What a week! The velocity of life has kept me from writing, and that’s probably a good thing for my mental health, as well as your time management, and avoidance of rabbit holes regarding the shocking shrinking of Mercury.
Let me start with this. If I, who struggles to run two miles without collapsing, were to affix a “26.2” sticker on the back of my Subaru, who in the actual running community would enforce the stolen valor rule, “thou shalt not boast of marathons thou hast not run?” I mean, if a 2006 Oldsmobile with a 26.2 circle on the bumper parks in the closest space to the McDonalds entrance, and a large woman with cankles emerges from the car, does anyone have the right to shout “hey! rip that sticker off!”? Or do they simply wait and come back with a razor blade to scrape it off themselves?
This rule can apply to so many areas of life. On Twitter (okay, X), if your handle starts with “astro,” it’s taken to mean you’re an astronaut. Ask @astro_clay, or @astro_timpeake, or @astro_petit (the Houston @Astros don’t count). Can the astronaut community object to some poser using the @astro handle? What say ye, philosopher god-emperor Elon Musk?
More to the point: Does Pete Hegseth get to really be the Secretary of War, or can the Senate decide to end his continuing act of stolen competence, or at least stolen sobriety? Then again, our president was recently caught on camera viewing a large poster that appeared to say “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED” onboard Air Force One. I kid you not.
A judge has not yet ruled on a lawsuit filed by a Kennedy Center board member to enjoin the president from taking a Cat 330 SB and making rubble on banks of the Potomac. But when has anyone ever stopped Donald J. Trump from tearing stuff down? There’s even a story in the book “Art and Crime: The Fight Against Looters, Forgers, and Fraudsters in the High-Stakes Art World” about Trump buying the Bonwit Teller building in 1979. He promised the Metropolitan Museum of Art that he’d donate the limestone relief panels from the top of the 11-storey former department store. But those panels, along with the rest of that historic site, were blasted to oblivion without so much as a “sorry!”
(You’d think Trump would have had the taste to preserve the panels, of two disrobed women dancing with scarves. It’s just the kind of thing he’d put in his bedroom at Mar-a-Lago.)
One thing I found funny was who answered the journalist’s questions probing the Art Deco scandal: one “John Barron.” He told them the artwork, according to three independent experts—“which top men?”—had “no artistic value,” and would have cost $32,000 and a week and a half delay to remove. Donald J. Trump later upped the “Barron” cost estimate to $500,000.
The next day “Barron” was quoted as saying that the bronze latticework that had hung over the entrance to the Bonwit Teller building was also missing: “We don’t know what happened to it.” The artist Otto J. Teegan, who had designed the piece in 1930, responded, “It’s not a thing you could slip in your coat and walk away with.” “It’s odd that a person like Trump, who is spending $80 million or $100 million on this building, should squirm that it might cost as much as $32,000 to take down those panels.”
Rabbit hole excursion ends here.
Now onto more valor scalping, this time Moonraker style.
The U.S. has, for the first time, admitted we have weapons in space. Not being totally naïve, I believe that America has had some kind of killer satellite capability for some time now. But the admission itself is telling.
Does it mean that, as I predicted last year, that the Outer Space Treaty is dead? Under that treaty, carefully negotiated by the late 1960s Soviet Union, it is not strictly against the rules to put weapons in space. It’s only a violation to put nuclear weapons in space. Or to use the moon for military purposes, or to claim any part of the moon under sovereign control of a nation.
I think Trump wants to do all of the above. I think the Russians, and more importantly, the Chinese, know this. I think they will ride this horse into the sunset until such time when they can push Trump to withdraw from the treaty.
See, the president can in fact withdraw from a treaty, unilaterally. President Jimmy Carter did it with the Taiwan Mutual Defense Treaty, which was ratified by the Senate in 1954. The Supreme Court declined to intervene, leaving the treaty dead. Since the Carter administration, the Justices have never taken up the issue, so presidents are free to cancel treaties, though it takes the Senate to make new ones into law. (One exception is the NATO Treaty, into the enabling Act Congress specifically wrote language preventing the president from withdrawing.)
All it would take is President Trump announcing that the United States is withdrawing from the Outer Space Treaty, and boom, one year later, it’s done. Of course, once it’s known we plan to do it, the Chinese and the Russians will race to see which one can withdraw first, and the treaty will be effectively dead, leaving the orbit around this blue marble vulnerable to nukes, and whatever other AI-based killer robots aren’t already up there waiting to zot us out of existence.
Killer doomsday AI is a hoax, right? That’s what the president wants you to think. Of course, I will admit that there is a strong incentive for companies like OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, Google/Alphabet, and Meta to play up the doomsday scenarios and call for regulation. “Regulatory capture” is actually a thing. If you run a trillion dollar company, it’s what you want to keep a moat around your products and services. This racket has been around since the railroads ran the Interstate Commerce Commission, which was created to, umm, regulate the railroads.
The AI makers want a federal regulator for AI, and a structure for them to report rogue malicious models that make it into the wild. Then the regulator gives them cover from lawsuits and unlimited liability for destroying half the world (or, more likely, draining your bank account). This also keeps smaller upstarts from stealing the market by deploying actual real neurosymbolic AI which approaches AGI, versus the slop LLMs we now have. If the current crop of data center queens is dangerous, well then a functioning reasoning engine with true associative and critical thinking capability could be orders of magnitude more dangerous (but it wouldn’t be, because such an AI would understand good from evil, which the current ones can never do). The regulator would be forced to shut down such forbidden things, at least until the trillion dollar behemoths can buy it on the cheap.
In this particular case, the LLMs are actually a danger, and putting them in charge of space-based weapons, or the 60,000 cameras (including many, many Flock cameras) blanketing Atlanta, is the act of a fool or a tyrant (or both). So let’s just say downplaying that danger might not be the best thing.
“Dad, I want to be an influencer!”
Sigh. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be YouTubers…
Kevin D. Williamson, who was gracious enough to drive down to Atlanta, leaving his wife and four boys—three of them triplets—deep in diapers, to meet with our local Dispatch Junto group, recently wrote this about social media influencers:
I do not think that anybody who is not mentally damaged in some way really believes that putting a bumper sticker on a 15-year-old Subaru is going to help us “Free Tibet” or “COEXIST” or combat climate change or whatever. But I see many, many of those stickers, and they all read the same way to me: “Look at me caring about the poor and the oppressed more than you do!”
The piece is titled “Influencers are Schmucks.”
Before I strike that hot iron, let me make an observation about goys casually throwing around Yiddish invectives. My mother was an artist with Yiddish curses. She could weave such exquisite streams of Eastern European Jewish profanity that would turn a Black Sea sailor’s ears red. Until I grew up, I actually thought there was no purpose to Yiddish other than swearing. Seriously, just Google “Yiddish curses” and when you finish that rabbit hole, come back in about 12 hours.
Goys should not casually use the word “schmuck.” There are much more nuanced and appropriate words, like “momser,” or “shmegegge,” or “pisher,” or “putz.” A “schmuck” is the same thing as a “schlong” and in fact, interchangeable with “putz,” though the latter word is much more relatable to the English word “pr**k,” meaning what you think it means. I think Kevin’s essay should be titled “Influencers are Shmegegges,” (jerks) but that’s why I am not an editor. My headlines are all fakakta. (Go look it up yourself; God cleaned up my potty mouth decades ago.)
Now, let me take up the imagery of a 15-year-old Subaru with whatever kind of bumper or window sticker you might see on one. I have driven Subarus since my oldest child was a baby. We had a Honda Accord that couldn’t get out of its own way, and on the way home from the hospital with the new baby, we had an encounter with a momser on the interstate. After that, I found something you don’t see anymore: a Subaru Forester XT Turbo. It’s an SUV with a turbocharged boxer engine, like they have in the WRX. This is no minivan mom machine. We only sold it because it got 16 miles per gallon on a good day, and we would go broke filling the tank.
We’ve owned many Subarus since. We currently have a Crosstrek Hybrid that gets about 40 miles per gallon, and my oldest son has a 10-year-old Legacy. Subarus are safe, reliable, well-built all-wheel-drive vehicles that carry some kind of trope where only far-left, rainbow-wearing, gender-confused communists drive them. I still wish I owned my beloved 2011 STI. It was my race car, and it sat in the garage for two years gathering dust. I miss it.
So, writers: if you want to make a point about concern trolling, or virtue signaling from the back of a liberal vehicle, use a Prius, or a Volvo. Leave us Subaru owners alone. Conservatives do drive Subarus. Malicious AI is not a hoax. Inflation is real (it is why you should drive a hybrid or EV, versus paying $4/gallon at the pump). The Kennedy Center will fall to the Trump curse. The moon is ours. And the Outer Space Treaty is all but dead.
All that can happen now is the Republicans keeping both houses of Congress in November, and then the syncretic key to unlock every religion’s eschaton, the end of the world, ragnarok, the Rapture, and Tom Cruise evolving into a Thetan, will shine from the heavens like a constellation of Starlink V3 satellites.
Look up. And beware the valor scalpers.
It's been a while since I've seen someone shpritz a spiel as well as you just did.
I always heard it said/saw it spelled it as farkakte or verkakte, rooted from farkakt.