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…?
The Calliope of Dread
Nazis, the AfD, and “Christian” Democrats
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
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.)
Lessons Not (Yet) Learned
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”
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
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*
*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.
Signs of the Apocalypse
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
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.