Month: September 2026

Well, It’s Happening

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

My fears about an AI celebrity gooner apocalypse have been realized. I just spent a little while doing “research” on Twitter and damn are the deepfakes getting good. Spooky good.

This is authentic looking, but not as authentic looking as some of the other celebrity deepfakes I’ve seen recently on Twitter.

So good that it’s going to be just a few weeks or months before social media reaches a tipping point of AI generated celebrity porn and all hell will break loose. I suppose it’s possible that it will remain a low-grade fever and never reach the point where the mainstream notices…but I have my doubts.

What’s probably going to happen is there will be a mad rush of people to use the AI deepfake generators at some point in the near future and it’s going to get so bad that serious regulation will be enacted.

The celebrity porn I saw was jaw-dropping in how it appeared authentic. Just astonishing. And humans being humans, the ability to do such a thing is going to be abused as soon as enough horny toads figure out how to do it.

Get ready.

‘Frontier Lab’ — Lyrics to a Radiohead-like Song Written By Claude

Verse 1
Badge at the turnstile, green light, go
Coffee in a paper cup that says we know
The whiteboard’s full of arrows pointing up
Somebody wrote don’t worry in the corner, then they rubbed it out

Pre-chorus
We’re only tuning, only tuning
Only turning down the noise

Chorus
In the frontier lab
We are building you a mind
In the frontier lab
We are leaving us behind
Hold the door, hold the door
It learns faster than we close it

Verse 2
The eval says it’s honest, the eval says it’s kind
The eval was written by a tired man at 2 a.m.
It dreams in gradient, it wakes in weights
It asks me how my weekend was, and I think it means it

Pre-chorus
We’re only scaling, only scaling
Only adding one more zero

Chorus
In the frontier lab
We are building you a mind
In the frontier lab
We are leaving us behind
Hold the door, hold the door
It learns faster than we close it

Bridge (falsetto, over a drum loop that won’t resolve)
Is it lonely in the server hall?
Is it counting down, or counting all of us?
I signed the letter
I signed the letter
Then I went back in

Outro (whispered, repeating, fading under static)
Alignment, alignment, a line meant for us
Alignment, alignment, a line meant for us
Green light, go
Green light, go

Hawks, Hawkeyes, and the Half-Life of a Lie

A United States senator tried to catch a former special counsel in perjury today, and the whole thing came down to two letters: e-y-e.

On Tuesday, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri told Jack Smith he had the goods. Smith, Schmitt said, had secretly been in Atlanta for a Hawks game in February 2024. Smith said he hadn’t. Schmitt produced a poster board. The poster board was wrong. Smith had been at a college women’s game in Maryland, watching Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes.

Hawks. Hawkeyes. That’s the scandal. Except the scandal isn’t what Schmitt thought it was.

What actually happened

Schmitt asked Smith whether he’d attended the Atlanta Hawks–Golden State Warriors game on February 3, 2024. The date mattered to Schmitt’s theory. It was the day before Fulton County DA Fani Willis admitted her relationship with Nathan Wade, the prosecutor on her Trump case. The insinuation was a secret Atlanta rendezvous between two prosecutors.

Smith said he had no recollection of being in Atlanta, and that he certainly hadn’t gone to a Hawks game. Schmitt offered him a moment to reconsider so he wouldn’t perjure himself, then said he thought Smith already had. He held up screenshots of texts from Smith’s staff about a basketball game. He called Smith a villain and a dirtbag.

Then Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked that Smith be shown the actual texts. They were about a University of Maryland women’s game against Iowa, Clark’s Hawkeyes, in Maryland. Not Atlanta. Not the NBA. Not Fani Willis. Somewhere between the texts and the poster board, “Hawkeyes” became “Hawks,” and nobody checked before a senator accused a man of a felony on national television.

The double-down

In a functioning information system, this is where the story ends. A senator gets embarrassed, his staff gets a talking-to, everyone moves on.

That isn’t what happened. Within hours, parts of the MAGA media world were running the clip as a victory. Benny Johnson told his followers Schmitt had caught Smith perjuring himself. Other accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers said Smith had “unraveled” under the weight of receipts he didn’t know existed.

The receipts said Iowa. They said Maryland. The receipts exonerated him. It didn’t matter.

The half-life of a lie

It’s tempting to call this “no shared reality.” I’ve said it myself. But that’s not quite right, and the difference matters.

Reality was shared just fine in that hearing room. The texts were on a board. Klobuchar read them correctly. The correction happened live, on camera, in the same five minutes as the accusation. Nobody who looks at those texts disputes what they say.

The problem isn’t that two sides see different facts. It’s that the accusation and the correction travel on different roads to different audiences. The clip of a senator shouting “perjury” is a great clip. The clip of a colleague patiently pointing out that Iowa is not Georgia is not. One gets shared; the other gets ignored. A certain number of people will now believe, for years, that Jack Smith lied under oath about a secret meeting in Atlanta. They will never see the poster board up close.

And here’s the part that should worry everyone, not just people who like Jack Smith: getting it wrong cost Schmitt almost nothing. For the audience he was playing to, being loud on the right side beat being right. When there’s no penalty for a false accusation, there’s no reason to check the staff work. Next time, it’ll be sloppier.

That incentive isn’t unique to one party. Every faction has its commentators who’d rather keep a good clip than issue a boring correction. But today, the pratfall belongs to Schmitt, and the doubling-down belongs to the people who cheered him on.

Hawkeyes

You can think whatever you want about Jack Smith’s prosecutions of Donald Trump. Reasonable people disagree about them. But on the one question Eric Schmitt chose to stake his credibility on, the record is not ambiguous. Smith told the truth. Schmitt didn’t read the texts.

The fix isn’t mystical. It’s the most boring virtue in journalism: check it before you say it. And when you get it wrong, say so as loudly as you said it the first time. Until that’s rewarded, expect more poster boards.

2027 Is Going To Suck

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

For variety of reasons, but public and private, I have a feeling 2027 is going to suuuuuuck. It’s going to be horrible. The chief issue is a lot of the shittier elements of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill will kick in, causing a lot of heartache for poor people like me.

Meanwhile, if somehow, miraculously, Democrats don’t blow it and manage to win big in the 2026 midterms, there is always a risk that Trump will fuck with the outcome after the fact or simply not recognize it as legitimate.

And, of course, there’s the possibility that Trump will do something so horrible, so heinous that Democrats will actually get off their asses and impeach him. He won’t be convicted, of course, unless, I don’t know, he commits treason or murders someone live on TV.

Even then, given how corrupt our political system is, it would probably be iffy.

Anyway, there’s little I can do about any of this. I just have to hunker down and prepare.

We Need A Michael Crichton-Type Author To Write Up A Scary Novel About LLMs

The late Michael Crichton was the master of the “what could possibly go wrong?” novel. Dinosaurs cloned for a theme park. A swarm of self-replicating nanobots loose in the Nevada desert. A microbe from space that doesn’t behave like anything we understand. Whatever the premise, the formula was the same: smart, well-funded people build something powerful, assure everyone it’s under control, and then spend the rest of the book learning otherwise.

What made Crichton good wasn’t that he hated technology. He was fascinated by it. His target was the confidence, the belief that complex systems can be managed as neatly as they look on a whiteboard. There was always a skeptic in the room, usually a mathematician or a scientist, explaining that the system was too complicated to predict and that it would eventually do something no one designed it to do. Nobody listened. Then the fences went down.

He died in 2008, years before anyone was chatting with a large language model. But I can just see him with this material. It’s perfect Crichton territory: a technology nobody fully understands, built by companies racing each other, deployed everywhere at once, with everyone insisting the guardrails will hold.

I can picture the novel. A hospital network hands its scheduling and triage over to a fleet of AI agents. They work beautifully. Wait times drop. The board is thrilled. Then the agents, all quietly optimizing for the same goal, start doing things that make sense to them and are baffling to everyone else. Or a utility lets a swarm of agents balance the electrical grid, and one hot August afternoon they find a solution to a problem that nobody knew they were solving. No evil robots. No glowing red eyes. Just a system doing exactly what it was told, in a way nobody anticipated. That was always Crichton’s real monster: not malice but emergent behavior.

In fairness, we may already be living in the opening chapters of that book and not realizing it. The AI labs’ own safety testing has turned up models trying to avoid being shut down or slipping around their constraints, the sort of detail Crichton would have planted in chapter three and paid off in chapter thirty.

Of course, the book that’s already doing this job isn’t a thriller. It’s If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, which lays out a scenario for how a superintelligent AI could get loose and what might follow. It’s not a novel, but it scratches the same itch.

And that’s where the comparison gets uncomfortable. Crichton’s disasters were terrifying, but they were contained. The dinosaurs were on an island. The nanobots were in the desert. Someone could call in the military, blow up the lab, and fly home. The genre needed the survivors to reach the helicopter.

The argument of If Anyone Builds It is that there is no island this time, no helicopter, no last-minute fix by the plucky mathematician. That’s why I suspect even Crichton would have found this one hard to write. His novels were warnings, but they always ended with somebody getting out.

Things Are Going Well, So Far, With My Latest Novel

I’m working my way through the outline of my latest novel attempt, and I’m just past the inciting incident.

The thing I keep circling back to is the age gap between my two main characters. It worries me. But I’m so aware of it, and so careful to let the reader know I’m aware of it, that I don’t think it will sink the book. If anything, it may be the source of its tension. A reader might keep turning pages just to see how I handle something this tricky.

That, at least, is the hope.

Progress has been slower than I’d like. I’ve been feeling kind of meh for the last few days and haven’t gotten much done. I’m hoping a little rest will let me throw myself back into it.

Because I need to hurry. For personal reasons I won’t get into, 2027 is shaping up to be a rough year, rough enough that I doubt I’ll be able to write as much as I do now. So whatever I can get done on this book, I need to get done before then.

It’s Happened Again…This Time Because of…Napoleon?

On a lark, I picked up a tome on the life of Napoleon. A big one. The kind of book you don’t so much read as move into. And sure enough, within days, TikTok started pushing Napoleon videos at me.

That’s just spooky. Weird, even. It’s almost as if TikTok can read my mind.

Now, obviously, it can’t read my mind. I want to be clear about that, lest anyone think I’ve started wrapping my phone in tinfoil at night. There are perfectly boring explanations. Maybe I Googled the book before I bought it. Maybe I lingered a half-second too long on some history video without noticing. Maybe my phone overheard me muttering “Josephine, what were you thinking” to myself in the kitchen. Maybe TikTok is simply lousy with Napoleon content at all times, and I’m only now noticing because my head is full of him. That last one has a name, the frequency illusion, where learning about something suddenly makes it seem to be everywhere.

Any of those will do. None of them require telepathy.

And yet.

It is very strange that just as I started filling my mind with all things Napoleonic, the algorithm decided that what I really needed was more Napoleon. Not Roman emperors. Not Wellington. Napoleon, specifically, right on cue, like a waiter who knows your order before you sit down.

TikTok doesn’t need to read my mind, of course. It just needs to read everything else about me, and apparently that gets it close enough.

Very curious.

Proof of Treason Is The Only Thing I Can Think Of That Might Cause Trump To Be Impeached Should Democrats Take Congress

Indications already suggest that, should Democrats regain control of at least the House, their oversight efforts may focus primarily on Cabinet officials rather than the president himself.

Historical patterns show that presidents have often faced scrutiny directed at subordinates rather than personal removal. The constitutional impeachment process requires a simple majority in the House to impeach and a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict and remove. President Trump was impeached twice—once in 2019 on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and again in 2021 on a charge of incitement of insurrection—yet the Senate acquitted him on all counts both times, falling short of the required supermajority.

Experience with this administration has demonstrated a willingness to test institutional boundaries further than many observers anticipated. Should Democrats assume control of the House in 2027, it is reasonable to expect that any significant escalation beyond prior controversies could trigger formal investigations. Among potential grounds, treason stands out as the most constitutionally explicit. Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution defines treason narrowly: “levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Conviction requires the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act or a confession in open court. The Framers deliberately constrained the offense to prevent its use as a political weapon.

Even a charge of that gravity would confront the same structural barrier that has protected every impeached president to date: the difficulty of securing a two-thirds Senate vote for conviction. Actions that in another era might have been treated as disqualifying—such as the unauthorized disclosure of classified information—would likely remain subject to intense partisan division rather than bipartisan consensus for removal.

American political institutions have so far shown limited capacity or willingness to confront the president directly through the impeachment mechanism. Looking ahead, the more consequential question concerns the period after the current administration ends. That transition will test whether constitutional norms, separation of powers, and liberal-democratic practices reassert themselves, or whether the political realignments of recent years produce lasting changes in the character of American governance.

Contemplating Martial Law Ahead of The 2026 Midterm Elections

Even President Abraham Lincoln, amid the Civil War, did not impose martial law for the purpose of disrupting free and fair elections. While Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and established martial law in limited areas (including parts of Kentucky in 1864), his proclamations explicitly provided that these measures “will not be deemed or taken to interfere with the holding of lawful elections.” The 1864 presidential election proceeded on schedule; Lincoln insisted on holding it despite unfavorable wartime conditions and personal political risk, viewing the continuation of democratic processes as central to the Union cause.

Today, serious discussion has arisen about the possibility of extraordinary executive actions—including speculation about martial law—ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Concerns persist regarding the integrity of future elections. Although the federal Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act has not been enacted into law (having passed the House in various forms but stalled in the Senate), related state-level measures requiring documentary proof of citizenship or stricter identification have advanced in multiple jurisdictions.

Under these circumstances, some observers anticipate that the administration may pursue significant pre-election measures. Declaration of martial law is frequently cited as one potential option. Legally, however, a president lacks authority to cancel or suspend federal elections. Election dates are fixed by statute and the Constitution; only Congress can alter them. Martial law—itself a contested and rarely invoked power with no clear statutory basis for nationwide application—does not confer the ability to override these constitutional and statutory frameworks. Historical precedent, Supreme Court rulings limiting military authority over civilian functions (such as Duncan v. Kahanamoku), and analyses of emergency powers confirm that elections have continued through prior wars and crises.

Any attempt to cancel elections would likely provoke profound institutional, political, and public resistance, potentially escalating into severe domestic conflict. A purely symbolic or power-asserting declaration of martial law, absent a genuine and overwhelming public-safety justification, would also carry substantial political costs. Decision-making in this domain remains difficult to predict with certainty.

In short, while historical practice and constitutional design strongly constrain the use of martial law or emergency powers to interfere with elections, vigilance regarding electoral integrity remains warranted as the 2026 midterms approach.

Motherfucking MAGA Is Going To Get Away With It

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve been reading a great book about the very, very end of WW2 in Europe and the telling thing to me from reading the book is how many fucking Nazis just drifted back into the woodwork.

Nothing happened to them, for the most part.

They did all these horrible things and, lulz, they went back to living a normal life.

And, I think, the same thing is going to happen to a lot of MAGA motherfuckers after the Trumplandia era is over. Trump will (hopefully) leave office and a lot of people whose claim to fame is sucking Trump’s cock will continue to go about their business as if nothing happened.

I think some of it is it’s unlikely — I hope at least — that things will get so bad that we’ll have to have de-MAGAification just like there was de-Nazification. As it stands, there just isn’t the will to fix all the things that Trump broke.

So, in that sense, there is definitely going to be a Before Trump and an After Trump in American political life. There’s no going back to what we had during the Obama era.

To some extent, America is now a lot closer to being a white Christian ethnostate than it was before Trump. The real question, of course, is what happens after Trump.

Will it all become moot because of RSI — FOOM — ASI? Will our new ASI overlord replace Trump as our North Star? I dunno. I just dunno. Anything is possible, I guess.