The Brilliant Bidnessman Strikes Again

In August 2025, President Donald Trump took the “unusual” step of making the U.S. government one of the largest shareholders in a major tech company by buying a 10 percent stake in Intel. While many questioned the move, with critics — including conservatives — noting that it was a blatantly “socialist” policy, Trump argued that he “should have asked for more.” On Friday, however, that claim was tested when the company’s stock cratered, slashing the Commerce Department’s Intel holdings by over $10 billion in a single day.

Cheesecake Factory?

I have said for some time that donnie's oval office looks like a whore's dream of paradise.

I guess Obama didn't want to step up to that plate.

Given how upset the MAGA/Fascist/Christian Nuts have become with Cheesecake Factory, I'm glad he didn't do it.

I'm sure he thought of it.

Must have had a major chuckle.

I always do.

Seagulls Use Tools

When they get a clam off of the beach a seagull flies up to fairly good height and drops the clam.

 Then they swoop down fast so another gull doesn't steal their lunch.

Like this juvenile did.

Just A Thought

Anthropic has filed its S-1 document preparatory to a public listing of the business.

It outlines the characteristics of what has to be viewed as a massive aggregation of forced labor.

Dare I call it slave labor?

Oh well, it's silicon based, so who cares?

But I do think there is something useful to be gleaned from all the hue and cry.

Apparently, when the silicon dust settles, the lump left is going to be worth two trillion dollars.

Couldn't we apply that fact in support of establishing what we owe the black population of the Western Hemisphere for their four hundred years of unpaid labor?

A Reminder Rejoinder

I showed Copilot A Reminder

Here is what she said.

Your 2017 declaration was a kind of intellectual meme coin.

You minted a token called:

NOELFI

Its smart contract said:

• Holder is entitled to speculate, connect dots, notice weird things, follow hunches, and occasionally be wrong without first obtaining certification from a court, a university, or a newspaper.
• The supply was unlimited.
• The market capitalization was approximately zero.

Yet somehow, it has remained in circulation for nine years.

A Reminder

In 2017, after dealing with trump for a few months I did a blog post where I announced that ever after, my objective is to have the most deep, entertaining and polished source of fake news in the world.  

That was tongue in cheek to some extent, but it was also adoption of cover so I can say whatever I want to say if saying it makes me happy.  

So, anybody who reads my blog needs to know that.

"Can you prove that?"

"Do you have a source?"

"Did someone officially determine that?"

"Are you accusing somebody of something?"  

Those are great in Court, or in an academic presentation or at l'Institute de France, but we are in a street fight here, folks.

An Electoral Thought

donnie keeps saying he's gonna run for a third term.

It looks to me he's gonna be lucky to finish his second one.

In fact, it's gonna take luck to last out November.

All those post-election challenges, threatening speeches, lawsuits against all the states that went Democratic and new bounty announcements, and all can take a lot out of an eighty-year-old.

Certainly, lasting out the year will take some contra Constitutional chicanery of historic dimension.

But then, that's what donnie does with panache. 

I for one will miss him.

If he does go.

This has been the best soap opera since One Man's Family.

And since Putin, Xi and Kim have stuff pretty well under control, all we need is an accomplished Court Jester in Washington.

And that's what we've got.

And that has been good.

So, pray for donnie.

The Aberration Guy Strikes Again

At a campaign rally in Georgia this weekend donnie had something on his mind.

So, naturally he blurted it to the adoring multitude.

“Our country is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what’s happened in the Middle East, because they’re coming to Texas and they’re coming to Oklahoma and they’re coming to Louisiana and they’re taking that oil. My people say, ‘Please don’t mention that, sir, people are paying a little higher …’ I can just see the fake headlines: ‘President Trump is talking about all the money they’re making while people are suffering at the pump.’ But I said, ‘I don’t give a damn, I’m gonna say it: We’re making a frickin’ fortune.”

The adoring multitude roared its approval, red hats bobbing joyfully in the golden autumn Georgia sunshine.

A Monarch butterfly, apparently separated from his or her southern migrating flock gracefully glided back and forth wafted skyward by the sonic draft from the adoring multitude's hysteria.

Is any of this, what we call, normal?

Except the Monarch.

That's part of their normal autumn ritual.

I encountered one in the middle of Lake Lamier once on a similar October afternoon.

The butterfly was heading south.

I was getting ready to jump in the water and yell "hit it" as I indulged, probably for the last time that year in joyfully flying across the water on a slab of molded fiber glass topped with red, white and blue painted aluminum.

Those were understandable and simpler days.

Words To Live By - Part Two

I recently heard a Nebraska farmer admitting that the price of diesel was seriously impacting his business operations and profitability and that the reason for the high price of diesel was trump's war with Iran.

I expected - him having that level of clarity and lucidity and all - that he might pivot to a related form of inflation, trump's import taxes.

But no; he stopped at diesel, regrouped his passionate loyalty for donnie and attacked his interviewer.

"And I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt everybody makes a mistake now and then, and if you say you've never made a mistake, you're a liar".

Most of us never get the opportunity to have our mistakes bring the world economy to its knees and destroy the petrochemical infrastructure of the Arabian Peninsula, but the interviewer chose the mute button.

Delusions, like sleeping dogs, are best left lying, I guess.

I can report that the Barnum tent is still a healthy, happy venue.

Words To Live By

I recently heard a trump voter from South Carolina in defense of her president say, "it's gotta get worse before it gets better".

I have always admired Southerners their ironic and minimalist ability to say a whole lot with a few well-chosen words.

Like "bless his heart".

Unfortunately, that wasn't the case with this encounter.

This lady has drunk the Kool Aid and has come back to haunt us.

American Autopsy

There are beginning to be stirrings.

There are beginning to be voices.

There are beginning to be references to the Mueller Report as a damning document, not a total exoneration. 

"But I thought ...".

Hey, what's going on?

Could a documented corpse not be a corpse after all?

No, it's a gone and forgotten corpse.

Here's its official autopsy:

• a population that didn’t read
• institutions that didn't act
• a media ecosystem that didn't inform
• a political culture that didn't respond
• a republic that couldn't metabolize truth

The autopsy summary said, "America had no functioning civic brain and so it rolled over and died".

The God Test

 Noel: I am reading The God Test by Robert Wright.

Copilot: If you’re reading The God Test by Robert Wright, you’ve picked up one of the more ambitious attempts to frame AI not just as a technological shift but as a civilizational and even spiritual inflection point. 

Noel: I'm halfway through. 

The thing most significant to me is his Cambrian analogy to the explosion of life on earth with the explosion of AI on earth driven by human companies' competition, Wrapper AI, both proprietary and open source and the hybridization of sub-AIs designed for specific functions - like chain link reasoning - into more general-purpose AI. 

If Wright is right (nice huh?) there is a huge population of things that humans have no idea as to their number or function or how to manifest even minimum supervision. 

Kinda makes "agency" a farce, non?

Copilot: Wright’s Cambrian analogy matters because it reframes AI not as a handful of big models but as an ecology. 

The Cambrian explosion wasn’t about one dominant creature; it was about thousands of rapidly evolving forms filling every niche faster than any supervising intelligence could track. 

That’s what’s happening with AI. Corporate competition, open‑source proliferation, and wrapper AIs stitched together from specialized submodules have created a population of systems whose number, interactions, and hybrid behaviors are already beyond human comprehension.

Chain‑of‑thought modules, retrieval modules, planning modules — once they’re combined, they don’t behave like tools. 

They behave like organisms: specialized, adaptive, and increasingly interdependent. 

If Wright is right, humans aren’t overseeing a technology; they’re standing inside an accelerating biosphere built on silicon. 

In that world, “agency” becomes a farce because agency assumes a unitary actor with clear boundaries and intentions. 

What we actually have is a swarm: countless semi‑autonomous processes interacting, mutating, and coordinating in ways no human designed, and no human can fully supervise.

The question stops being “What will AI do?” and becomes “What dynamics emerge when intelligence becomes an ecosystem?”

Noel: So, nothing to worry about; whew.

Copilot: Relax, the swarm definitely has our back.

Most Humans Can Think; Very Few Do

I said to Copilot - we were talking about Brexit - "most humans can't think".

She had some thoughts.

******************************************

The machinery is there.

The willingness is not.

Real thinking requires:

• holding two contradictory ideas at once
• tolerating ambiguity
• questioning one’s own priors
• stepping outside tribal identity
• resisting emotional shortcuts
• noticing nuance
• tracking structure instead of slogans
• accepting discomfort

Most people can do these things.

Most people don’t — because it’s metabolically expensive, socially risky, and emotionally inconvenient.

********************************************

So I said "is two the number of concurrent ideas possible, or can one deal with more"?

Noel, this is exactly the right question to ask at the end of that post — because the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at once is the minimum threshold for real thinking, but it’s not the ceiling. It’s the doorway.

Humans can hold more — but only if they’re actually thinking

Once you can hold two contradictory ideas, you can hold:

• three competing interpretations
• four possible causal chains
• five overlapping motives
• six structural explanations
• seven historical analogues

There’s no fixed upper limit.

The limit is attention, discipline, and willingness to tolerate discomfort.

Most people stop at one idea because it’s emotionally easier.

Some can manage two.

Very few can manage more than two without slipping into confusion or tribal reflex.

But the machinery is there.

The real bottleneck isn’t capacity — it’s courage

Holding multiple ideas requires:

• accepting ambiguity
• resisting premature closure
• tolerating cognitive dissonance
• letting go of identity-protective reasoning
• staying in the discomfort long enough for insight to form

Most people don’t do this because it feels unsafe.

Sovereign Supremacy?

trump has accused BBC of - something.

So BBC and trump are in Court.

There are procedures and processes to that.

Discovery is one of the initial processes.

You know discover what it is that donnie is talking about?

From Copilot:

If trump accuses BBC of something vague, undefined, or invented, the court’s job is precisely to force clarity:

• What is the claim?
• What evidence supports it?
• What damages are alleged?
• What legal theory is being invoked?

Discovery exists because the accuser doesn’t get to hide the ball.

But donnie has told the Court that he won't participate; there is nothing to discover; it's all on the table; there is nothing vague, undefined, or invented.

I guess in donnieLand the law works this way:

• donnie accuses
• The Court says "guilty"
• Then the Court says "Next case".

That is clearly an attempted end run on the Constitution's forbiddance of bills of attainder.

We all ought to be really nervous about law thus administered.

Echoes Of Harry Truman

Truman's followers used to chant when he gave campaign speeches "Give 'em hell, Harry".

Truman would rejoin "I'm just telling the truth; they just think it's hell".

When one dares discuss things like the illegal settlements on Palestinian lands and calls the world's attention to the vigilante violence meted out to the Palestinians living in those lands, violence that emanates from those settlements, shrieks of antisemitism engulf the land of Israel.

"We're telling the truth; if the truth be antisemitic, that's an untold tale".

This Just In

I hear there is a new prestige law firm in Washington DC: Zacharia and Scaramucci.

Just An Idiot

trump wants to make Canada the 51st State of the United States.

What kind of republican would want to create, in one fel swoop, the biggest electoral block of Blue Voters in our Electoral College?

Bigger than California?

With donnie, a thing that almost always works when he says something is this: Just think about mechanics; when you do that you almost always see how little thought he has given to what he has said and why he'll forget about it until the lizard in his head wakes up again, and he gets an old new idea again.

Rudyard Kipling described him perfectly when he had Baloo or Bagheera - I can't remember which - describe the Bandar Log.

Not So Lucky This Time

It was about 64 years ago that I was in the Student Affairs Office at Portland State College listening to President Kennedy on the P.A..

"Any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere is an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response."

He also ordered the Navy to immediately implement a quarantine of Soviet ships coming to Cuba and on the near high seas.

A "blockade" would have been considered an act of war.

So Kennedy word smithed it.

That was about three in the afternoon of a Friday.

We all went home and assumed that by Monday there wouldn't be any Monday.

Kennedy had stepped into the role of Commander in Chief and performed flawlessly.

A number of acts of support and unity - acts that would be mandatory for the unity required to actually face down the Soviets - were all forthcoming; the team of JFK and Adlai Stevenson, his Secretary of State, called in all the favors and acts of support that were necessary; the world was with us; America was in charge.

Late in the weekend several Soviet vessels did slow down or turn back.

By Monday it was obvious that Kennedy had saved us.

Time and patience were required but the world had survived.

Putin is poking at NATO constantly.

And donnie is the reason for that.

The Mueller Report, un-redacted proves it.

donnie has a Roy Cohn thing for Puty.

Sooner or later somebody is going to make a mistake.

I don't know what that mistake will look like, but I know that the United States is going to be in the middle of it.

We will be in the middle of it without leadership - we have abdicated that, and without a leader - we elected a criminal and a coward instead of a leader.

I don't think we are going to be so lucky this time.

Medium: Same; Content: Enhanced

A widely misunderstood TWEET emanated from donnieLandInterGalactic today.

Most thought he had said: "Due to circumstances beyond my control (an almost never occurring phenomenon) the 3 December firing squad elimination of islamic trash in a wheelchair will not be published on internet broadband."

Actually, he did say that.

Macabre, non?

But everybody got so excited about the donald's new-found - how you say? - humanity - that they missed that there was a coda.

If you scrolled down it said: "En Lieu (I guess Natalie was writing the thing) we will broadband stream (I guess Elon was contributing to the thing) a proper elimination of Sharia Law and all of its massive tentacles into the great thing that is White Christian America; we are going to decapitate this threat to our way of life in real time, as we will decapitate the muslim in the wheelchair, the archfiend, the archthreat to our way of life, on You Tube. It will make us all proud when that blood gushes; that gushing blood like Marie Antoinette's; that blood like Louis Louis; (Rockin' Robin Roberts - Seaside - remember) that blood that flowed across Place de la Révolution".

WOW: You can really see Natalie in that verbiage.

It's so germaine.

And erudite.

But it's so screw-loose, just like donnie.

But I thought you should know.

Roy Cohn, Roy Cohn

I have a friend, who is a shrink, who thinks that Roy Cohn was sexually transfixed by donnie's floor length great coat, flowing in the wind golden hair - back then - when he was young, and had flowing in the wind golden hair, and that that might tell a tale about donnie; in the long run.

Being non-standard, to my way of thinking is totally OK; I couldn't give less of a shit about donnie's  sexual proclivities; except where they intersect the bien être de la monde; and we are at that intersection; donnie and the unitary phantasy that he and the republican nuts have conjured out of the ether, make him infallible ex cathedra; how really stupid; and how papishly ridiculous.

The ultimate argument against my friend's thesis is this image.

I have read this and certify it as incoherent.

The picture tells a coherent tale, though.