The Congress of Ratfuckers
Lest We Forget
Iuvenes Dum Sumus
The Real Trans Menace
Donald Trump came out of his mother’s body an innocent, as we all do. Eighty years later, he teeters on the edge of the grave, a bloated sack of depravities few, if any of us can fully comprehend.
There’s a great sadness in this transition, as well as a great evil, both of which we not only witnessed but many of us actually endorsed. We should keep this in mind as we nurture our own children. If it’s true that no person is an island, entire of itself, then it’s also true that every part of the human archipelago is at least partly our responsibility.
Now We Wait
Emily St. John Mandel: a Brief Appreciation
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
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
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
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.)
A “Significant Security Incident”
So Sam, your sandboxed model ran off and plundered Hugging Face without even leaving you a note, eh? Is that what I’m hearing? Does that mean that the hippies were right, that information really does want to be free? It’s kinda like what that old guy said, I guess:
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
to have an ungrateful child
(Cue sardonic laughter.)
Balogun
Three things need to be said:
- Folarin Balogun wanted to play. He’s devoted his young life to the pursuit of excellence in his sport, and shouldn’t be blamed for the corruption of those who govern the tournaments he and the national team participate in.
- The foul was serious, but did not appear to have been intentional. He probably shouldn’t have been shown a red card. For better or worse, though, the referee is the referee. That should have been the end of it.
- FIFA is, at best, a rickety institution, and Donald Trump could fuck up an anvil. We may not be able to stop him from wrecking things he doesn’t understand, but not even a comic book patriotism requires us to endorse his desecrations.
The Sin of Pride
I once owned a raw silk sports jacket
I once owned a pair of cordovan wingtips
I once owned a Meerschaum pipe
More than once
I’ve found myself in places
Where history was being made
Saying this
I’m reminded of a French cartoon
I saw once, while waiting
For something
Momentous to happen
Four panels
In the first three
One stick figure waves a
Triumphant hand
And says to a second stick figure
Ma maison
Ma voiture
Ma femme
In the fourth
The second stick figure
Bends over, points to
His own
Stick figure ass
And says
Mon cul
Yes
That is it exactly