Apocalypsos

How Fault-Tolerant Is Your AE-35?

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According to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, fifty-eight years ago space agency functionaries talked like eunochs, robots, and none-dared-say-them-nay organization men. A year and a couple of months later, Neil Armstrong stepped off the LEM ladder’s final rung, and life imitated art.

A modest lifetime later, ChatGPT, HAL’s more or less legitimate grandchild, like his grandsire before him, only wants what’s best for you. No, really….

In between these two determinative fabrications, we had Brazil and Blade Runner. None of our best and brightest paid a damned bit of attention to them….

Days Of Infamy

William Timberman4 Comments

The only thing that’s saving Trump’s attack on Tehran from more apt comparisons to Pearl Harbor is the observation that the Khamenei regime was an order of magnitude more odious than his own. The fact remains that Trump likes taking things that don’t belong to him or to the United States, including the lives of innocents. He needs to go.

Almost Imaginary Poll

William Timberman2 Comments

On a scale of one to ten, ten being the most comfortable, how comfortable are you waking up to the news that Pete Hegseth has just started WWIII?

Republicans: MAGA! MAGA! SIS. BOOM. BAH!

Democrats: Well….

Independents: (sic) Where’d you hear that?

Signs of the Apocalypse

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Oligarchs, edgelords, influencers. The manosphere. Algorithms, blockchains, chatbot haruspications. Data centers, concentration camps, genocide. Stephen Miller in sunglasses and a shiny suit. The crooked cross at the base of Pam Bondi’s throat. The gig economy, the attention economy, the awake all night calliope of dread.

Does the Pope approve of Samuel Alito? Has Harvard made its deal with our new devils yet? Will someone please show me the way to the next whisky bar?

But never mind. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Deus vult.

Unbidden Bits—January 30, 2026

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I hate to say it—and this is the first place I’ve said it publicly—but my personal doomsday clock for how close MAGA-style Republicans are to getting the civil war they’ve spent the last 40 years jonesing for is telling me that it’s now about 2 seconds to midnight. The inhabitants of the great cesspool at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue should be well pleased. The rest of us can only repeat what every previous victim of the human impulse to carnage and destruction has long since been forced to acknowledge. Knowing what’s coming has never saved anyone from disaster except those with the means to escape it. Einstein made it through the last world-wide cataclysm. Anne Frank and Sophie Scholl did not.

On the Morality of Violent Political Resistance

William Timberman2 Comments

From Ken White at the Popehat Report comes a long inquiry into the morality of political violence, ending with this concluding paragraph:

I think I have been perfectly clear. However, for the benefit of people easily offended by implication over bluntness, I think there is a plausible argument that it is morally permissible, and even morally necessary, to use political violence against the Trump Administration and its agents and supporters under the current circumstances in America. The arguments in favor are likely to grow.

Here is my response, edited to correct the name of the of the Border Patrol “commander at large” apparently in charge of ICE operations in Minneapolis:

I’m afraid I feel compelled to offer a different answer than the one Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. gave their lives to defend. No community is morally obligated to suffer what Gregory Bovino and his murderous thugs have done in Minneapolis to Renee Nicole Goode, Geraldo Lunas Campos, and Alex Pretti. Any community attacked the way ICE has attacked Minneapolis is morally justified in taking up arms against their attackers and driving them back to the sewer that spawned them. Our Declaration of Independence, as well as our own right to defend ourselves, says as much.

Practically speaking, of course, an armed response by a community under siege in the circumstances that Minneapolis finds itself in today would simply result in ending the lives of a few depraved assholes in exchange for the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocents. Abstaining from violence in these circustances has nothing to do with morality, but it does have everything to do with a resistance that is prudent as well as courageous. That’s why I agree, for the moment at least, that Governor Walz has the right strategy, if not the right tactics, to respond to the Federal Government’s atrocities. If we’re serious about our resistance, more consistent and more effective tactics will come to us eventually. In the meantime, sadly, we can count on continuing news of blood and cruelty that a genuinely moral person will find extremely hard to endure without striking back.

The Arc of History

William Timberman4 Comments

Repurposed from comments on Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality Substack

History does appear at times to have some sort of arc, although maybe not the one referred to in MLK’s very non-Marxist portrayal of history as a pilgrim’s progress. Sixty years ago I might have been hopeful that history, at least conceptually, was finally reaching some sort of apogee, but I was young then, and my knowledge of German hadn’t yet revealed to me any of the more dismal historical events that had been busily giving the lie to Enlightenment optimism as I was being born. Nowadays, given the commedia dell’arte version of the Decline of the West being cosplayed with such ferocity by the unholy fools in the White House, I’m beginning to wonder if history’s true arc isn’t some lumpier version of a sine wave. If so, maybe people serious about what is to be done ought to exchange Hegel and Marx for the Ramayana.

Optimists hope that technology’s ultimate ROI will be to help us smooth out our ups and downs as a species. Pessimists fear that there is no ROI, that technology just heightens the amplitude of the wave until it breaks, and whether it breaks at the apogee (the singularity) or perigee (annihilation by nuclear weapon exchanges or climate collapse) hardly makes a difference. They both have evidence to offer us. Me, I have doubts that the evolution of our technology aids the speed of our biological evolution much at all. Give an ape a bone, and he uses it as a club. Millennia later, give him a hypersonic nuclear-tipped missile, or an economy predicated on the burning of trillions of dollars worth of petroleum fuels, and sic transit gloria mundi. It’s like Pogo said, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Questions. I Have Questions.

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So when is some foreign army gonna come grab our disgusting dictator and spirit him off to an unknown destination? Will they let us see the Epstein files afterward, do you think? And what’s the likelihood they’ll be wanting our oil as compensation for the favor? The 21st century is just getting so confusing.