The Calliope of Dread

Not Technically Treason

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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.

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.

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…?

Nazis, the AfD, and “Christian” Democrats

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Many German Christians, like their American co-religionists, seem much less Christian to an outside observer than they pretend to be….

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Excerpted from Der Spiegel’s newsletter Die Lage am Abend, September 24, 2026:

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Was Realpolitik zwischen CDU und AfD aber noch für Auswüchse haben kann, zeigt sich nun in Heidenau im Kreis Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge.

Dort fordern Stadträte von AfD und CDU in einem fraktionsübergreifenden Beschlussantrag, Stolpersteine »im öffentlichen Straßen- und Gehwegbereich« künftig abzulehnen. Viele Bürger, Angehörige und Initiativen, heißt es in dem Antrag, würden diese Form der Erinnerung an Opfer des Nationalsozialismus als »nicht angemessen« empfinden. Und, sinngemäß: Wer gedenken will, soll auf den Friedhof gehen.

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Just what excesses the realpolitik between the CDU and AfD can still produce is now being shown in Heidenau in the district of Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge.

In a bipartisan motion, city councilors from the AfD and CDU there are calling for a ban on the placement of Stolpersteine (stumbling stones, i.e., ten-centimeter concrete cubes bearing brass plates inscribed with the names and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution) “in public streets and sidewalks.” The motion states that many citizens, relatives, and public initiatives consider this form of remembrance for victims of National Socialism “inappropriate.” In essence, it argues that those who wish to commemorate (the victims of Hitler and his National Socialist Regime) should go to the cemetery.

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.

A “Significant Security Incident”

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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.)

When It Comes To Agentic AI, If Is Still a Very Big Word, Even If When Is Not

William Timberman

As expected, Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote yesterday morning debuted a new, generative AI-powered Siri that Apple claims can significantly extend the capabilities of any human being with a late model iPhone in their pocket. We’ve heard this before, of course, most infamously in Apple’s WWDC keynote of two years ago. Should we believe that this time around they can actually deliver on the promises they made then? I think not, not at least until they can explain in reasonably granular detail how they plan to address what I still see as three glaringly obvious failure modes for their new agentic Siri.

First, to be even remotely usable in a real-world context, Siri’s promised conversational and multimodal capabilities must be 100% reliable. If they are not, we may wind up being held hostage by a tool that can collect and assesses complex data, draw conclusions from that data, and act on those conclusions too fast for us to predict or escape the consequences of any cognitive mistakes they make along the way.

Second, to do for us what Apple promises, to carry out complex multimodal tasks on on our behalf without any oversight or guidance from us beyond an initial natural language request, the new agentic Siri requires full access to the personal data stored on our computing devices, and full control of the applications running on them. Having presumably overseen the testing necessary to assure that Siri’s responses to our requests can be trusted, Apple seems confident that it can grant Siri this level of access and control to its own applications. For third-party applications, though, the situation is more complex. If, for example, Siri needs to schedule an appointment for an iPhone user, it already knows how to access the data in Apple’s calendar app, and how to add additional data to it. If a user chooses another calendar app as their default, Siri must rely on a feature of Apple’s operating systems called App Intents, which Apple describes as follows:

With App Intents, you express your app’s actions and data in a structured way that makes them discoverable by Apple Intelligence and provides deeper integration with system features people use frequently.

The problem here is that Apple is imposing a new and potentially expensive burden on third-party developers, Small, independent developers may lack the resources necessary to test and deploy Apple’s new guidelines as soon or as thoroughly as Apple expects, and large corporate developers, those who consider themselves Apple’s peers, may prefer their own cross-platform solutions and ignore Apple’s agentic ambitions for Siri as long as they can. (To be fair, in the continuing absence of any but the most rudimentary cross-platform user-interface standards, this seems likely to be the fate of any platform-specific approach to agentic AI deployment, not just Apple’s.)

These frictions between what Apple expects and what will actually happen may eventually reach some sort of accommodation. At this stage in the large-scale deployment of AI agents, though, an ordinary mortal relying on Siri to schedule a ride to a critical medical appointment in another city, transfer complex documents to multiple clients using different computing platforms, or book a two week travel itinerary to cities on another continent, may find themselves in more trouble than anyone, including Apple, is currently able to predict.

Third, it seems clear that very soon our computing devices will not only know everything about us that can be encompassed by digital databases, but will also be able to act in the world as though they were us without any consent on our part other than the implied consent of activating their agentic functions. What happens if we lose control of such a device? Nothing I’ve heard from Apple or any other company has offered anything to convince me that they’ve fully imagined the consequences of millions of digital Doppelgängers suddenly let loose in the world. Are we really sure we want to be continually subjected to an environment in which Apple and Google get to do the fucking around, and we’re left with no choice but to do the finding out? YMMV, but for my part, I’d at least like to be kissed first.

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.