I kind of regret that there’s no /r/TotallyNotRobots analog on the Threadiverse, but I suppose that there might not be enough people who want to do casual creative writing to keep it active. !writingprompts@literature.cafe seems to be getting limited traffic.

As I’ve commented on here before, I think that personal finance should be part of K-12 core curriculum.

The entire extent of what my K-12 education covered was how to write a check and how to balance a checkbook in 5th grade. And, in an optional driver’s ed class, we had to get sample insurance quotes from multiple insurers to drive home the fact that you should get multiple quotes. That’s all I got in 13 years of formal education.

My home economics class in maybe…7th grade?..didn’t touch personal finance at all. Basic cooking skills, clothing repair, some arts and crafts.

Personal finance is something that basically everyone needs to know, and as things stand, basically they only get from their parents and that’s gonna depend on what their parents know.

In the US, curriculum is determined at state or below. It looks like California revised its curriculum to include a high school personal finance class as of 2024, and students will start taking it as of 2027.

https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/personalfinance.asp

Assembly Bill (AB) 2927, Chapter 37, Statutes of 2024 added a stand-alone course in personal finance to the high school graduation requirements, commencing with the graduating class of 2030–31. It requires public schools, including charter schools, to offer the course during the 2027–28 school year. The measure also calls for the State Board of Education (SBE) to approve a curriculum guide, outlining topics and providing resources for the course.

I think that that’s probably a good move.

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I looked it up.

https://worldhistoryedu.com/reasons-why-north-korean-generals-wear-so-many-medals/

One of the reasons for the proliferation of medals is that North Korean generals are often allowed to wear decorations originally awarded to their parents or grandparents. This tradition reflects North Korea’s emphasis on familial loyalty and continuity in service to the state. By displaying these inherited medals, generals symbolically link their achievements to those of their forebears, perpetuating a narrative of multi-generational commitment to the regime and the nation’s ideals.

The roots of North Korea’s extensive medal culture can be traced back to the Korean War (1950–1953), during which many awards were introduced to recognize military valor. As the war concluded and active conflict ceased, the scope of these decorations expanded to include contributions in non-military spheres, blurring the lines between military and civilian achievements.

So think of it kind of like, oh, hereditary titles in an aristocracy or something. It’s a “I’m the grandson of person who was important some time back” sort of thing. The people with lots of medals belong to a family that has been in the “in” crowd for some time.

Attaboy!

EDIT: Apparently they already awarded it, and it’s gold!

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/03/26/trump-given-america-first-award-republican-party/89330333007/

Trump receives inaugural ‘America First award’ from Republican Party

“We’re going to do something we’ve never done before. We’re going to honor him with a new award that we’ll present annually from this point forward, but he is the suitable and fitting recipient of the first-ever America First award,” Johnson said. “We can think of no better title for what that is…that’s this beautiful golden statue here, appropriate for the new golden era in America.”

Trump does seem like the suitable and fitting recipient of the first-ever America First award!

Is the Medal of Honor enough? Given Trump’s qualities, doesn’t he warrant some form of higher award that would place him somewhere above all the existing Medal of Honor awardees?

The Medal of Honor has non-gold components. He could make a new medal out of solid gold. And call it whatever he wanted. The Medal of Extraordinary Honor, say.

Yeah, I gotta say that from an outsider’s perspective, while I’m not privvy to whatever internal concessions might have been made, from the outside, this really looks like this is mostly France’s fault, not Germany/Spain.

France was asking to commit 1/3 of the funds to build a CATOBAR plane that literally nobody else in the world other than France and possibly India wanted relative to a land-based fighter and to get to make all the major decisions on the project and, if reports are accurate, get a disproportionate amount of the workshare. I understand that Italy wanted to join, and France kept them out. France offered Germany leadership on the MGCS in exchange for France getting to run the FCAS, but the MGCS was a much smaller project than the FCAS and Spain, which was kicking in as much money as the other two partners, didn’t get anything comparable.

And it’s not just that France was asking for a lot, but that it didn’t have a lot of leverage. Germany’s got options. It can run out and build a coalition and do its own land-based fighter. It could use the F-35. It could join the GCAP program with Italy, the UK, and Japan. But France probably doesn’t have the funds to make a competitive fifth- or sixth-generation CATOBAR naval fighter on its lonesome, so it really needs some kind of coalition. And France has already committed to doing their next carrier as CATOBAR, bought that electromagnetic catapult that the US built for its carriers.

What Dassault was stating publicly for was that if France didn’t get the concessions it wanted, it would just do an update of the Rafale. That may be great for Dassault, since it gets to run everything that way. But I am far from convinced that it’s a great idea for France’s military, which, if that happens, is going to be flying a much-older fighter than comparable countries before long.

My understanding from past reading is that some of what justified this approach is that France is betting very heavily on relying on the Dassault nEUROn, possibly being remotely-controlled by a Rafale that’s hanging back, being able to fulfill tasks that a newer fighter might, and that thus they won’t need a modern, conventional fighter that badly. That’s a risky bet in my book, since we don’t have examples of wars being fought that way, and if that bet turns out to be wrong, they’re going to be in a difficult place.

My understanding from past reading is that the major limitation for Germany with GCAP is that they aren’t already involved, Japan needs the GCAP active relatively soon and can’t push back its schedule, whereas if Germany wants to start from scratch, that’ll probably push things back. But I could reasonably imagine that they do a Block 2 or something like that with whatever additions Germany wants, as Germany’s expected to be more-comfortable with a longer schedule. That being said, GCAP is expected to be a long-range, heavy fighter able to operate over the (big) Pacific, and I don’t know whether that fits what Germany’s looking for. The present article does say that Germany wants range, but I don’t know if they want that much range.

I guess we’ll see, since presumably Germany’s going to be doing its Plan B now.

EDIT: I really think that France would have been better-off doing one of the following:

• Using the F-35C on its upcoming carrier. It has only a single carrier. It doesn’t need that many planes. Then doing joint development of a European land-based fighter, which most other countries in Europe are interested in and has more export potential than a CATOBAR-capable fighter.

• Convincing enough European navies to commit to developing a European VTOL naval fighter instead of doing what they are now, using the F-35B, and then having those countries, including France, use STOVL carriers. The UK went STOVL. Italy’s presently using STOVL. I understand that Spain may-or-may-not continue to have any carriers, but I imagine that France probably could convince Spain. That requires France to give up CATOBAR on its one carrier, but my suspicion is that that’s probably liveable. That’s probably not really an option now, since it looks like France is committed to CATOBAR and a bunch of other countries are already using the F-35B on their carriers.

Now France is kinda painted into a corner. They’re going to have to make this work, and if it doesn’t work, they’re going to limit their military. And they probably have limited export potential for anything that they do make.

EDIT2: And one other thing I didn’t mention above — one of the concessions that France got was that they were worried that Germany might restrict export of the plane or parts or whatever to some country for political reasons. That might scare off customers. So they got an arrangement that FCAS export could only be blocked if all partners agree on it. Okay, fair enough — but if you’re that concerned about export potential, again, the constraint that it be a CATOBAR fighter is a significant barrier in and of itself.

Patel has vowed to sue The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick, suggesting in a social media post that the article met the high legal bar to qualify as defamation.

I doubt that. Patel is a public figure. The US has a high bar for defamation to start with, and it gets harder for public figures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan

New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), is a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled the freedom of speech protections in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution limit the ability of public officials to sue for defamation.[1][2] The decision held that if a plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit is a public official or candidate for public office, then not only must they prove the normal elements of defamation—publication of a false defamatory statement to a third party—they must also prove that the statement was made with “actual malice”, meaning the defendant either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it might be false.[2] New York Times Co. v. Sullivan is frequently ranked as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the modern era.

I don’t have a YouTube account, and have no interest in getting one. I hid shorts with this browser add-on:

https://github.com/Vulpelo/hide-youtube-shorts

Totally ahistorical. Catholics (in America) are practically synonymous with liberalism going back to the 1930s. They’ve been in the tank for the Democratic Party since Kennedy.

searches

It looks like there’s some commentary out there on this already:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/04/14/donald-trump-attack-pope-leo-2026-midterms/89606369007/

President Donald Trump has stepped on a political hornet’s nest with his attacks on Pope Leo XIV that have infuriated Catholics worldwide. The rift with the Vatican could exacerbate an already challenging 2026 election season for congressional Republicans as Trump risks alienating a key constituency.

Several conservative-leaning Catholic leaders have publicly called on Trump to apologize – which the president rebuffed – saying they shouldn’t have to choose between their faith and their country. “There is no doubt that President Trump’s post insulting Pope Leo crossed, again, a line of decorum that plays an important part in diplomacy,” Kelsey Reinhardt, president and CEO of CatholicVote, a political advocacy group, said April 13 in a post on X.

Catholics are the single largest religious denomination in the United States, accounting for one-fifth of the population, according to the Pew Research Center. Catholics are 10 percentage points more likely to lean toward Republicans than Democrats, Pew found in 2025.

Trump lost the Catholic vote to Joe Biden 52%-47% in 2020, according to CNN exit polls. He won over Catholics 59%-39% against Kamala Harris in 2024.

2026 is expected to be a tough year for the GOP as forecasters shift more races in Democrats’ favor.

Republican pollster Brent Buchanan said his polling firm Cygnal has been tracking Catholic voters since the 2022 midterms. He said that American Catholics have repeatedly shown their independence from the Vatican’s policy guidance but that if Trump persists in squabbling with the pope, it could spell trouble for the GOP this fall.

“The papacy is an institution that has existed for thousands of years,” Buchanan said. "Even if you don’t ascribe to Catholicism, you know who the pope is and you have an idea what the pope stands for, and it’s usually broad, positive, moral things.

“Catholics tend to be one of the swingier groups in the country, and pretty much whatever direction Catholics go politically, the country goes politically. They’re almost like a bellwether of sorts. So it’s unnecessary noise for an important swing group.”

Political scientists note that Washington and the Vatican have been at odds over policy before, but this war of words is uniquely bitter.

“There’s never been anything this public, this personal or this partisan,” David Campbell, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution, told USA TODAY in an interview.

For the current Republican Party, making race a topic of division is probably useful as a wedge issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue

A wedge issue in politics is any issue used to create a division within a political party. These issues are usually employed as a tactic by a minority party against a governing majority party, with the aim of splitting the majority’s electorate into two or more camps.[1][2] Although any issue could potentially be used as a wedge, some of the most common examples are often concerned with social justice, such as abortion or civil rights.[3][4][5] Due to the prevalence of social justice issues as a wedge, the tactic is often most effectively employed by conservative parties against liberal parties. American political strategist Lee Atwater has been noted as an early champion of wedge issue politics during the Reagan era.[6]

The Republican Party would probably rather have people divided over race. The Democratic Party over wealth.

But a Catholic-Protestant split would probably work pretty well for the Democratic Party as a wedge issue too, given that the current Republican Party is the social conservative party.

So, I think that Trump starting fights with the Catholic Church is probably a bad idea from the standpoint of the Republican Party, but if I were the Democratic Party, I’d probably be watching this with interest.

The resolution says that “God” wants all families to have “one husband, one wife.”

From the bill text:

WHEREAS, the nuclear family, consisting of one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children, is God’s design for familial structure and has been the bedrock of society since the creation of the world

From the Bible:

Deuteronomy 21:15–17:

If a man has two wives, and he loves one but not the other, and both bear him sons but the firstborn is the son of the wife he does not love, when he wills his property to his sons, he must not give the rights of the firstborn to the son of the wife he loves in preference to his actual firstborn, the son of the wife he does not love. He must acknowledge the son of his unloved wife as the firstborn by giving him a double share of all he has. That son is the first sign of his father’s strength. The right of the firstborn belongs to him.

I love all open source desktops equally

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment