Any baptized man can become pope, but traditionally he (and it is always a ‘he’) is elected from the college of Cardinals. This year, possible contenders range from Francis’ liberal-leaning secretary of state, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, to Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, an ultra-conservative and outspoken critic of Francis. We could also see, for the first time, an American pope, a pope from Sub-Saharan Africa, or an Asian pope.
With campaigning frowned upon, consultations secretive, and coalitions in constant flux, it is impossible to predict an outcome or even a list of top contenders. “The trash heaps of church history are littered with the carcasses of journalists who have tried to predict the next pope,” wrote long-time Vatican analyst John L. Allen in the National Catholic Reporter in a prelude to a list of potential candidates to replace Pope John Paul II in 2005. As if to prove his point, Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, who greeted the world from the St. Peter’s balcony as Pope Benedict XVI a few days later, didn’t even make Allen’s list. Argentina’s Jorge Mario Bergoglio did—but it took another round before he was named Pope Francis in 2013, upon Benedict’s resignation.
She considers seven prospective candidates.
I don’t honestly know whether any of those mentioned will become the next pope. Experience suggests if will be someone else. What I do know is that the conclave may give us a rare window into what the most senior members of the hierarchy think is the gravest challenge facing the Church—its changing “center of gravity”, loss of European influence (another version of the same thing), faction within the Church, social issues, or something else.
In 2023, China’s share of value-added production in manufacturing was 29 percent of the world total—more than the United States, Japan, Germany, and India combined. China’s lead in global gross manufacturing production in 2020 was even greater: 35 percent, more than the combined total of the United States, Japan, Germany, India, South Korea, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom. Today China produces a third of global automobile manufacturing, half of the world’s steel, and 80 percent of the global civilian drone market. China is second only to Japan in manufacturing robots and is the world’s leader in factory robot installations. While China controls half of global commercial shipbuilding, America’s share of the global shipbuilding market has dwindled to 0.1 percent. What this means is that while the United States may lead China in the number of overseas bases and military spending, China would find it much easier than the self-weakened, partly deindustrialized United States to convert its superior civilian manufacturing base to military production.
I suspect that my views on tariffs are somewhat lighter that Mr. Lind’s. Basically, I think that regardless of how damaging they will prove to the U. S. economy we must impose tariffs on Chinese imports. China is a special case. Mr. Lind explains why in this passage:
Chinese state-backed firms dump subsidized products into the U.S. market, wiping out American manufacturers. Then, instead of buying an equivalent amount of American-manufactured goods, Chinese entities invest in American real estate or purchase American financial assets, driving up the value of the dollar, to the detriment of American exporters and the benefit of Chinese exporters.
but I think that Mr. Lind is mistaken in his views on “sector-specific tariffs”. The reality we face is that the entire supply chains for defense-critical goods must be based in the United States or, at worst, in North America. We really have no other choice.
I have found an enormous proportion of the opinion pieces whether editorials, columns, or blog posts remarkably uninteresting. Republicans support Trump. Democrats oppose Trump. Those who are independents or disaffected from both political parties don’t really know what the heck is going on or, indeed, why the political parties are behaving so erratically. Let’s recap.
Back in 2016 Donald Trump obliterated the Republican establishment by prevailing over eleven major Republican aspirants and who knows how many minor ones representing every faction in the party to become the Republican presidential candidate for president in the general election. There is no longer a “Republican establishment” and won’t be as long as Donald Trump is the leader of the party. He isn’t a libertarian, a paleoconservative, or a “Reagan conservative”. His beliefs are whatever he says they are on the day that he’s asked. We know he’s in favor of cutting taxes, opposes illegal immigration, and thinks the U. S. has been taken advantage of by allies and adversaries alike. He likes tariffs but may not understand them. After that it gets fuzzy.
After having devoted considerable energy to impeaching Trump twice and prosecuting him in court who knows how many times only to lose the presidency, House, and Senate to him and the Republicans the Democratic Party is rightly described as “leaderless”, “rudderless”, and “flailing”. What does the party stand for? No one is entirely sure.
My own complaint about the Democratic Party is that it is not presenting workable alternatives to the policies Trump and the Republicans are espousing. IMO opposing Trump and the Republicans is not enough. They are hampered in presenting workable alternatives by their devotion to public employees’ unions. I recognize you’ve got to “dance with the one that brung ya” but uncritical loyalty to public employees’ unions is driving the most Democratic states and cities into insolvency.
I don’t believe I’ve ever linked to Tucker Carlson before let alone embedded a video of his like the one above but I found his interview of George Friedman very interesting. I listened to about 20 minutes of it and then downloaded the transcript and read that. I recommend you read the transcript. If, like me, you read a lot faster than they talk you can get the information from it without investing as much time as you would in listening to the interview.
I found Dr. Friedman’s remarks very interesting and, indeed, very closely aligned with my own views. They included:
U. S. security is founded on naval power
The U. S. dominates space
The outcome to date of the war in Ukraine has largely been the consequence of intelligence derived by the Ukrainians from the U. S., which I found somewhat surprising
However many ships the Chinese have China does not present a tactical vulnerability to the U. S. because they are, essentially, bottled up which I also found surprising
The dependence of U. S. companies on Chinese industrial production is a major tactical and strategic vulnerability
Listen to or read the whole thing.
I’m not as convinced as Dr. Friedman is that President Trump is a structurally significant president in the way that Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, and FDR were. As I’ve said before I think Trump is his own worst enemy, particularly his shooting off his mouth and his ignorance of (and lack of patience with) the way things work in the federal government. We will see.
At Polymarket, a popular crypto-based platform, users have traded more than $13 million worth of contracts that will pay off if their holders make accurate predictions about the next leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.
Meanwhile, around $4 million worth of similar contracts have changed hands at Kalshi, a rival prediction market. Kalshi—which unlike Polymarket is open to Americans—began taking wagers on the next pontiff just hours after the death of Pope Francis on April 21.
Who are the favored picks?
The current front-runner is Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, with a 27% chance of winning as of Friday afternoon, according to Polymarket. In second place is Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, a Filipino dubbed the “Asian Francis,” at 21%.
Another favorite among some bettors is Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana. The African cardinal’s chances on Polymarket mysteriously surged from 7% last week to 14% on Friday, putting him in third place. The same three cardinals are top contenders at Kalshi, as well as at U.K. bookmakers that allow betting on the next pope.
Although I think it would be great if an African or East Asian bishop were elected pope, I suspect with the challenges the Church is facing in Europe these days Cardinal Parolin is likely to be elected. My pick would be Wilton Gregory. He’s retired now but he was formerly the archbishop of Washington, DC.
WASHINGTON, May 1 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump ousted his national security adviser Mike Waltz on Thursday and named Secretary of State Marco Rubio as his interim replacement in the first major shakeup of Trump’s inner circle since he took office in January.
Trump, in a social media post, said he would nominate Waltz to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, adding that “he has worked hard to put our nation’s interests first.”
UN ambassador is a sort of off-again, on-again cabinet position so I guess that’s a demotion but it’s not entirely surprising—he broke a cardinal rule: don’t embarrass the boss. But he wasn’t entirely “ousted” either so I guess it’s more of a slap on the hand.
The Trump administration’s attempt to weaken the Endangered Species Act is easy to criticize. This month, it proposed a rule that would limit what constitutes “harm” under the law to only direct actions against wildlife, such as hunting, wounding or trapping. Destroying their habitats would no longer count.
Anyone who’s ever seen roadkill littering U.S. highways should understand the flaw in this logic: Species can thrive only when they have space to live free from dangers imposed by humankind.
It is not enough to simply defend the status quo, however. An honest assessment of the Endangered Species Act would conclude that, alongside its strengths, it has many weaknesses. As scientists warn that the world is entering a period of mass extinction, lawmakers would be wise to rethink federal conservation strategies. This means reforming the act to better incentivize citizens to protect the country’s precious biodiversity.
concluding:
President Donald Trump and his party are unlikely to embrace these reforms. But Congress in recent years has shown that there is strong bipartisan appetite to strengthen protections for endangered species. The best way forward is to embrace market-oriented strategies.
I materially agree with what they propose but I don’t think they’ve thought it through. Preserving biodiversity whether through bans on hunting, etc. or introducing “market-oriented strategies” increases production costs in the United States which puts us at a competitive disadvantage to countries which subordinate biodiversity to other goals notably China, India, and Brazil. Each of those countries destroys thousands or hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest cover annually, habitats to hundreds or thousands of species. Providing those countries with competitive advantages has the presumably unintended secondary effect of encouraging that activity.
If we are genuinely interested in preserving biodiversity, we need to align the incentives to produce more of what we consume rather than offshoring that production to countries that aren’t concerned about the environmental impact of industrial production.
Yesterday I completed a game of Baldur’s Gate 3 at the Tactician level of difficulty, the second highest supported. According to the developers, Larian Studios, only 5% of players accomplish that. I have no plans to play at the highest level of difficulty, something only a very small number of players have completed successfully. It’s a game not a death march.
I’ve been playing BG3 off and on since it was introduced in pre-release. It is an excellent role-playing game—possibly the best. Pre-release consisted of the first chapter only and I played to the end of the chapter multiple times, at least once for every character class (wizard, rogue, ranger, cleric, etc.). Since the game went into general release in 2023, I have played it through multiple times.
By far the most fun playthrough was as something called “Dark Urge”, a creature subject to and occasionally overwhelmed by violent urges to perform evil deeds. I have a limitation. I cannot satisfactorily roleplay as an actually evil character so my Dark Urge was actively trying to fight his evil nature, something I found very close to home. The ending of that playthrough was very satisfying.
The limitation restricts my ability to play as what are called “origin characters”, pre-built characters with substantial back stories and distinct goals. The origin characters with good orientations are the Gale (wizard), Wyll (warlock), and Karlach (barbarian). I’ve played as Gale; in the game I am just beginning I am Wyll. I have only completed the prologue but I’ve found it very immersing.
Every dispute between the Trump Administration and the judiciary these days becomes a political morality play about a looming “constitutional crisis.” But the facts of each case matter, and most of the time they don’t support the crisis narrative.
That’s the way it looks to us so far in the case of last week’s arrest by federal agents of Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan for allegedly helping an illegal migrant evade Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Judge Dugan was charged with obstructing a federal proceeding and concealing an individual to prevent an arrest. A federal magistrate found probable cause for the arrest upon reviewing a 13-page criminal complaint.
The alleged facts as laid out in the complaint by FBI special agent Lindsay Schloemer don’t look good for the judge.
but I do disagree with one particular. We do have a crisis. It’s just not that crisis.
Judges should decide cases based on the text of the law, precedent, and the common law—another way of saying “precedent”—rather than deciding them based on their own politics or ideological preferences. There are far too many judges who want to be legislators rather than judges.
Somewhat against my better judgment I watched ABC journalist Terry Moran’s interview of President Trump on the occasion of the 100th day of his second term in office last night. It wasn’t quite as combative as I expected although I thought that Mr. Trump was primed for a combative interview. I don’t think that Mr. Moran was quite as oppositional as Mr. Trump seemed to think.
I don’t think I heard anything new. President Trump continues to think that the 2020 election was unfairly “stolen” from him. He thinks that the tariffs he’s imposing will be effective with fewer adverse consequences than I do.
