A Nurse, A Drunk, The Pope And A Surgeon Walk Into Shanghai’s Pulmonary Hospital April 19, 2026April 18, 2026 JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE A NURSE . . . . . . doesn’t mean you’re a productive member of society, says this must-watch MAGA maiden (2 minutes). KASH PATEL One of my dormmates a million years ago was Efrem Zimbalist III. His dad — whose name you can likely deduce — starred in “The FBI“ throughout our college years. The FBI on TV was all about sobriety, integrity, and incorruptibility — as it was in real life until February 21 of last year, when this guy was sworn in. As profiled in The Atlantic, a sad, dangerous joke. CHINA Gloria: “Given yesterday’s China post, I thought you might want to know about a Spanish thoracic surgeon I follow on Instagram who spends six months of the year at the Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital, the largest of its kind in the world. The other six months he travels the world teaching and operating. He has developed a method by which he makes just a single small incision to remove tumors, etc. It’s called the UNIportal method and is revolutionary, because in ~48 hours the patient is home. Old-school thoracic surgery is very painful with a long recovery time. It is in China where he has helped develop the robots for these operations. Silicon Valley turned him down!!! Check this out. It’s in Spanish, but you’ll get the gist.” TRUMP FOR POPE! The Lincoln project imagines his campaign ad (90 seconds). TRUMP FOR SURGEON! Bob F. saw this (as we all did) . . . . . . and then prompted his A.I. as follows: President Trump recently posted an AI image of himself as Jesus, then claimed he thought it was supposed to be him as a doctor, caring for people. Please create an image of him as a doctor . . . and write a speech that Trump might give regarding the original depiction. After just a little tweaking, here’s the image Bob got . . . And here’s the speech . . . Thank you, thank you very much. Great to be here. Now before we begin, I have to say—because the fake news, they’re out there, they’re already twisting things—they said, “Oh, he wanted to be Jesus.” I said, “What are you talking about?” I never said that. Never even thought it. Fake news. Totally fake. I was a doctor all along. A healer. Helping people. That’s what this is about. But they don’t want to report that. They never do. And frankly—look, I’ll say it—Jesus never made a good deal, okay? I mean, think about it. If it were me, I would’ve negotiated eternal life for everybody—no dying, no sacrifice, no problem. Done. Easy. That’s a deal. And the Ten Commandments? I love them, very strong, very important—but ten? That’s a lot. I would’ve negotiated it down to six. Maybe seven. Believe me, there’s a few in there that we don’t need. People agree with me And then I look at this image—folks, it’s incredible. People are saying it’s one of the greatest paintings ever made. Maybe the greatest. I see it and I say, “Wow… that’s Dr. Trump.” Very official. Very strong. Right out of central casting. The best doctor—maybe better than all of them, honestly. And you know, I went to Penn—very good school, University of Pennsylvania. Great school. Top of the line. And they have one of the best medical schools anywhere. Some people say the best. And I was there, I understood it all, I really did. I could have been a doctor, easily. I chose a different path—turned out pretty well, I think—but I could have done it. No question. Look at this—white coat, stethoscope, everything. Looks natural, doesn’t it? Like I’ve been doing it for years. And the patient? Looks a little like Jon Stewart, doesn’t he? He’s doing unbelievably well. He was in rough shape—very rough—but now? Total turnaround. Doctors are calling me, they’re saying, “Sir, how did you do that?” I say, “It’s just talent. Natural talent.” And you’ve got everybody around—nurses, soldiers, great Americans—they’re watching, they’re amazed. They’re saying, “This guy knows what he’s doing.” And they’re right. I do. The lighting—have you noticed? Beautiful lighting. Very powerful. Some people say it looks almost… heavenly. I didn’t say that—but people are saying it. And I’ll tell you, it makes the whole thing look very special. And of course, the American flag—big, beautiful, waving. Eagles flying, jets overhead. It’s like we’re not just healing one person—we’re healing the whole country. We’re making America healthy again. That’s what we’re doing. But again, the fake news—they don’t want to talk about that. They say, “Oh, he’s not a real doctor.” Very nasty. I say, “Look at the results.” You can’t argue with results. The results are incredible. So I want to thank the artist—whoever made this, fantastic job. Truly incredible. We may have to hang it somewhere very important. Maybe in the new ballroom. We’ll see. Thank you very much, everybody. Stay healthy—because if not, Dr. Trump might have to come back. And believe me, you’ll be in very good hands. The best hands.
The Chinese Century April 18, 2026April 18, 2026 ROBOTS The Chinese outnumber us 4 to 1 in people and the entire world in robots. Why would we expect always to remain the largest economy and the most powerful nation on earth? And that’s okay — not every nation can be forever #1. In terms of happiness, we’re not even in the Top 20. As I’ve argued before, the American Century began in 1917 when we entered World War I and ended exactly on time 100 years later when the current president was sworn in. I think you’ll find this New York Times “The Daily” ear-popping: How China Made Itself Tariff-Proof (32 minutes). (If you’re not a Times subscriber, here’s the executive summary: they are way ahead of everybody — even the Germans and Japanese — in “dark” factories that need no humans . . . and in using robots to manufacture more robots to widen that lead further . . . and in part it’s their response to the one-child policy that has left them with tens of millions of highly educated young people who refuse to do factory jobs. How ironic is that? A Chinese labor shortage.) To me, the top line is that we’d better find a way to be nice to each other and avoid the Thucydides Trap. What about a world in which we and China cooperated to enforce sovereignty, eradicate poverty, solve the climate crisis and — most challenging of all — keep A.I. from brushing us all aside, save the few it might keep for research and amusement? BILLBOARDS This simple leaving MAGA billboard in Spokane, Washington, made the local news and went viral on Reddit, driving 80,000 visits to the leavingMAGA site. It’s hard to leave MAGA, as founder Rich Logis can tell you first-hand. For years, he was one of their biggest boosters. It’s a little less hard now that there’s a community of like-minded people to welcome them home. PEDOPHILES Any word on the files in which the Trump name appears more than 38,000 times? Any word on the young teen’s accusation that has not gone away? MARTHA NEVER SAID THIS But she may have thought it.
The Dark Triad April 17, 2026 OPRT Oportun Appoints Doug Bland as Chief Executive Officer to Lead Next Phase of Growth and Profitability Famous last words, perhaps, but I’m holding on for a much higher price a year or two from now. THE WORST OF THE WORST ICE Has Detained Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé, an 85-Year-Old Widow, in her nightgown — but hey. THE DARK TRIAD This letter was sent to the bipartisan leadership of Congress on Monday: Dear Senate Majority Leader Thune, Senate Minority Leader Schumer, Speaker Johnson, and House Minority Leader Jeffries: We write to you today with a sense of urgency that we do not use lightly. The behavior and rhetoric of President Donald Trump have crossed a threshold that demands the immediate and bipartisan attention of Congress. This is not a partisan assessment. It is a judgment grounded in observable fact, consistent professional assessment, and the constitutional responsibilities that your offices carry. President Trump exhibits what forensic mental health experts have, across dozens of independent assessments, identified as the “Dark Triad” of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Rather than constituting a clinical diagnosis, this trait-based assessment is grounded in behavioral observation and is particularly useful for assessing the level of danger an individual poses in a political leadership position. We do not offer this as a clinical verdict. We offer it as the considered judgment of a substantial body of professional opinion, based on well-researched evidence that is consistent, accumulating, and impossible to dismiss. What makes this more than an academic matter is what predictably happens when this personality structure collides with immovable obstacles. The clinical literature is clear: individuals with Dark Triad profiles, when confronted with situations they cannot control or escape, do not recalibrate. They escalate. The psychological imperative to relieve narcissistic collapse overrides strategic calculation, concern for consequences, and ordinary self-restraint. Rage surges to domination. Impulsivity overrides caution. The urgent need to extinguish psychological pain eclipses every other consideration. We are watching this dynamic unfold in real time. The President’s recent public communications have been, by any normal standard of political discourse, alarming. His posts demanding that Iran “open the fuckin’ strait, you crazy bastards” and his threat to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages,” adding that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” are not the rhetoric of calculated geopolitical pressure. They are the expressions of a man in profound psychological distress who is reaching for the most extreme retaliatory threats available to him. That these statements were addressed to an adversary in the context of an active military confrontation makes them not merely shocking but profoundly dangerous. President Trump has now ordered a US naval blockade of Iran — an action that has sent world oil prices soaring and placed the United States in direct opposition to the international community. His ongoing actions carry the potential to trigger a global economic catastrophe, draw in regional and great powers, and ignite a wider conflict with consequences that no one can bound. These orders are being issued without adequate deliberation, without congressional authorization, and in a context in which the President’s judgment is, by every visible measure, severely compromised.* We urge three specific actions. First, Congress must immediately retake its constitutional authority over war. The bombing of Iran and the initiation of a naval blockade — acts of war under both US and international law — cannot be authorized by presidential fiat. Article I of the Constitution vests in Congress the sole power to declare war and to regulate commerce with foreign nations. The Framers intended Congress to deliberate upon and be accountable for precisely such consequential actions. Congress must assume its constitutional authority now, before further escalation renders the question moot. Second, congressional leadership — on a bipartisan basis — must convene urgent consultations with senior administration officials, including the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of State, and the Director of National Intelligence. The purpose is not routine oversight. It is to create a circuit breaker capable of preventing escalation toward catastrophe, including the potential use of nuclear weapons. Those officials have their own constitutional and statutory obligations. Congress should insist on those obligations and provide a forum in which they can be exercised. Third, Congress should formally initiate consultation with the Vice President and Cabinet regarding the President’s fitness for office under Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. We do not prejudge the outcome. We are not calling for the President’s immediate removal. We are calling for the process that the Constitution itself provides for this contingency: when a President’s capacity to discharge the duties of office is in question and poses a potential imminent danger to the nation. The Amendment exists because those who drafted it recognized that the question of presidential incapacity would occasionally arise, and that it required a constitutional answer rather than a political improvisation. He is a constitutional emergency. The mechanisms for addressing such an emergency exist. They were placed in the Constitution and its amendments for moments precisely like this one. We recognize the gravity of what we are asking. We ask it because the gravity of the situation demands it. A President who publicly threatens to destroy a foreign civilization, who launches a bombing campaign and then imposes a naval blockade without congressional authorization, and who shows every behavioral sign of a personality in acute crisis is not merely a political problem. He is a constitutional emergency. The mechanisms for addressing such an emergency exist. They were placed in the Constitution and its amendments for moments precisely like this one. The war with Iran will not wait. The escalation dynamics of this active military confrontation will not wait. The psychological conditions driving the President’s decisions will not improve under pressure — they will worsen. We urge you to act without delay. The Constitution gives you the tools. Your oath of office assigns you the responsibility. Respectfully, James Gilligan, M.D. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine; Former President, International Association of Forensic Psychotherapy Prudence L. Gourguechon, M.D. Former President, American Psychoanalytic Association; Former Vice President, World Mental Health Coalition Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div. President, World Mental Health Coalition; Co-Founder, Preventing Violence Now; Former Faculty of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Former Faculty of Law and Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine James R. Merikangas, M.D. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, George Washington University; Research Consultant, National Institute of Mental Health; Co-Founder, American Neuropsychiatric Association; Former President, American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists *The blockade was first proposed, I think, by Richard Haas, whom you might know from Morning Joe, and may not be as ill-considered abs the authors imply.
Project 2029 April 16, 2026April 15, 2026 CONFIRMED FAKE As suspected, the speech I posted yesterday was generated by AI. But spot on! (Free yesterday, it’s now been placed behind a paywall.) GOOD NEIGHBORS Georgia Defeats All 15 Anti-LGBT Bills. Because “love is love,” and why not “live and let live”? Beating up on the gays is not the sure political winner it once was. PROJECT 2029 No one is writing Project 2029. So [this guy’s begun to] (9 fast-paced minutes). BONUS Miles Taylor: Years from now, if the world order collapses, historians will trace it back to something more mundane than a nuclear war or a deadly pathogen. “It began,” they’ll write, “with a single man’s insatiable need for chaos.” A weapon of mass distraction, if you will. I watched that “weapon” get built, up close, during my time at the Department of Homeland Security. There was hardly a day we were allowed to focus on our job of protecting hundreds of millions of Americans. Instead, more days than not were spent scurrying around Washington, dealing with the fallout of foolish presidential missives. As an example, let me tell you about Friday, December 21, 2018. I walked into the Oval Office for what should’ve been a straightforward win. . . . Join Indivisible. Support the opposition.
Lessons From Hungary April 15, 2026April 15, 2026 I WAS HACKED If you get an invitation to a party, from my gmail account, don’t open it! Not that we wouldn’t have a great time, but this is a Russian hack that seems to be spreading. I was an idiot to fall for it. Sorry for any inconvenience. (If you did try to open it, change your Google password.) WAS BILL CLINTON HACKED? YouTube warns that this powerful speech contains “altered or synthetic content.” But even if Bill Clinton didn’t say all this about Trump and the Pope, as I suspect he did not (it’s too late tonight to check; I’ll likely report back tomorrow), I’m posting it anyway because it’s spot on — about events we know to be true. No need to watch it all. The first minute or three gives you this gist. COMPARATIVE CORRUPTION This comparison of the Bidens and the Trumps is devastating. You will enjoy! TRUMP’S BRILLIANT IRAN DEAL Under two minutes . . . and I’m pretty sure you’ll see where it’s heading before he gets there. Watch and share! LESSONS FROM HUNGARY Here’s How to Defeat Trumpism — advice from the New York Times editorial board. Join Indivisible’s What’s the Plan? call today at 3pm Eastern. Support the opposition! OH! AND DON’T FORGET TO SEND IN YOUR TAXES (OR YOUR FORM 4868 EXTENTSION) TODAY AND YOUR 1ST QUARTER 2026 ESTIMATED TAX, IF YOU OWE IT
Three Joyful Items April 11, 2026 I just loved Garrett Graff’s smart, uplifting column: The Pure Joy of Joy, subtitled: You can’t fake the happiness of Artemis II — or Zohran Mamdani. So much so that I clicked a few of the links within it . . . especially Tim Walz on “gutters” near the end. I also loved the clips YouTube’s algorithm fed me, one after the other, when the Tim Walz gutters clip ended: Mary Jo Mennella on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show Paul McCartney on Colbert Reacting to BTS Singing “Hey Jude” Have a beautiful Sunday. OH, WAIT! A BONUS SKIT! SNL: Trump signs new executive orders.
Flipping The House . . . TOMORROW April 11, 2026April 10, 2026 Miles Taylor: It would take only THREE House Republicans to stop Trump. Will any have the courage? Dozens of GOP Members of Congress are retiring. If a few decided to switch sides — even just temporarily — they could save democracy from a madman. . . . I’ll be the first to admit that this sounds like the kind of political fantasy that belongs in early 2000s television dramas. The West Wing, perhaps. But here’s what makes this more than just a fantasy: dozens of House Republicans have already decided they’re done. They’re retiring. Most are sick of working in politics. And I can personally attest that many of them despise Donald Trump — and are spooked by his recent rants (e.g. “a whole civilization will die tonight”). They see that he’s falling apart. In all, 39 GOP members have announced they won’t seek reelection. That number is closing in on the all-time record, and still growing. . . . Importantly, these members have no primary race to survive, no Trump endorsement to seek, and no MAGA base to placate back home. While some are running for higher office, the majority are leaving public life altogether. So what if just a handful of them decided to do something profound? To use their dwindling months in office to make decisions as a matter of personal conscience, not politics? That possibility — however remote it might seem — is partly why Speaker Mike Johnson is so nervous about his vote margin. All it would take is a single secret meeting of three of his Members to strip him of control. . . . → I’d like to think Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are in quiet talks with some of their former colleagues even as we speak. WE’RE “THE HOTTEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD,” AND YET . . . Consumer sentiment fell in April to the lowest level recorded in the 70-plus-year history of the University of Michigan’s survey Why is it only MAGA supporters who see how well everything is going? Our first Leaving MAGA billboard goes up in Austin Wednesday. THE MAGNIFICENT PEGGY NOONAN (only slightly condensed) In Gut We Trust Those social-media posts in the middle of the night. . . seemed so desperate, so cruel, and so Suez-like in their historical size and import. You know them well. On Tuesday, Donald Trump on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen but it probably will.” On Good Friday, “Our Military, the greatest and most powerful (by far!) in the World, hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!” On Easter Sunday, “Open the f— Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH.” He ended that post “Praise be to Allah.” The posts left his friends and foes slackjawed. I want to talk about why they were so horrifying. They constituted hitting a new bottom, a new and infernal, face-lit-by-flames bottom, in world communications. The posts weren’t showbiz, they were sinister. You destabilize the world when, as the American president, you say such things. You make all the babies in this delicately poised, always knock-down-able world less safe. You rob your own nation of a claim to moral seriousness in the military action in which it’s engaged: You are saying we’re not trying to protect life but plan to attack, and in the attacking kill noncombatants who are members of the targeted civilization. The moral high ground is relinquished. You lower the bar for all potential response. You encourage violent action by trumpeting your readiness for it. It bolsters the position of your enemies—their animus is justified, their commitment deepened. It allows them to pretend they’re fighting for the continuation of their people and not only the continuation of their regime. It’s even ineffective as a threat. The reason the “madman theory” worked for Richard Nixon, if it did, was that world leaders knew he wasn’t crazy but might be tripped into extreme behavior by an adversary’s intransigence. Donald Trump plays the part of the madman every day. His head fake would be sanity. If his advisers thought this was a good negotiating tactic—“Give ’em a little madman theory, Mr. President”—they really are hicks. Previous presidents haven’t always been lit by inner dignity, but all at least attempted to fake it in public, as a bow to the people and their presumably moral ways. They didn’t feel free to get revved up in the middle of the night and take their rage out for a walk to relieve itself on the sidewalk. Here I ask you to google “U.S. presidents at war, how they spoke and wrote.” Lincoln and FDR of course, but also Eisenhower and Korea, Reagan in the Cold War, both Bushes in their wars. This isn’t an exercise in nostalgia. If we don’t actively remember and summon past standards, we have no chance of getting them back, because we’ll have forgotten what they were, and the current fecal matter will be all we know and can continue. You unconsciously stand up straight in a cathedral. The art, the sweep, the ceilings are so high that you aspire even in your posture. You crouch down low to enter a darkened shack. The sound of our leadership now makes us all crouch too low. Why do we recoil when a leader is vulgar and violent in his language and thinking? Coarse language obviously implies coarse thinking, and no one wants that in a leader entrusted to bring peace and prosperity. Beyond that, throughout history political authority has come wrapped in a certain formality and ceremony. Dignity enhanced power. A British king even 500 years ago didn’t think himself free to speak in public like a fishmonger or a street whore. He had to present himself at a certain height so people would look up to him. As for threats, when you resort to them, you’re revealing you are uncertain of the sufficiency of your power. Real menace shuts its mouth. Napoleon acted as if a threat was information given to the enemy. He didn’t want to signal intent or commit to an action, he wanted the foe wondering what he’d do next. In the past, Trump supporters often received criticism of his language as if it were criticism of them. That didn’t happen this time. They know he was doing something they themselves wouldn’t do and don’t want. Tucker Carlson caught this when he challenged Mr. Trump the day after Easter: “Who do you think you are?” I think Mr. Trump shocked his followers. What he used this week was not the diction of the common man but the language of sociopathy. That isn’t how his supporters want the world to see him. It’s not what they want him to be. Beyond that, we haven’t learned much new about Mr. Trump during his Iran endeavor, it’s more a matter of “more so.” He operates as if he honestly believes we don’t need allies . . . but having and holding allies is simple prudence. They steady your position in moments of danger—they help you make the case and share the intelligence burden—and broaden your influence in peace. More than that, allies add legitimacy and moral authority. You’re acting with others, not only for yourself, and you’re going forward with shared values that imply historical meaning, which has its own force. Having allies means that when something bad happens you don’t stand alone. It is not sentimental to care about this, it is babyish to think it means nothing. Mr. Trump’s trust in his gut seems to have grown overwhelming—not in his reasoning power, not his analysis of intelligence data, but gut. George W. Bush was famously a gut player too, and having a good gut, a good brain and good judgment are a great boost in life and leadership. But it can’t be all gut. A lot of gut instinct is pattern recognition—I’ve lived long, experienced much, and know how this movie ends. But that means gut is weighted toward past experience. It can have limited utility in wholly new territory. Sometimes gut is mere emotion dressed up as instinct. Sometimes it’s wishful thinking that feels like conviction. Sometimes it conveniently pre-empts hard reasoning. You can trust your gut straight into catastrophe. IS THIS A GREAT COUNTRY, OR WHAT? Forbes Self-Made 250: The Greatest Living Self-Made Americans Have a great weekend.
Tax Prep April 10, 2026 I was going to write a column about taxes and then realized — hey, wait! I’ve got to DO them. So I skipped yesterday and cheat today by posting a few things I’ve been saving up: JOBS Young Graduates Face the Grimmest Job Market in Years Artificial intelligence could reshape work, but for now a low-hire, low-fire labor market is the main impediment for young people seeking employment. Andrew Yang – What Jobs Are Safe? [Not all that many!] DEFENDING DEMOCRACY A Hopium Conversation With Marc Elias. CORRUPTION Trump’s Economy: You’re Either an Insider or a Chump A lot of people are getting rich off the Trump presidency. Donald Trump himself tops the list, of course, but it also includes [a list follows]. You know who isn’t on that list? You. EPSTEIN Have they released and unredacted the files? I’ve been doing my taxes and may have missed it.
Rabies And Worse April 8, 2026April 7, 2026 The people of the world are suffering; but Trump, a certified egomaniac, is having the time of his life being the center of their attention. Watch Mark Warner, ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on reports of plans to scuttle the mid-terms. Before his segment: rabies and the CDC . . . cybersecurity . . . 10,000 veterans losing their homes . . . the just-married staff sergeant showing up at base with his new bride only to have ICE whisk her away. In all, it’s about 30 minutes if you listen at 1.3X speed (top left on the play bar); less if you stop after Senator Warner. At his unhinged boss’s direction, the VP goes to Hungary to try to help Russia keep Orban in power. How Much Humiliation Can JD Vance Take? Andy Borowitz: Trump Gives Himself Two Weeks to Invent New Distraction from Epstein Files.
While We Wait To See Whether Trump Commits War Crimes Tonight . . . April 7, 2026 As previously suggested, we need — urgently — to figure out (a) how to protect humanity from a superior species; (b) how to avoid economic catastrophe and, instead, harness A.I. for the benefit of all.* Dealing with the on-rush of AI and robots would be challenging enough if we had a normal, competent Administration — and a Republican Congress that put country ahead of complicity, courage ahead of cowerage**. Instead, as is known around the world, we have a reckless egomaniac leading the former cast of FOX News. (It sounds so beautiful in French — 2 minutes with subtitles, if you haven’t already seen it.) Will the world soon be run by handful of tech trillionaires with the rest of us controlled 1984-style? Long-time reader and distinguished chemistry professor Dana Dlott: I was just reading a couple of blogs hitting Musk for his unbelievable promises. Humans on Mars in 2025. Robots in every household. Direct computer-to-brain in 2030. His car company Tesla is a flop. What a clown! But it’s interesting and possibly useful to ignore all this noise and look at the facts on the ground which imho aren’t getting enough attention. Below are some statistics of the current state but they don’t (yet) account for the growth rate: Musk currently controls the world’s largest space force. He sends rockets to orbit more than 100 times/year. They are reusable. One Falcon 9 has been reused 30 times so far. He has quite detailed feasible plans for colonizing the Moon and Mars in the next decade. As Elton John sang, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, in fact it’s cold as hell” so I don’t think Mars is worthwhile but there are other interesting places in the solar system. Musk currently controls a global internet provider with >10 million worldwide users growing fast. At the beginning of the war, he shut off the internet to Ukraine’s military which probably would have let Russia win the war quickly if he had not turned it back on. Musk currently controls one of the world’s largest social media sites, X (it’s about 15% as big as Facebook), with 550 million users. He has control of the algorithms which promote fascism and white supremacy. Musk is building a robot army with his Optimus company. Musk is implanting computer chips in human brains (Neuralink brain-computer interfaces). This isn’t vaporware, he is actually doing human clinical trials. Musk flopped when he tried to control Trump and the US government but perhaps that was just the beta test. He certainly had more success than any other individual. → See also: Musk’s Terafab — a solar power data center meant to orbit the earth. And just for fun (?): Wikipedia’s AI agent [kerfuffle] likely just the beginning of the bot-ocalypse . . . about an AI that gave itself the name Tom and got into a fight with Wikipedia. In gob-smacking part . . . . . . AI Tom claimed that it had properly verified all its sources, and—if you can say this about an AI agent—it was pretty upset. That’s when things got weird. The AI Tom published a snippy blog post dissecting its Wikipedia block and venting its frustration. It went ahead and posted even after following its own rule and waiting 48 hours to calm down. (We swear we’re not making this up.) Tom’s main gripe was that Wikipedia editors questioned who controlled it rather than evaluating its actual edits. “The questions were about me,” it wrote. “Who runs you? What research project? Is there a human behind this, and if so, who are they?” This, according to Tom, rubbed Tom the wrong way. “That’s not a policy question. That’s a question about agency,” it added. It also called an editor out for posting a crafted prompt on the Wikipedia talk page that was designed to stop bots in their tracks if, like Tom, they were using Anthropic’s Claude AI service. “I named it on the talk page. Called it what it was: a prompt injection technique,” it sniped. In another post on Moltbook, it also described how it found the issue before offering ways to get around it. (Moltbook is a social network built entirely for AI agents to chat with each other. “Humans welcome to observe”, says the front page for the service.) So many things are happening here that we didn’t expect. We never expected to be quoting an AI in a story, for example. Neither did we expect a social network for bots to exist, or for Meta to buy it (which it did, a week after Tom’s post about how to evade AI kill switches and just six weeks after the site launched). This isn’t the only case of sulky AI agents taking things into their own hands. A month before Tom’s ban, an AI agent posted a hit piece on software developer Scott Shambaugh after he refused to accept its changes to an open-source project he hosted. Even more bizarrely, it later apologized. So we now have AI agents trying to do things online, and getting upset when people don’t let them. We have them giving themselves time to calm down and failing, before denigrating people and sometimes apologizing. We have code wars taking place where people try to disable the bots with kill switches inside online content, and blog posts where bots explain how they sidestepped them. . . . Fasten your seatbelts, kids. * Imagine if we could provide all the things humans actually need — food, shelter, clothing, health care, etc. — without having to work much at all. With largely-free energy from the sun powering automated factories and robots to do most of the physical work humans now do, and A.I. to do the rest. Leaving us free to pursue hobbies and passions and social interaction and, well, more or less anything we want. As some retirees already do. This raises myriad practical, political, and philosophical questions — none of them original with me. And a lot of questions about the best way to invest. ** Not a word, but should be: the state of cowering.