√ 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.

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.

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…

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.

A tan suit, yellow shoes, and an American flag pocket hanky? Really? (This is a form of lethality I admit I'm not familiar with, but if it does away with the Tatebros look, the camogimmecap look, and the goatbeard look, I'm all for it.)

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....

Even if they kill me, I'm surely gonna die laughing:

Many German Christians, like their American co-religionists, seem much less Christian to an outside observer than they pretend to be.... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Excerpted from Der Spiegel's newsletter Die Lage am Abend, September 24, 2026: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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.

Police chief says officers responded to a man with injuries to head, neck and teeth on Howard and made contact with agents involved.

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 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 provinces of the country.

Donaald Trump is a perfect example of the fatal solipcism 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?

Turns out Elon Musk has TWO hats: For visiting Washington, DC:Trump Was Right About Everything For visiting Magdeburg, Sachsen-Anhalt:Hitler hatte im allen Recht

When over time the government of the United States becomes the exclusive province of overfed white men trained by ossified institutions, funded in their ambitions by a vicious 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,

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 isto have an ungrateful child (Cue sardonic laughter.)

One of my favorite rants of all time. Every evening when the din of our ongoing political suicide abates a little, I hear it again as clearly as ever. I want a dyke for president, I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn't have a choice about getting leukemia.

What of the future that, as William Gibson famously told us, is already here, but is also unevenly distributed? In a cultural age characterized largely by AI and the revival of fascism, I find any number of pundits feeling out of sight for the ends of literacy, civility, and their own positions at the bottom of the funnel of cultural relevance.

Three things need to be said: Folarin Balogun wanted to play. He's devoted his young life to 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 should not have been shown a red card.

MaxiMe: Donald Trump Toadies-in-Chief: JD Vance, Marco Rubio (NB: In the end, there can be only one) Secretary of Manly Prancing: Pete Hegseath Director of National Stupidity: Bill Pulte Eminence Grise: Stephen Miller Patient Zero: RFK Jr. Barely Useful Idiot: Kash Patel Press Here: Katherine Leavitt Chief Heddahopperin: Laura Loomer Not the Wartime Consigliere: Ivanka Trump Ambassador to the Courts of Lost Causes: Jared Kushner Cryptonomicanoe and Bagman Too: Elon Musk (ret.) Vanilla Ice: Markwayne Mullin

The essence of stupidity: You vote for a czar. You get a palace full of would-be Rasputins. You believe that Fortune has smiled upon you.

She believes the warning was related to a post about the ICE agent who shot Renee Good in Minneapolis.

I once owned a raw silk sports jacketI once owned a pair of cordovan wingtipsI once owned a Meerschaum pipeMore than onceI've found myself in placesWhere history was being made Saying thisI'm reminded of a French cartoonI saw once, while waitingFor somethingmomentous to happen Four panels In the first threeOne stick figure waves a…

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?

Children are not property. Period. Full stop.