of them didn’t.

But there wasn’t an entire culture war built up around what choices people made. You were free to do whatever. This was America.

RELATED: The return of Drag Queen Story Hour?

Irfan Khan/Getty Images

Gay until graduation

All of this reminds me of a close friend whose only child (a son) came out to her as gay while he was in high school.

Naturally, she supported him. Though at one point she privately said to me, with a sigh, “I guess I’ll never hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet.”

But then, two years later, the son decided he wasn’t gay after all. So all that anguish was in vain.

But then, another year later, the son started dating a trans person!

All of this was quite confusing and difficult for my friend. But of course, she couldn’t say anything or even commiserate with her friends, lest she be labeled a bigot.

Let’s just (not) be friends

It seems unlikely that I’ll ever hang out with either of these two guys I met. They have too much on their plates. And because of their children, they now have a stake in the sexual identity debates.

And this during a time when they were supposed to be letting go of their children. These were supposed to be their “empty nest” years.

They did their duty. They raised good kids. In both of these cases, the parents had put them through college.

These guys should be playing golf and awaiting grandchildren, not defending trans activism or walking in Pride parades.

But fathers love their children. So naturally, they want to help. They’ll do anything they can for their kids.

Grumpier old men

It used to be that older men were expected to become grouchy and conservative in their old age. But even that natural evolution has been subverted.

Now their lives are affected by LGBTQ politics almost as much as their children’s — which, I suspect, is exactly how the LGBTQ crowds like it. Anything that disrupts traditional families is all right by them.

​Culture, Gay children, Lgbt, Lifestyle, Parenthood, Traditional families, Blake’s progress 

A male who broke into a Memphis home early Tuesday morning came face-to-face with the armed homeowner, who was more than ready for him.

Memphis police told WMC-TV that officers responded just after 1 a.m. to a shots-fired call at a home on Eldridge Avenue in the North Memphis area.

‘This is my home. I mean, I should be able to enjoy it without people comin’ through the window on me.’

When officers arrived, they learned the homeowner caught an intruder breaking into the residence — and the homeowner was holding the suspect at gunpoint, the station said.

Police added to WMC that the suspect was lying face-down on the bedroom floor. The station’s video report below about the incident says the homeowner fired two shots.

RELATED: ‘I didn’t have any hesitation’: Gun-toting homeowner says he spotted intruder in his house and ‘just let it fire’

Officers commanded the homeowner to put the gun down, the station said, adding that they then checked the suspect — Simeon Pratcher, 33 — and found he was not wounded.

Pratcher told police he came through the window because he thought no one was home, WMC reported, after which he was taken into custody without incident.

Pratcher is facing charges of aggravated burglary and possession of burglary tools, the station said. Jail records indicate he remained behind bars Wednesday morning, and no bond amount is listed. His next hearing is Wednesday morning.

The video report also notes that the homeowner experienced a break-in just days earlier, during which his home was ransacked and items worth thousands of dollars were stolen.

“This is my home,” the victim told WMC in the video report. “I mean, I should be able to enjoy it without people comin’ through the window on me.”

After the previous break-in, two people were arrested, the station said.

“I’m not runnin’,” the defiant homeowner told WMC.

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​Home invasion, Memphis, Tennessee, Homeowner shoots at intruder, Arrest, Jailed, Guns, Gun rights, Self-defense, Crime, Second amendment 

In a recent interview, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pushed back against claims that taxing billionaires more would meaningfully improve life for working Americans, arguing that even dramatically increasing his tax burden would do little to solve inflation or lower costs for families.

“People sometimes say that, you know, I don’t pay taxes. That’s not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes … if people want me to pay more billions, then let’s have that debate, but don’t pretend that that’s going to solve the problem,” Bezos said.

“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens. I promise you. You can’t connect those two things. Not logically,” he added.

BlazeTV host Pat Gray couldn’t agree with Bezos more, pointing out that he also “bleeds terribly” during tax season — but the government largely just wastes his money.

“And so, what happens is you could double that, or you could triple it, or you could quadruple it. It’s still going to the government, and they’re still wasting it on crap,” he adds.

But Bezos wasn’t done, taking on high rent costs as well.

“I recently saw somebody blame it on Airbnb. OK, Airbnb is not the cause of expensive rent … it’s already been outlawed in New York City and rents are still very high. So we know Airbnb isn’t causing high rents,” he said.

“What’s really causing high rent is government intervention. We subsidize demand with things like tax policy, which is fine, but at the same time, we constrain supply. We constrain supply with things like zoning and permitting. Why does it take so long to get something permitted to build?” he continued.

“If you want rents to come down, econ 101, really simple,” he said, explaining that you can’t subsidize demand and constrain supply.

“If you do, prices are going to skyrocket. But this is not anybody’s fault other than government policy. And this is fixable. Again, this is a skills issue,” he added.

“We should put together an economic commission. Featuring Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, you probably want to avoid Bill Gates,” Gray comments.

“But you know, get these guys together who know how to be successful and understand economics and help us craft a makes-sense tax policy in this country where you’re not just pounding people who are successful,” he adds.

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​Airbnb, Bill gates, Billionaire, Elon musk, Inflation, Jeff bezos, Pat gray, Pat gray unleashed, Tax policy 

Establishment Republicans are not the only ones who have suffered stunning electoral upsets lately.

After more than two decades in Congress, Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) lost the Democratic primary runoff on Tuesday to Rep. Christian Menefee (D-Texas), a man not only 40 years Green’s junior but who just took his seat in Congress a few months ago.

‘The President of the United States is a racist, a bigot, a misogynist, as well as an invidious prevaricator.’

Texas Republicans can take credit for forcing a contest between two sitting Democratic congressmen. After the Texas congressional district map was redrawn, the 9th district suddenly became much redder, compelling Green to seek the 18th district seat currently occupied by Menefee.

Neither Menefee nor Green managed to crest the 50% of the vote needed to win the Democratic primary outright on March 3. Menefee eked out a slight edge over Green that night, 46% to 44%.

By contrast, the primary runoff on Tuesday was a blowout in which Menefee trounced Green nearly 70% to 30%. The outcome was so unexpected that NBC News chief data analyst Steve Kornacki called it “jarring.”

Menefee was gracious in victory, stating, “Congressman Green, brother, I want to give you your flowers. I want to thank you for your service to people across Houston and Harris County.”

Green claimed the loss would mark the move “to another chapter in life,” adding, “I plan to continue to have a career associated with service.”

RELATED: Rep. Al Green forced into runoff with candidate half his age after failing to get 50% of Democratic primary vote

Rep. Christian Menefee and other Democrats; Nathan Posner/Anadolu/Getty Images

The extent to which Green has “served” his constituents in Texas since he was first elected in 2004 is a matter of debate. Even the Houston Chronicle acknowledged that Green is not necessarily as well known for “shepherding high-profile legislation” as he is for building “influence through seniority and committee assignments.”

At the national level, Green, a former president of the Houston chapter of the NAACP, is probably best known for his race-based activism and anti-Trump animus.

“The President of the United States is a racist, a bigot, a misogynist, as well as an invidious prevaricator,” he railed in July 2019. “To say that Donald John Trump is unfit for the Office of the President of the United States is an understatement.”

Since Trump began his first term in office in 2017, Green has introduced or co-sponsored articles of impeachment against him at least four times. Green has also been forcefully removed from each of Trump’s last two State of the Union addresses, most recently back in February, when he carried a sign that read, “Black people aren’t apes!”

Trump is not the only racist Republican in Green’s eyes. Green has also leveled accusations of racism against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Tennessee Rep. Diana Harshbarger, and all the Texas state lawmakers, including Gov. Greg Abbott, who helped redraw the congressional map.

The 18th District of Texas is deep blue, and Menefee is expected to coast through the general election in November against Ronald Whitfield, who secured the Republican nomination in March after earning just 4,500 total votes.

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​Al green, Democratic primary, Establishment republicans, Texas republicans, Politics 

As the Trump administration and congressional Republicans work to lower Americans’ cost of living this year, they should be guided by a simple principle: All affordability is local.

Democrats and too many establishment Republicans still think they create jobs, economic growth, and opportunity. Whenever high prices pinch consumers, lawmakers huddle up with K Street lobbyists to see what big business, big tech, and big banks want … and give it to them.

Yet they scratch their heads as corporate profits surge while working families’ monthly bills only climb higher.

Corporate consolidation makes life easier for lawyers, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and politicians. But it makes life much more expensive for everyone else.

We’ve seen this pattern again and again. Obamacare. Federal student loans. Subsidized mortgages. The Build Back Better inflation bomb. These policies doled out billions to insiders and middlemen but left everyday Americans holding the bag.

Instead of writing more checks this time, congressional Republicans should focus on rewriting the rules that are contributing to our affordability crisis. Federal regulations — mostly imposed by deep-state bureaucrats, not elected legislators — cost the U.S. economy more than $2 trillion per year. That’s five times the size of last year’s Working Families Tax Cuts legislation.

Reforming these regulations would lower prices, spur job-creating investment, and produce the broadly shared prosperity Republicans promised on the campaign trail.

Their first priority should be to reform the federal permitting process, an issue the White House and Congress have been working on together. However, despite real progress to improve efficiency and remove unnecessary red tape, the response has yet to match the urgency of the moment.

The permitting process has become a punchline — it’s wasteful, corrupt, and self-defeating. Federal agencies are blocking massive, urgent infrastructure investments in energy, mining, defense, transportation, AI computing, and manufacturing. Sometimes it seems like the U.S. economy’s greatest rival is not China, but our own government.

Our energy needs alone warrant wholesale regulatory reform. The United States today has neither the energy production nor transmission capacity we need to keep up with AI-driven electricity demand. New rules should be streamlined, transparent, and, most of all, fair. Our economic competitiveness and national security depend on these investments. A more prosperous, more secure future is not going to build itself.

The second priority, related to the first, is housing. President Trump has already signed executive orders to reform regulations that are holding back new home construction. Congress needs to follow his lead. The inability of working families to afford homes today has metastasized into more than an economic drag — it’s becoming a social crisis.

Current housing regulations seem intentionally designed to drive up home prices. This is great for well-off Boomers who see their homes primarily as 401(k)s with finished basements. But it’s catastrophic for young couples hoping to get married and start families.

By some estimates, the U.S. housing shortage is already more than 4 million units. Federal regulations should not stand in the way of new home building — nor should Washington subsidize state and local governments’ regulatory obstruction.

RELATED: A ‘Soviet’ housing fix from Congress

Michal Fludra/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Federal rules drive up costs in every sector of our economy. Health care, education, business, and occupational licensure all present golden opportunities to reform-minded policy entrepreneurs in the House and Senate.

And while they’re fixing regulations in those industries, Congress should also key in on the industry that ties them all together: banking. Right now, federal banking regulations are tilted in favor of the big banks, unfairly hamstringing some community banks and forcing many others to merge or close.

Industries dominated by huge corporations always seem robust. But as we saw during the financial crisis — and as we see every time an artificial bubble bursts — healthy, consumer-friendly markets are diverse and decentralized.

While outright bank failures have remained relatively limited in recent years, community banks are steadily disappearing through mergers, consolidations, and voluntary closures. In 1990, there were around 12,000 community banks scattered across the U.S. Today, only around 4,000 remain.

According to the FDIC, the number of community banks continues to decline each quarter, with 44 of them either closing or being absorbed by larger institutions in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone. That trend matters because community banks are not interchangeable with Wall Street giants.

Corporate consolidation makes life easier for lawyers, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and politicians. But it makes life much more expensive for everyone else.

Too many federal regulations treat all banks the same, putting compliance burdens on small lenders that only megabanks can afford.

These regulations squeeze resources out of the local financial institutions that growing communities rely on. Especially in the AI era, the real-world human economy will depend more than ever on personal relationships, community solidarity, and interpersonal trust. Right now, Washington disadvantages those things and the community banks defined by them.

The American people are ready to make our economy affordable again — as soon as Washington lets them. Streamlining federal rules will allow Americans to build, drill, mine, invest and lend, and compute and compete as never before.

Lawmakers must remember that a more affordable economy is a more local, more cooperative, and more human economy. Regulatory reform — from national infrastructure to community banking — is an investment in America’s most powerful and undervalued resource: our people.

Editor’s note: This article appeared originally at The American Mind.

​Big banks, Big business, Big tech, Corporate profits, Cost of living, Democrats, Obamacare, Trump administration, Opinion & analysis, Inflation, Affordability, Housing 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton enjoyed more than one victory on Tuesday night.

In addition to defeating incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP Senate primary runoff election by over 380,000 votes, Paxton saw his endorsee, Texas state Sen. Mayes Middleton, win the Texas attorney general Republican primary runoff.

With over 97% of the expected votes in, Middleton — a proud supporter of the America First agenda — had secured 55.2% of the vote. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a former deputy to Paxton who who turned coat and pushed for Paxton’s resignation, trailed behind by 10.4 percentage points.

‘Republican obstructionists have to be done away with.’

Roy noted just before 10 p.m. that he had called Middleton to congratulate him. The victor thanked the fourth-term congressman online, writing, “Looking forward to working with you to keep Texas Red and see you pass the SAVE Act.”

Middleton — an oilman, seventh-generation Texan, and father of four who was endorsed by numerous conservative groups including the Texas Family Project, Moms for America Action, and the True Texas Project — pledged in his campaign to “lead the charge to secure our border, protect Texas kids, ensure fairness in girls’ and women’s sports, protect Texas taxpayers and consumers, ensure strict election integrity, and root out waste, fraud, and abuse from our government.”

RELATED: Trump-endorsed Paxton DEMOLISHES Cornyn in GOP Senate primary runoff

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

He also said that he would work to eradicate Sharia law in the state and abolish the H-1B visa program.

During the campaign, Roy and some of his backers characterized Middleton as inexperienced. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Middleton’s former primary opponent, Aaron Reitz, were among those who countered this framing.

Patrick repeatedly stressed that “Mayes Middleton is one of the most conservative members in Texas Senate history — a proven, unapologetic MAGA conservative who fights and wins,” who will “work hand-in-hand with the Governor, the Legislature, the Department of Justice, and President Trump to make the Texas Attorney General’s office the strongest in the nation.”

“Some criticize Mayes by saying he lacks the legal experience to lead. But that argument doesn’t hold up,” Reitz noted in an op-ed. “For nearly twenty years, Mayes has practiced law as a civil attorney, focusing on oil and gas transactions and litigation, while at the same time serving in state government.”

Middleton criticized Roy in turn for previously turning on President Donald Trump, characterizing the lawmaker as a backstabber who “betrayed MAGA.”

Roy — who enjoyed the backing of elements of the GOP establishment including Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) — stressed that he is aligned with Trump and has a stellar conservative voting record. However, some evidently have not forgotten that he opposed efforts to challenge the 2020 election results in Congress; accused Trump of “clearly impeachable conduct” after the Jan. 6, 2021, protests; and backed Trump 2024 presidential primary challenger Gov. Ron DeSantis.

After winning the presidential election in 2024, Trump suggested that Texas Republicans should primary Roy, accusing Roy of “getting in the way, as usual,” and noting that “Republican obstructionists have to be done away with.”

Middleton will now face off with Texas state Sen. Nathan Johnson, a litigator and composer, endorsed by the Houston LGBTQ+ Political Caucus and multiple gun-grab groups, who contributed scores to the anime series “Dragon Ball Z.”

Johnson has pledged to lead “the fight against the MAGA machine’s assault on our individual rights, against the looting of our tax dollars, and against federal overreach.”

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​Attorney general, Chip roy, Donald trump, Election, Maga, Mayes middleton, Texas, Politics 

Poping ain’t easy. After the turbulence of the Benedict and Francis papacies, during which the Vatican largely wrestled with internal challenges, the unique and contested authority of the bishop of Rome finds all of Christianity at an uncanny crossroads.

Just since Leo’s ascension, AI has developed to a point that — for many millions of people worldwide — intuitively underscores the failure of modernity’s greatest power structures to justify humanity’s continued existence and our continued individual existence as human beings. Science, economics, ideology, art, philosophy, ethics — none of these grand pillars of modern life can any longer give a defense of humanity adequate to bring silence and stillness, or even a “strategic pause,” to the juggernaut.

Already, of course, there are instant criticisms.

Desperate for something to cling to in the storm, many find themselves thirsting for exactly what modernity seemed to tell them to abandon: a guiding spiritual authority over their personal and social lives, one they are sure they can trust as a matter of life and death. With so many of the cults and sects born in the modern age fizzling out or mid-collapse, the obvious place to turn is the nemesis of the self-determining modern person: so-called “organized religion,” which for most in the West, especially America, still means the Christian church.

The depth of cognitive discomfort and embarrassment required of so many to return to the one place they had been convinced most to walk away from is so intense that the pressure on would-be spiritual authorities is reaching historic proportions. How to speak in a way neither too harsh nor too gentle? How to communicate effectively in an era of communication overload and parasocial relationships at scale? How to take needful risks of rhetoric and persuasion without provoking a devastating backlash, without being totally misunderstood, without becoming just another huckster cleverly hooking people with yet another sensationalistic, over-optimistic or over-pessimistic scenario?

Pope Leo, among many others of lesser public exposure, confronts all these questions and more. And in one document (so far), “Magnifica Humanitas,” he is expected to somehow answer them all or at least point the way to an answer as grand and comprehensive as the cyber ultimatum — justify yourself or say goodbye — being thrown down at the trembling feet of the human race.

Great expectations

This is obviously way too much weight to be piled atop one letter from one person — even this 50-page letter (an encyclical, addressed to the bishops of the Church in communion with Rome) and this person, the first American pope and the first with a degree in mathematics. It could have been guessed that Leo himself is cognizant of the good and not-so-good reasons for these towering expectations, and in this respect his much-hyped encyclical does not disappoint. It is a masterful exercise in managing constraints to preserve freedom of movement for a few carefully chosen steps. Leo had to show that his approach to the question of technology flowed with not only his predecessors but the Church as a whole, reaching back to its ancient origins. He had to speak in terms Christians generically could at least understand and find in the text some basis for sympathy and respect. He had to affirm his office’s claim to spiritual authority, and the Catholic Church’s and its tradition, without much further alienating any significant audiences, but while paying special homage to the constituencies he believes are key to mounting a successful bid for spiritual authority of any kind over AI-age technology. And he had to extend an olive branch of sorts to at least some of the most powerful of the AI technologists — a treacherously political task, given the increasingly naked opposition he faces from the Thiel/Palantir wing of tech and the increasingly naked worshipfulness toward AIs shown by tech’s effective altruist wing.

All this he managed to do, focusing his remarks on the core Christian understanding that humanity is alone the image of God on Earth, made capable by Christ of attaining to the very heights of sacredness intended for us by the Father. This purpose, this being, however deeply marred by the Fall, preserves for us individually and together a magnificent grandeur that nothing made by our own mortal hands can possibly surpass. Only by using our tools to degrade ourselves to radical new lows can those tools establish over us an overawing mastery that appears in our disfigured and diminished state to be godlike — to be, in fact, the real deity, the only deity.

RELATED: AI ‘doomers’ suffer from their own weird god delusion

ArtMarie/Getty Images

To avoid this fate worse than death, Leo brings the reader to the Catholic social teaching tradition. In sum, that teaching describes our inalienable sacredness in terms of a universal and particular human dignity that must be protected and cultivated among all, even and especially the most wretched, through the affirmative protection of full access to life’s ancient fundaments (work, rest, shelter, movement, family, etc.) and newer social staples (intellectual property, software, hardware, etc.). Rather than a set of principles, Leo shows the teaching as an embodied and active social practice, one that harbors and manifests the human grandeur bestowed by God as a common good that we, and the Church, are duty-bound to sow into.

Lovers and haters

Already, of course, there are instant criticisms. The feed has begun to fill up with many clever and incisive critical commentaries of “Magnifica Humanitas.” It is asserted that Leo’s cozying up to Anthropic is both cynical and naive. It is claimed that the pope spends so much time on social organization that he fails to dig into the fundamental questions about how a person is supposed to locate his own personal significance or identity apart from the community or the cyber collective. Some accuse Leo of simping for the political left by defending illegal “migration.” Others take issue with his insistence on a clear phenomenological and ontological distinction between the capabilities of humans and the capabilities of AIs. The list goes on and on.

Above and beyond all these objections, however, it would simply be absurd to think that any pope, making a respectable go at fulfilling even only his “first among equals” role ascribed before the schism to the bishop of Rome, would not issue a theological and anthropological “effort post” on the present technological situation that looks more or less like “Magnifica Humanitas.” While Leo’s repeated emphasis on the conciliar and synodal character of the Church could uncharitably be seen as mere theological window dressing for socialist-style social justice, Orthodox and high-church Protestant Christians, to take a few examples, could see at a higher level a papal recommitment to an embodied experience and understanding of spiritual authority that is both well grounded and well distributed, not concentrated at a single earthly point from which every drop of trustworthy guiding must radiate down.

Yet it is true that Leo chose his emphases for reasons not all Christians or Americans would prefer to privilege most, and in the spirit of developing some of the more useful themes left outside the encyclical, I would venture — as someone who covered all these issues over five years ago, complete with passages heavily citing the same Romano Guardini quoted in “Magnifica Humanitas,” in my book “Human Forever” — a few additional reflections.

Frontier observations

Firstly, Leo makes much use of a contrast between two forms of building — that of the Tower of Babel, which seeks to consummate human pride by tooling a total, united identity, and that of the walls of Jerusalem, which were patiently reassembled under the repentant leadership of Nehemiah. Some people, especially exceptional ones, will always seek to build for the whole of humanity by building at scale for a whole-of-humanity use case, and indeed this is not the only or the crucial modality. At the same time, the metaphor of rebuilding Jerusalem suggests a unity of the city of God and the city of man that many will experience as unattainable even on a more patient timeline. Historically, Christians in this position have ventured to society’s frontiers, “empty” spaces where the barest habitations can be prepared to protect and nourish the cleansing of the personal heart and the prayer for the salvation of the human race. And, historically, these habitations, which grew into monasteries, not infrequently became the seeds of villages and townships — the city of God the germ of the city of man. Ours is a moment perfect for the building of monasteries, into which many who feel incapable of living in the world will flow if they are not enclosed in a system of “assisted suicide” at scale.

Secondly, work, value, and society — these relational things at the center of Leo’s presentation of human worth — take on still higher stakes when energy, memory, and money increasingly converge, as they are now clearly doing. Obviously a tool that asserts a monopoly on the choice of tools — where “everything’s computer,” as Trump says, and AI is “the only thing we have,” as Thiel says — is not neutral. More interestingly, however, what choice of tools do we have to cultivate and sustain a socioeconomic life richly rooted in the full complement of salutary architectures? Today, any worthwhile answer to this question has to begin with Bitcoin — where the unity of energy, memory, and money is manifested in a tool that isn’t AI and that just about anyone can start using right now to enable friends, family, parishioners, and even monks to build and strengthen one another without relying on top-down, centralized control. Indeed, if Bitcoin is not used in this way, it is easy to see how it will be seized upon to undergird even stronger and more sweeping forms of top-down control.

Thirdly, Leo recognizes the limitations of any papal encyclical to address these matters. How to know who to trust in seeking and receiving authoritative spiritual wisdom is a matter increasingly hard to settle from a primarily or mainly intellectual approach, such as considering the persuasiveness of a person’s presentational management of concepts, terms, and ideas. So does the risk of hinging humanity’s prospects on intellectual persuasiveness become acute, driving the seeking and the receiving deeper into the direct experience over time of face-to-face relationships with persons not legible from the increasingly disembodied “aerospace” of the field of intellectual presentation. Subsidiarity as a “principle” precipitates ultimately into relational and personal practices — beginning with their grounding not just on bottom-up practices of fraternity, but, even more fundamentally, on the rock of one’s own personal and interior humbled attention toward the moment-to-moment effort at cleaning out the chamber of the heart enough to receive the Holy Spirit.

Finally, while harmony between us and our own tools is not a pipe dream, it is a difficult matter of balance and degree tested by the deepest honesty about what rationales lurk in the hidden recesses of our hearts. Free will must involve trade-offs, often stark while rarely utterly absolute. The gradations thereof pertain increasingly to accepting that all choices in favor of merely human means at the expense of divine means make debits of treasure that can and do compound. The joyful sadness of accepting the prospect of divine forgiveness for the infirmity involved — and the dedication of the will to keeping this weakness in mind, even as our more merely human means are used even or especially unto the human good — is increasingly essential to maintaining a relatively more harmoniously balanced relationship between human-made and divine-made (or begotten) means.

​Tech, Pope leo xiv, Artificial intelligence 

Arizona police raced to the home of a woman after she threatened to harm two children she had with her husband, only to find a gruesome scene.

Andrea Clarice Davis, 38, sent her husband a photograph of their child bleeding before she killed the two children and then killed herself, police said.

‘She was a good mom, so please don’t just, whatever happens, don’t portray her to be some — she did what she did, but she wasn’t a horrible person. She wasn’t.’

Glendale Police spokesperson Jose Santiago said the woman’s 39-year-old husband called police on Monday from Tailgaters Sports Bar & Grill just after midnight to report the shooting.

He said Davis had found him with another woman and fired a gun at both of them just outside the bar. The 36-year-old woman was shot in the back of the head as she tried to flee.

The husband told police that Davis had threatened to harm their two children, and police responded to their home near 49th Avenue and Paradise Lane, only 2 miles away from the bar in Phoenix.

He then received a photo from his wife showing one of the children bleeding and notified police.

Glendale and Phoenix officers arrived at the home about 2:30 a.m. and forced their way into the home because of the alarming texts Davis had sent to her husband.

When they gained entry, they found the bodies of the two children, 18-month-old Andolan and 10-year-old Austin, shot dead, and Davis dead after shooting herself.

Felicia Queen, a cousin of the father, told KTVK-TV that she was shocked by the incident.

“They were little, you know. They didn’t deserve it. They still had a whole life ahead of them. And it’s not fair. I can’t even imagine what my cousin’s going through right now,” Queen said.

Davis’ best friend told KTVK that she had lost her mind after finding out her husband had been having an inappropriate relationship with a co-worker.

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The woman shot at the bar was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries. The husband was not harmed in the shooting.

Santiago would not confirm whether Davis’ husband was in a relationship with the other woman. Both police departments said they had no prior interactions with the family.

“He is a very good dad,” Queen added. “And she was a good mom, so please don’t just, whatever happens, don’t portray her to be some — she did what she did, but she wasn’t a horrible person. She wasn’t.”

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​Alarming texts, Inappropriate relationship, Mom kills kids, Murder suicide, Crime