I Wish We Had a Good Solution for This Problem

James Madison's Federalist Number 10 famously warned about the dangers of political factions, seen as citizens united by a common passion or interest that could work against the rights of others or the interests of the community as a whole.

But Madison was a realist. He did not believe factions could be avoided. But he did believe safeguards that would make it difficult for any single faction to become a tyranny. 

In other words he favored a systemic approach to creating countervailing incentives, such as the three major branches of the federal government. 

President George Washington, in his farewell address, was direct: “Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party, generally.”

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism,” Washington said. 

Both founders warned about factions and parties placing their own interests above the common interest of the nation. 

And political parties emerged quite quickly. 

Founding-era concern	Underlying fear	Modern parallel
Faction	A group puts its interests above the country	Partisan base politics
Party loyalty	Representatives stop exercising independent judgment	Party-line voting
Minority organization	A small but intense group acquires disproportionate influence	Activists, donors, primary voters
Geographic faction	Political divisions become regional identities	Red/blue geographic polarization
Factional retaliation	Each side tries to punish the other	Escalating partisan warfare

The aphorism "show me the incentive, and I will show you the result," seems relevant here. 

Madison and Washington essentially argued that if you create institutions in which factional interests (party loyalty, as a prime example) are rewarded, that is indeed what one gets. 

“Compromise” ideally allows both sides to get something of what they want. But party loyalty demands something else. 

Compromise becomes “you caved to the other side” while resistance in principle to the other side becomes “I stood my ground.” 

So party loyalty becomes “obstruction.” And loyalty to the party replaces “what is good for the nation?” as the guiding principle. 

If party leaders get rewarded for mobilizing fear, loyalty and resentment, we should not be surprised when politics produces fear, loyalty and resentment. 

It is the similar principle to social media: moderate, reasonable content does not get attention. 

Party politics also suggests how polarization can persist even when large numbers of Americans dislike polarization. 

Perhaps Madison was right, and factions cannot be avoided. Perhaps the best we can do is create conditions whereby other factions with competing and opposed interests also exist. 

The problem is that if executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government, for example, become factional battlegrounds between Republicans and Democrats, the branches do not necessarily provide countervailing power to the other branches if one party controls all three branches. 

Even if the judiciary is formally non-partisan, some want to politicize it. 

So much of what we seem to get is just Democrats and Republicans intent on gaining and maintaining power for their faction. Whether that is good for the common welfare is debatable. 

If the incentive is “power,” then “party loyalty” will be the outcome we get. 

Maybe we’ll figure out better ways to change the incentives. We probably will get no help from either party. 

Why the Catholic Church Opposes Socialism

The problem with socialism is not simply that it “doesn’t work” as an economic system. The more-profound issue is that it destroys human dignity and creativity. 

Human dignity requires meaningful agency. Meaningful agency requires freedom and responsibility. Freedom and responsibility generate initiative and creativity.

Put simply, society exists for the person, not the person for society. 

And the critique of socialism, at its root, is the subjugation of people to the state, not the elevation of individuals as conscious and moral beings. 

As with other key elements of Catholic anthropology, each individual person is the objective of the whole body of social teaching. 

Human beings are makers, the church argues. People are intended to transform nature, develop technology, create businesses, cultivate farms, invent things, build institutions, raise families, create art and develop culture.

So work has intrinsic value, beyond the objects produced, as an expression of human creativity. 

Socialist thinking (not to mention its historical atheism), in practice, makes material production dominant at the expense of liberty.

For this reason, the Catholic Church is probably the only major religion with a specific religious objection to socialism. 

That does not mean the teaching approves of unrestrained or exploitive capitalism, either. The principle is something more like free and responsible people aware of a network of obligations to other persons and to the common good.

When it defends the right to own private property, it does so because property has a social purpose. Ownership carries obligations toward the common good, workers, families and the poor.

Catholic principle	Economic implication
Human beings are persons, not things	Workers cannot be treated merely as production inputs
Humans possess reason	They should exercise judgment and initiative
Humans possess free will	They cannot legitimately be reduced to instruments of collective purposes
Humans are responsible moral agents	Economic institutions should preserve responsibility
Humans are creative	Economic life should permit initiative and entrepreneurship
Humans are social	Property and markets have obligations toward others
Humans have transcendent ends	Material prosperity cannot be society's ultimate goal

Material welfare is important, but not more important than human dignity. 

So any political-economic system becomes objectionable when it treats the person primarily as a component of a collective, a producer, or an economic unit.

Encyclical	Pope	Key contribution
Rerum Novarum (1891)	Leo XIII	Rejects socialist abolition of private property; defends workers and human dignity
Quadragesimo Anno (1931)	Pius XI	Develops critique of collectivism and excessive economic individualism; emphasizes social justice
Divini Redemptoris (1937)	Pius XI	Explicit condemnation of atheistic communism and its reduction of the human person
Mater et Magistra (1961)	John XXIII	Expands Catholic social teaching amid modern economic development
Laborem Exercens (1981)	John Paul II	Work is fundamentally an expression of the human person; creativity and responsibility matter
Centesimus Annus (1991)	John Paul II	After communism's collapse, develops the relationship among freedom, markets, property, creativity and human dignity

Let me put it bluntly. The Democratic Socialists of America emergence within the Democratic Party might not be an issue for other people. 

For Catholics, it will trigger what should be an automatic rejection: the Catholic Church clearly opposes socialism in principle, and not simply because it does not work.

Socialism destroys human creativity and freedom. Catholics who follow the church’s social teaching will not be able to support a DSA-led party.

Dolly Parton

source: People

Dolly Parton, a light gone out at 80. 

Dolly Rebecca Parton, the singer, songwriter, actress, entrepreneur and philanthropist who rose from a one-room cabin in the mountains of East Tennessee to become one of the most recognizable and beloved Americans in the world, died Tuesday at 80.

She was born Jan. 19, 1946, in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children in a family that lived in considerable poverty. 

Her father, Robert Lee Parton, worked as a sharecropper and construction worker; her mother, Avie Lee, kept house and raised the children.

The family sang together,and Parton began performing publicly while still a child. 

She never forgot where she came from, and, for someone who became extraordinarily wealthy, she never seemed embarrassed by it.

Instead, poverty became one of the great subjects of her art.

She became one of the most prolific and versatile American entertainers of her generation, moving comfortably among country, pop, gospel, film, television and musical theater. 

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, which inducted her in 1999, describes her career as one that expanded from country songwriting and singing into pop stardom, acting, business and philanthropy. 

The towering blonde hair, rhinestone-studded clothes, elaborate makeup and exaggerated femininity could easily have reduced another performer to a caricature. Parton instead turned them into an instrument of self-definition. 

She understood the joke.

Parton became a movie star, built an entertainment empire around her name and helped establish Dollywood near her hometown in the Great Smoky Mountains. 

In 1995, she established Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, initially providing free books to children in her home county. 

The program was inspired in part by her father’s inability to read and write. It eventually expanded throughout the United States and internationally, sending age-appropriate books free of charge to children from birth to age five. 

By 2025, the program had passed the extraordinary milestone of 300 million books distributed. 

She contributed to medical research, children's hospitals and disaster relief, including substantial assistance to victims of the 2016 wildfires in the Smoky Mountains. 

In 2020, she donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University, helping support research that contributed to development of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.

She did not seem particularly interested in lecturing people about what they should believe. She simply used her extraordinary resources to do things she thought were useful.

Parton was a deeply religious woman from the American South whose music emerged from country, bluegrass and gospel traditions. 

She was also a feminist icon, a champion of literacy, an advocate for working women and a cultural figure embraced by people whose politics could otherwise have very little in common. 

This was perhaps the central achievement of Dolly Parton's public persona. She could be simultaneously glamorous and homespun, enormously wealthy and proudly Appalachian, commercially calculating and genuinely generous, self-mocking and fiercely ambitious. 

Her career produced numerous honors and distinctions, including membership in the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Grammy Awards, and recognition from institutions far beyond country music. The American Library Association awarded her honorary lifetime membership for her contribution to literacy and libraries. 

She wrote thousands of songs. She sold more than 100 million records. She became a movie star, a television personality, a businesswoman and the proprietor of a major theme park. She created an international literacy program that put millions of books into the hands of children.

After accumulating wealth and fame on a scale few people from her circumstances could have imagined, she spent much of the second half of her life giving pieces of that success away.

She was Dolly Parton.

Diffusion Models Can Create New Images Without Infringing on Training Sources

A study of language models, especially those designed to create images and video, might suggest that copyright infringements by diffusion-based models might be impossible to prove. 

The authors say “locating a part of the training data that can be held responsible for a generated sample, can become impossible if a model is trained on a sufficiently large corpus of data.”

In other words, a large training set is all that is needed to render copyright traceable to any single source impossible. 

The study methodology relies on omitting an attributed unit from the training set (one image or all images by the same creator), the induced counterfactual sample cannot be directly attributed to that same unit. 

source: Nature Communications

In the above example, a generated image created from a smaller data set is more attributable to a single training image.

A large data set, on the other hand, creates a new image that shows no trace of a single training image.  

Model / family	Main generation	Diffusion?	Basic architecture / approach
GPT-4 / GPT-4o / GPT-5 family	Text, multimodal	No*	Primarily autoregressive Transformer for language
Claude 3/4 family	Text, code, multimodal	No*	Autoregressive Transformer
Gemini 1–4 family	Text, multimodal	No*	Primarily autoregressive Transformer
Llama family	Text, code	No	Autoregressive Transformer
Mistral / Mixtral family	Text, code	No	Autoregressive Transformer, including MoE
DeepSeek family	Text, code, reasoning	No	Autoregressive Transformer/MoE
Gemini Diffusion	Text/code	Yes	Text diffusion Transformer; generates blocks of tokens and iteratively refines them (Google DeepMind)
DiffusionGemma	Text/code	Yes	Non-sequential diffusion Transformer based on Gemma research (Google DeepMind)
Stable Diffusion 1.x/2.x/XL	Images	Yes	Latent diffusion, historically U-Net-based
Stable Diffusion 3/3.5	Images	Yes	Diffusion Transformer / MM-DiT
FLUX.1 / FLUX family	Images	Yes	Diffusion/flow-based Transformer
DALL·E 2	Images	Yes	Diffusion
DALL·E 3	Images	Yes	Diffusion-based image generation
Imagen 2/3/4	Images	Yes	Diffusion-based image generation; Google explicitly describes Imagen as a diffusion model (Google DeepMind)
Midjourney	Images	Yes*	Widely understood to use diffusion/related denoising techniques, though Midjourney does not disclose its architecture in detail
Adobe Firefly	Images/video	Yes*	Diffusion-based generation among its models; architecture varies by model
Sora	Video	Yes	Diffusion Transformer (DiT); starts from noisy video patches and denoises them (OpenAI)
Sora 2	Video	Yes*	Diffusion-based video generation; details of current implementation are less fully disclosed
Veo 2/3/3.1	Video	Yes*	Diffusion/Transformer-based video generation; Google describes Veo as drawing on its diffusion-model research (Google DeepMind)
Runway Gen-2/3	Video	Yes*	Diffusion-based video generation
Kling	Video	Yes*	Diffusion/Transformer-based video generation
Luma Dream Machine	Video	Yes*	Diffusion/Transformer-based video generation
MusicGen	Music/audio	No	Autoregressive Transformer over discrete audio tokens
AudioCraft / related models	Audio/music	Mixed	Different models use different architectures
Genie 2	Interactive worlds/video	Yes	Autoregressive latent diffusion—an interesting hybrid (Google DeepMind)

“Our findings provide a compelling case that attribution, the task of locating a unit of data within the training set that can be held responsible for a generated sample, is practically impossible on contemporary generative diffusion models,” say authors Zheng Dai and David Gifford.