A master of profound linguistic necromancy. The equal of William Gibson, but with an even greater range. One is grateful to be a member of the same species, if only an honorary member….
Belaboring the Obvious
Josh Hawley Redux
I’ve made an interesting, if not altogether surprising discovery in watching YouTube snippets of Jack Smith’s torment in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s latest kangaroo court proceedings. It seems that Josh Hawley isn’t just a weasel, but is also, along with John Kennedy (the Dixie John Kennedy), a tireless purveyor of professional grade stupidity. Such people should not exist, although the wise person does have to make allowances for living in a universe which seems to find our entire species faintly ridiculous.
Election Day…
…a day to bring confusion to our enemies. As you vote, remember that we didn’t choose to be their enemies. They chose to punish us for being who we are. That was a mistake, and today is an opportunity to show them what that mistake will cost them if they persist in it. We should take advantage of our opportunity gladly, but if, at the end of the day, we should prevail, let us remember not to gloat, but to keep on keeping on until the last of our tormentors finds something more honorable to do with their lives.
I Need a Flux Capacitor
Ten years forward to the singularity? Sure, why not? Or maybe back to those halcyon days of…of….
Yeah, okay then—sturdy shoes, earplugs, and a Gandalf stick. Onward we plod. As the lady with the starched hair once said: “There is no alternative.”
Lest We Forget
The Congress of Ratfuckers
Not Technically Treason
Despite the understandable hysteria on the center left, Donald Trump’s geopolitical betrayals are not treason. The U.S. isn’t actually at war with any of the greasy dictators that he’s put us all at risk to curry favor with, so technically they aren’t enemies. Even though he’s giving aid and comfort to them, and definitely deserves to be put somewhere where he can’t contribute to the torture of innocents, he doesn’t actually seem to be at risk of being marched out of the White House at gunpoint by the forces of an irate U.S. general staff. (After Hegseth’s purges of any general officer with more than two neurons, a military coup has never seemed all that likely anyway, no matter what Trump and his dumbfuckery end up costing us.) This is a mixed blessing even for those of us who, in our allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, have always held the principle of civilian control of the military to be sacred.
I, for one, will hold to my principles, but I’ll also say that for the first time in my life, the shame of being a citizen of the United States of America, a country that elected Donald Trump twice, is overwhelming. Redemption is still possible, I suppose, but at this point I’d rate the possibility of it coming in my lifetime as slim to none.
Unbidden Bits—October 18, 2026
There is one thing that billionaires can teach us. If we ever reach a point in life where we can accept a waiter’s obsequious praise as confirmation of our status, we will never see it coming. (Yes, that it—the one with the hood and the scythe.)
Progress on Donald Trump’s Bucket List
√ 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.
Mortal Doubting
The Atlantic has published a new interview today by David Brooks, entitled Do Human Beings Have Souls? He isn’t asking me (he’s asking Shelly Kagan), but if he were, I’d say some do, some don’t, and with some it’s hard to tell. There’s no doubt in my mind that James Baldwin did, and that Donald Trump doesn’t. Further tests will probably have to be run on David Brooks.
Conversations with the New Siri
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 many customer’s homes now 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.