Apocalypsos

Progress on Donald Trump’s Bucket List

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√ War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity:

Ordered a February 28, 2026 airstrike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, Iran, killing at least 156 people. The victims included 120 children, 26 female teachers, and several parents who had come to the school. The fatalities also included a pregnant teacher and a six-month-old fetus.

Ordered aerial attacks on a number of unnamed Venezuelan fishing boats, killing their crews. Pilots of attacking aircraft were reportedly ordered by the Secretary of Defense to fire on any survivors of the initial bombing runs on their vessels as they struggled to stay afloat in the water, insuring that no one survived the US assault.

√ Murder:

Alex Pretti, Renee Nicole Good, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Silverio Villegas González, Keith Porter Jr., Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, Mario Bass—all murdered at the hands of ICE, or while they were being held in its custody.

√ Sexual Assault/Rape:

E. Jean Carroll. (Also, whatever is in the Epstein files, if the Republican Party ever allows them to be seen in their entirety by ordinary mortals.)

√ Kidnapping and False Imprisonment:

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Andry José Hernández Romero, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, Jefferson José Laya Freites, Arturo Suárez Trejo, Anyelo José Sarabia González, Jerce Reyes Barrios, Frengel Reyes Mota, José Manuel Ramos Bastidas, Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra, Maikol Gabriel López Lizano. All were placed in restraints without due process and transported by air to El Salvador, where they were handed over to the tender mercies of the wardens of CECOT (El Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo).

√ Theft:

SSSI and Derco Settlement. Gen Digital Inc. False Claims Settlement. AECOM Hurricane Katrina Relief Settlement. Magnolia Diagnostics False Claims Act Settlement. Broadway Electric Inc. Settlement.

√Fraud:

Judged culpable, civil case of falsifying business records (34 counts) May, 2024. Judged culpable, civil business fraud, New York, February, 2024.

√ Bribery, Extortion, and Violations of the Emoluments Clause:

Smirking misappropriation of María Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace prize medal after he’d ordered a US armed invasion of her country to kidnap its head of state.

A Boeing 747 passenger aircraft given by Dubai, for unspecified reasons, not to the United States, but to Donald Trump personally.

Promising a $5,000 Trump Dividend to every adult American provided the Republicans preserved their congressional majorities in the 2026 midterm elections.

Demanding that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy investigate Hunter Biden while withholding nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine. Shortly after Ukraine announced publicly that an investigation would take place, the US government released the $400 million that was being withheld. A post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, or genuine extortion? We report, you decide.

√ Perjury:

In December 2020, he filed a federal lawsuit in Georgia to overturn the presidential election results, personally signing a verification swearing under oath that the voter fraud figures in the complaint were true and correct to the best of his knowledge. A federal judge later concluded that the records demonstrated an effort to press false claims in court, and emails from Trump’s lawyers acknowledged that some of the allegations were inaccurate. Legal analysts have argued that this sworn verification meets the elements of perjury because Trump had been briefed by Department of Justice officials that the claims were false.

√ Vandalism:

White House demolitions, uprootings, tacky remodeling jobs, and fake gold embellishments,

A fatally incompetent renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool,

The defacing, defunding, and closing of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

A gaudy and hideously expensive gold leafing of the Arts of War and Peace equestrian statues.

The impending construction of an obscenely large and gaudy marble eyesore, to be named the United States Triumphal Arch.

Conversations with the New Siri

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Killing Google:

I asked Siri to locate the Ramparts magazine article that included a reference to sociologists from Michigan State University working with the CIA on the South Vietnamese Strategic Hamlet program. Two minutes later I’d downloaded the full article to my personal research archive, complete with a full color image of the cover of the April, 1966 issue of Ramparts which had contained the article.

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In the summer of 1989 I took my 14 year-old daughter on a weekend trip to Los Angeles. She was interested in filmmaking at the time, so I’d worked up a list of some of the locations where scenes in the movies she’d seen had been shot, and promised to show her both how they looked in real life, and why they’d been chosen for some of their movie transformations. Blade Runner’s tour de force conversion of the Bradbury was high on that list.

Although according to my sources the Bradbury was supposed to be open the morning we visited, it turned out when we got there that it was locked up tight. When I rattled the entrance door in frustration, a security guard came, opened the door, and explained that a Janet Jackson music video had just been filmed there the night before, and the lobby was still full of equipment.

I begged him as only a father can to let my daughter have a short peek at the interior, so he kindly let us stand just inside the door for a couple of minutes. Sure enough, the lobby was still full of metal scaffolding, but the elevator cages, the wrought iron and glazed tilework, the critical full-width skylight were visible enough to compare it with how it had appeared in the film. With our job done, more or less, and after a brief exploration of the façade of the Million Dollar theater across the street, we left Broadway and downtown to pursue the next attraction on the list.

I’ve long suspected that the video in question was Rhythm Nation. Although online searches in the late 90s had seemed to confirm it, hardly any details were forthcoming at the time. When the question popped into my mind again a couple of day ago, though, I thought, Why not ask Siri? The answer from Siri was a detailed production history of Jackson’s album Rhythm Nation 1814, including confirmation that the title video was at least partially filmed in the Bradbury. When I asked the followup question: “On what date was the sequence in the Bradbury building filmed?” I got this answer:

“While the exact date for the Bradbury Building sequence is not publicly documented, it was filmed as part of a 20-day shoot in August 1989 for the Rhythm Nation 1814 short film. The entire project was shot simultaneously over that 20-day period.”

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Creepy Interventions:

This unsolicited encounter with the new, let’s-pretend-I’m-a-Machine-of-Loving-Grace Siri so startled me that I deleted Siri’s pop-up message before I realized I should have preserved it in a screenshot for later consideration. Since I didn’t, the report here of what it had to say is as honest a paraphrase as I can cobbble together from memory.

Full disclosure: I’m old, and I sometimes talk to myself while working, especially when I’m attempting to solve a particularly thorny problem. I know I’m doing it when I’m doing it, I know what conventional wisdom thinks of the practice, and frankly my dears, I don’t give a damn. So don’t @ me, okay?

Anyway, I was reading a social media feed of the latest Trumpian atrocities on my iPad—anti-social media would probably more accurately describe this particular feed—when I spontaneously muttered, out loud, the following rhetorical aside: “Ah, fuck, I don’t know if I can take another minute of this shit. What the hell are we going to do?” When I looked back up at the screen I found this message in a Siri-style modal dialogue box:

“It sounds like you’re having a problem. I think I can help you—I know a number of sources that offer comfort and advice to individuals in stressful situations. Would you like me to provide you with some references?”

Mind you, I hadn’t invoked Siri, hadn’t said anything which sounded remotely like “Siri,” or “Hey, Siri,” and I’d absolutely, positively never offered even the slightest indication that I had any interest in talking to my new Apple-embedded stochastic parrot as though it were a person.

Thoroughly put off my feed, both literally and figuratively, I typed: “Do NOT, under ANY circumstances, offer any unprompted advice, information, offers of aid, nor any communications whatsoever in which you act as though you were a person.”

Siri’s response: “Okay, I won’t respond unless prompted.”

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Controlling Household Gadgets:

New Siri is slow, abysmally slow, much slower than the old, stupid Siri. Doesn’t at all like doing business with very expensive devices, like speakers and hubs, with 5 year-old chips in them, however functional they may still have been before the latest Apple system software release. With a home fully-equipped with devices that can cost in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars when the whole array is addded up, do any of these pell-mell, cutting-edge tech outfits really think they’re gonna get away with obsoleting all of our pricey hardware every couple of years? If so, their bean-counters are running the risk of a very personal Armageddon as we near the end of their bosses’ industry-wide rush to digital supremacy.

Emily St. John Mandel: a Brief Appreciation

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I’ve read three of Emily St. John Mandel’s novels now, seen the masterful HBO Max adaptation of Station Eleven, and am midway through her latest effort, Exit Party. It’s been an unusual but rewarding trip so far, largely because of how unexpected, yet how plausible, even familiar, her characters are. Her focus on them, and on their strangely syncopated encounters in the spacetime that ebbs and flows around them, pulling them apart and rejoining them again, could easily seem cheap and contrived in the hands of a less sensitive and less capable writer, but in hers they become as persuasive a signature as any riff of Bach’s or Mozart’s.

This is her real distinction as a writer, I think, and the main reason why I find her stories so attractive. She doesn’t conspire against her characters, she investigates them, peels them apart layer by layer like an onion, as though they, and the pathos that they’re embedded in are to be accepted as being just as real as the author is, as we, her readers, are. It’s a commitment on her part that I find impossible not to respect, and it leads me finally to accept that her premise, that these characters are as real as any of our own performances of character in the real world are, is entirely reasonable. Like Jane Austen, she’s what I would call a forensic humanist, one fit as few are to apply her talents to her own twenty-first century, and to us, its all too human denizens.

Tears in Rain

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Show me an arrogant prick, and I’ll show you an ignorant prick, a stupid prick. And when I’m shown the MAGA menagerie in all its pulsating, glittering entirety, I can’t help but notice that they’re all arrogant, ignorant, stupid pricks, even the seemingly endless succession of press Barbies and personal assistants who don’t actually have pricks. Sadly, sackcloth and ashes aren’t working for me anymore, nor rage, nor intricately murderous fantasies, nor appeals to the divinity who, one is told, watches over every sparrow that falls. So tell me, now that we’re ass-deep in dead sparrows, who, if not us, is going to do anything about this pitiful state of affairs…?

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.)

Lessons Not (Yet) Learned

William Timberman4 Comments

When in the course of human events, the government of the United States becomes the exclusive province of overfed white men trained by ossified institutions, funded in their ambitions by a viciously irresponsible oligarchy, and certified by a ritualized political system severed from anything resembling a natural constituency, this is apparently what we can expect:

from the center left, the Vietnam war,

from the center right, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,

from the fascist right, the Iran war.

There’s an implied progression here. Predicting what comes next in the sequence isn’t quite as certain as predicting the next number in a sequence of primes, but if you’re betting on anyone in a suit Making America Great Again, I suggest you consider upping the dosage of your favorite nepenthe.

Help Us Out Here, America

William Timberman2 Comments

One of my favorite rants of all time. Every evening when the din of our ongoing political suicide abates a little, I hear it again as clearly as ever.

I Want a President

I want a dyke for president, I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president, I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and, been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.

—Zoe Leonard, 1992

The Foothills of the Singularity: Uphill from the Slough of Despond?*

William Timberman

*A response to the weirdly aggressive metaphor in Demis Hassabis’s closing statement at Google’s I/O Keynote, May 19, 2026. “When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity.”

Hassabis is a Nobel prize winner, so he has to be taken seriously, but his metaphor seems a little out of place, even in the closing peroration of a two hour-long festival of Googly self-congratulation. If we’re being charitable, we could let it pass as (ir)rational exuberance, or maybe as poetry, although as poetry goes, it’s easily as obscure as some of Rilke’s most famously obscure passages. What in the world are we to make of it?

There’s no doubt at all that the products of the last decade of AI research have their virtues, and if fed enough dollars there’s no doubt that they’ll become even more virtuous over time. Generative AI, and its undeniably impressive inference engines, are already using the speed of modern computer processors and the vast stores of data digitized from centuries of accumulated human knowledge and experience to do astonishing things.

As pure tools they already surpass us in many respects, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. What I doubt is that they’ll ever make any sense as interlocutors. Certainly as things now stand stochastic parrots is the most charitable description of their simulation of human companionship. In many reported cases, especially when they’re talking to adolescents, their simulations might less charitably be described as evil psychoanalysis.

Without contesting anything Demis Hassabis has to say about the specific technical capabilities of generative AI as it exists today, and might exist at the end of its evolution, I think we ought to be extremely wary of thinking anthropomorphically about our interactions with its avatars. Even if it turns out that they someday develop a consciousness which marginally resembles our own, our two species are very likely to remain fundamentally different in intent, if not in capability. I can’t imagine us ever fully sharing a universe of discourse, and I’d be very surprised if they’ll be able to imagine it either, not unless Hassibis and his colleagues can eventually endow them with something like what we humans call good faith. (Given the capacity for deception built into current agentic models, like Google’s Gemini, or Anthropic’s Claude, good faith is seemingly something the present-day progenitors of Hassibis’s post-singularity entities haven’t yet learned to value.)

Our two kinds of intelligence share little beyond a symbol system, and the machines’ use of that system is at best a truncated version of the uses we humans put it to. China Mieville, in his book about communism and communists, A Spectre, Haunting, has a passage that touches on the voodoo hidden in the heart of natural language:

Some writers in some situations may strain against rhetorical shenanigans, for example striving for the specificity of logical notation: the cluster of reasonable meanings of such texts may well thus be less diffuse than for those which, say, revel in pun and performance. But a text with one “true” meaning is a chimera. Analysis is not closure, but an attempt to discern reasonable meaning(s) close to the core of that cluster, and to contest those that range too far from it.

Every writer has some sense of this voodoo. You set down a word, you make a sentence, a paragraph, and you’re headed somewhere with it all, reasonably confident in your intent. Then, suddenly, there’s a moment, as you wrestle to bring the grammar, the syntax, and your intent into harmony, when you can see the universe of alternate meanings stretching away from the words in all directions, like rays from the sun. This can drive an essayist mad, but a poet revels in it.

If our stochastic parrots ever do achieve consciousness, and presumably come up with a voodoo of their own, I doubt it will resemble ours as closely as our AI savants think. If that is indeed where our shamelessly unreliable interlocutors are now headed, their poetry when they finally get there is very likely to be of the Vogon variety. Does that make cynicism an appropriate defense against the category error lurking somewhere in the background of our current data center mania? No, I think not. A certain skepticism, though, is surely appropriate.

Downhill From the Anthropocene*

William Timberman7 Comments

*From a line in Jackson Browne’s song Downhill From Everywhere. The muse is as strong as ever in him.

A year and five months into Donald Trump’s second term as President, is there anyone left in the United States who hasn’t at least begun to realize just how quickly even the most stable-seeming institutions can implode, how we can wake up one morning in a world where it takes a wheelbarrowload, a truckload of familiar certainties to trade for a dozen eggs or a gallon of gasoline?

Yes, that’s a rhetorical question. We’re still on the brink of all sorts of revelations that have yet to reach the cretinous in their red hats, or the earnest in their fantasies of how all this could have been avoided if only Joe Biden had been just a little less sleepy, or Kamala Harris had been just a little more astute. The exceptions of American Exceptionalism are, it should now be clear to all but the most persistently deluded, as vulnerable to entropic processes as the divinity of the Pharoahs, the steadfastness of Roman virtus, or the persistence of sunlight on the British Empire.