Month: September 2026

End Times Euphemisms

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Sadly, this is by no means a comprehensive list:

Peace Is Our Profession: the motto of the Strategic Air Command, responsible from 1946-1992 for deploying the US arsenal of nuclear-armed bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Strategic Hamlet: An open-air prison compound surrounded by fortified walls/fences with controlled access manned by armed security forces. It was thought by the US govenment and its puppet regime in South Vietnam that forcing the populations of entire South Vietnamese villages to relocate to such places would prevent the Viet Cong rebels from infiltrating and controlling the rural population of the country. Unsurprisingly, the name deceived no one, not even those required by the chain of command to commit themselves to rigorous self-delusion. The plan failed, the compounds vanished, the villagers went home, and the US and its puppets lost the war.

Full Spectrum Dominance: According to the US Department of Defense, “The cumulative effect of dominance in the air, land, maritime, and space domains and information environment, which includes cyberspace, that permits the conduct of joint operations without effective opposition or prohibitive interference.” According to anyone sane, nothing less than God-mockery on stilts.

Corpus Christi: the name of a Los Angeles class nuclear-powered attack submarine. Changed to The City of Corpus Christi when Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a Roman Catholic, pointed out to the Department of Defense that Corpus Christi was Latin for The Body of Christ, which to him seemed inappropriate for the name of a warship. Apparently naming one The Angels irritated no one who needed to be appeased.

Extraordinary Rendition: Kidnapping

Enhanced Interrogation: Torture

Machines of Unloving Gracelessness

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Donald Trump is a perfect example of the fatal solipsism that can afflict any intelligence which trains only on its own models. AI researchers are aware of the threat, but it’s not apparent—to me, at least—that at this point the economic imperatives driving their frantic gluttony will allow them to keep generative AI from swallowing everything, including its own tail. Exactly how long do they think it will be before the supply of accessible human creativity dries up, and the only data realistically available for a frontier model to train on will be that created by its own previous generations? A year? Ten years? A generation? (This is not the singularity they’re looking for, but it may be the only one they—and we—are going to get.)

Unbidden Bits—September 2, 2026

William Timberman2 Comments

I was privileged to see Louis Armstrong in concert in 1961, when I was seventeen years old. He kept a stack of white cloths in the grand piano on stage, and periodically pulled one out and wiped his face with it. The woman who sang with him was magnificently, radiantly black, as wide as she was tall, and her gown glittered when she moved. She danced, she sang that night as though the lightning of all that was sacred inhabited her. Mr. Armstrong’s playing was closer to revelation than anything I’d experienced in my young life until that one incredible evening. It wasn’t an experience one ever forgets, and I haven’t. People who like to think that the world can be reduced to their bloodless, misanthropic calculations really have no idea….