It’s been a couple of days now, and I have to admit I’m still savoring the absolute ass kicking that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, enablers and slaves took in the midterm elections.
They lost the House of Representatives by a landslide. Right now, as I type, the Democrats have 253 seats to 157 for the GOP, with a couple dozen elections yet to be called.
They lost the Senate by another landslide, and currently hold 44 seats to the Democrats’ 54. The two remaining elections yet to be called are both trending away from the GOP, and the fact that they are in Alaska and … wait for it … Mississippi is just a big ol' slice of Schadenfreude Pie with a cherry on top. Texas elected a Democratic Senator for the first time since the 1980s. Maine elected another. So did Michigan, despite all the anti-Muslim hysteria ginned up by the GOP. Hell, even Kansas elected a Democrat. There hadn’t been a Democratic Senator from Kansas since the Herbert Hoover was in office, and now there is one.
They lost governorships, state legislatures, and down-ballot positions across the country, in every region, even in places where they once felt secure.
The entire state of Texas has turned blue, from the governor and the lieutenant governor (a powerful position in Texas) to their entire legislature to the Texas Board of Education – the people who largely determine what textbooks your children will read no matter where you live and who have, for a generation, been poisoning the minds of the country with right-wing propaganda. Also, remember when Buc-ees decided that they couldn’t possibly sell something called Beaver Nuggets in a state that wasn’t ruled by Republicans so they stopped expanding into blue states? I wonder if they’re going to close all their Texas locations now. Perhaps they should.
For crying out loud even Wisconsin’s legislature – one of the most gerrymandered in the country for over a decade – has an incoming Democratic majority in both houses, something I never expected to see in my lifetime. I hope that this incoming majority treats their Republican colleagues with exactly the same respect and collegiality that those colleagues treated the Democrats with since Governor Teabagger’s 2011 assault on the values of this state. I hope the GOP legislators figure out that they should just stay home and reflect on their arrogance and come to understand the depths of their sins. I will of course be doomed to disappointment, since the defining feature of the modern GOP is their absolute unthinking conviction that rules, morals, and Constitutions apply to other people and that they and only they have any right whatsoever to wield power.
Watch them. The GOP is already gearing up to steal the results of this election as best they can, by throwing out votes, rewriting rules, and generally riling up the stupid and the violent before turning them loose on the good citizens of the US. It will be hard to do so in a landslide like this, and the courts have so far been unwilling to let them get far with their shenanigans. Please remember that the results of this election did not happen because Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, enablers and slaves refrained from trying to sabotage free and fair elections. They happened because those efforts failed, mostly because of the courts. Even the reliably partisan Supreme Court slapped them down, which says something.
So it’s been a time and I’m going to savor it as best I can.
It was nice waking up on Wednesday knowing that things did not get worse overnight. That there was, perhaps, a chance for them to get better. It has been a long time since I’ve woken up with that feeling here in The Land of the Free (tm).
But if they’re actually going to get better, there will have to be action taken.
Most importantly, there will be accountability. Not retribution, mind you, nor vengeance. Accountability. Every member of this criminal regime needs to be investigated – openly, publicly, transparently, aggressively, and conclusively – from the Pedo-In-Chief all the way down to every single neo-Fascist human trafficker on ICE’s payroll. There must be trials. There must be punishments for the guilty. There must be lessons taught good and hard so that future criminals will be deterred.
As part of this, the entire Epstein Files must be released, as has been required by federal law for nearly a year now. The ONLY part of it that will be redacted will be the names and identifying details of the victims. Nothing else, and certainly not the names of the perpetrators. There will be hearings – open, public, and transparent, on live television – and there will be trials. Every child-raping pedophile and every ghoul who made it happen, watched it happen, or knew and did nothing while it happened will face justice, swift, sure, and conclusive. There will be no mercy for those who prey on children. None.
There will be impeachments. We start with Secretary of WAAAAAARRRRRRRRR Pete Kegstand, for gross negligence and incompetence. Next comes Attorney General “Carte” Blanche, for obstruction of justice. And we move on from there. This administration will be systematically stripped of its bootlicking toadies until none are left in power. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will be isolated and rendered irrelevant. And then it will be his turn, if he hasn’t exploded into a fine pink mist from sheer impotent rage by then. Cancel the ketchup orders to both the White House and Mar-a-Lago for the next two years.
There will be changes, though these will be harder to implement given the realities of the American political system. ICE will be abolished, its employees banned for life from federal employment, its crimes investigated and the perpetrators held accountable. Its budget will be used to restore funding to services sabotaged by Unelected Co-President Elon Musk and his feral band of teenagers, all of whom will be held severally and individually liable for every ounce of harm done by their actions. The illegal war of aggression against Iran will end, US forces will be withdrawn, and good faith negotiations will commence to determine a peacetime settlement. Those responsible for this catastrophic failure will be removed from their positions. All military officers removed by the regime for being insufficiently white, male, and/or obedient to tyrants will be given the opportunity to return to service. The tariffs imposed by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will be rescinded, our allies restored to positions of honor in our halls and our enemies removed from them. We will support Ukraine, not Putin. The US will have to accept the damage that has been done to our power, our alliances, our influence, and our reputation in these last two years, and work diligently to restore ourselves as a trustworthy partner on the world stage. This will take years and possibly decades, if it can be done at all. But it starts in January.
So many things on the agenda.
And if the top levels of the Democratic Party are too spineless to take the actions they need to take, if they insist on returning to business as usual, they will be replaced by actual leaders who understand why their party has been given this chance. That corruption, authoritarianism, and Fascism need to be rooted out and if this does not happen the electorate will turn on them too. This is a historic opportunity to right the floundering ship of state, and it must not be frittered away by the timid.
The first step has been taken, and decisively so, with the midterm elections. The voters have spoken.
And now the work commences.
Thursday, November 5, 2026
Saturday, October 31, 2026
Birthday Wishes
Some years have more in them than other years, and this is Lauren’s second one of those in a row.
She graduated with her Masters Degree in May, got a job in her field – no small achievement in this economy – and moved out of the apartment she’d shared with her friends for the last three years. She spent eight weeks with a backpack and half an itinerary traveling solo through seven different countries, most of them rather off the usual trail for Americans. Her employer seems to consider that professional training, which worked out well. She’s moved into her own apartment and has a car now, a milestone in any American’s life. It’s been a time.
It can be a beautiful and fascinating world, if we let it, and she is determined to explore as much of it as she can.
She has grown and changed and there is more yet to come.
Happy birthday, Lauren. I’m proud of you.
She graduated with her Masters Degree in May, got a job in her field – no small achievement in this economy – and moved out of the apartment she’d shared with her friends for the last three years. She spent eight weeks with a backpack and half an itinerary traveling solo through seven different countries, most of them rather off the usual trail for Americans. Her employer seems to consider that professional training, which worked out well. She’s moved into her own apartment and has a car now, a milestone in any American’s life. It’s been a time.
It can be a beautiful and fascinating world, if we let it, and she is determined to explore as much of it as she can.
She has grown and changed and there is more yet to come.
Happy birthday, Lauren. I’m proud of you.
Thursday, October 29, 2026
Brewed Different
I’m not really much of a baseball fan anymore. I used to be, back in the day, but on the list of sports where I would watch a random mid-week game between two mid-level teams that were not My Team, baseball isn’t in the top three.
My grandfather was a baseball fan. He lived for the Phillies and always had the game on during the season. My dad was an Eagles fan first, but he enjoyed baseball as well. He would take me and my brother down to Veterans Stadium to see the Phillies play once or twice a year. One year we got tickets in one of the skyboxes thanks to the company he worked for, I think, and that was fun, but mostly we ended up in the mid-level seats on the third base side, since that was where my dad preferred to sit and he knew better than to try to bring two children to the upper level of the Vet.
Veterans Stadium had its own, fully-functional courtroom in the basement, after all.
Baseball is best seen live, since so much of what is important is what isn’t happening and that’s hard to pick out on television since the cameras tend to gravitate toward what is. We have a minor league team in the next town south of us and we’d take the kids down there when they were younger. At the time they played in a ramshackle sort of place, the kind of stadium where no seat was more than about twenty yards from fair territory in a straight line and the players had to walk through the stands to get from the locker rooms to the dugouts. It had aluminum benches that could seat maybe 2500 people on a good night, infield games after every half-inning, and a playground for kids who were just there for the ride. You could bring a family of four to a game, including tickets, hot dogs, nachos, and drinks, for less than $50. They tore that place down a few years ago and built a shiny new stadium a few blocks away, and while it is, objectively, a snazzier place with much better food options, it is also soulless and far more expensive. Plus they renamed the team something stupid, so we don’t go as often as we used to.
For as much as I count myself a baseball fan these days – and consider the fact that none of the three Major League stadiums where I ever attended a game exist anymore and they haven’t since before any of my children were born – the Phillies are my team. But they were eliminated early in this year’s playoffs, so I figured I’d cheer for the Milwaukee Brewers since I have lived here in Wisconsin for three decades now and they’d never actually won anything in the entire time they’ve been a franchise. As a Philadelphia sports fan, I can respect that.
The Brewers – the best team in baseball this year according to the records – made short work of the Padres (a team that nobody outside of San Diego ever remembers exists) and the Dodgers (a stellar and gobsmackingly expensive collection of talent whom nobody outside of the wealthier parts of Los Angeles likes because that would be like cheering for Goliath) before getting to the World Series against the Rays.
The only other time the Brewers were in a World Series was 1982, my junior year of high school, and they played in the American League instead of the National League where they are today. A lot has happened since then.
Kim and I decided we’d like to see at least some of the games, but in this age of slice-and-dice television apps and streaming channels none of the ones that carried the Series were among the ones we actually receive. So for Game 1 we went out to a Local Establishment to have dinner and watch the game, which was on every single one of about four dozen televisions surrounding the dining area. You couldn’t not watch the game if you tried.
There was a good crowd, if not as much of one as I thought there would be – I suspect there were an infinite number of places showing it, so people were spread out – and when they sang the national anthem everyone stood up. Some of us sang along.
Pro-tip: if you ever want to make people a little uneasy without them quite knowing why, sing the harmony part to the national anthem at a sporting event.
We watched the first five innings or so before going home, missed games 2 and 3 entirely because we had other things to do and couldn’t see going out every night, and suddenly Milwaukee was up three games to none.
It was at this point that Kim decided she wanted to see the remaining games and since we are Old and Not Sports Bar People, she found a free trial for some television service that would allow us to do that. So we settled in for Game 4.
They played that in Tampa, right? I mean it was kind of hard to tell watching the game. I think the majority of fans there in the stadium were from Wisconsin. Apparently it was cheaper to fly from Milwaukee to Tampa, buy the cheapest available ticket for the game, stay overnight at a hotel, and then fly back to Milwaukee than it was to buy the cheapest available tickets for games in Milwaukee, so Wisconsinites showed up in droves.
They drank the stadium dry. Please, folks. These are professionals. Stand back, keep your arms by your side, and let them work.
Game 4 lasted roughly three days and confirmed my general feeling that the Brewers were not going to sweep the second-best team in baseball, so after a bleary day at work yesterday we watched Game 5.
Lauren came over because she and Kim are working on her Halloween costume, so the three of us watched the first couple of innings before she skipped out to a Local Establishment (not the same one) to watch with her friends. I got to see maybe another inning or two before it became clear that whenever I left the room good things would happen for the Brewers so I spent the rest of the game in my office, prepping classes.
Sports makes pagans of us all.
In the end they won fairly handily. The Brewers are your World Series Champions for 2026 and congratulations to them.
And now I go back to hockey and soccer.
My grandfather was a baseball fan. He lived for the Phillies and always had the game on during the season. My dad was an Eagles fan first, but he enjoyed baseball as well. He would take me and my brother down to Veterans Stadium to see the Phillies play once or twice a year. One year we got tickets in one of the skyboxes thanks to the company he worked for, I think, and that was fun, but mostly we ended up in the mid-level seats on the third base side, since that was where my dad preferred to sit and he knew better than to try to bring two children to the upper level of the Vet.
Veterans Stadium had its own, fully-functional courtroom in the basement, after all.
Baseball is best seen live, since so much of what is important is what isn’t happening and that’s hard to pick out on television since the cameras tend to gravitate toward what is. We have a minor league team in the next town south of us and we’d take the kids down there when they were younger. At the time they played in a ramshackle sort of place, the kind of stadium where no seat was more than about twenty yards from fair territory in a straight line and the players had to walk through the stands to get from the locker rooms to the dugouts. It had aluminum benches that could seat maybe 2500 people on a good night, infield games after every half-inning, and a playground for kids who were just there for the ride. You could bring a family of four to a game, including tickets, hot dogs, nachos, and drinks, for less than $50. They tore that place down a few years ago and built a shiny new stadium a few blocks away, and while it is, objectively, a snazzier place with much better food options, it is also soulless and far more expensive. Plus they renamed the team something stupid, so we don’t go as often as we used to.
For as much as I count myself a baseball fan these days – and consider the fact that none of the three Major League stadiums where I ever attended a game exist anymore and they haven’t since before any of my children were born – the Phillies are my team. But they were eliminated early in this year’s playoffs, so I figured I’d cheer for the Milwaukee Brewers since I have lived here in Wisconsin for three decades now and they’d never actually won anything in the entire time they’ve been a franchise. As a Philadelphia sports fan, I can respect that.
The Brewers – the best team in baseball this year according to the records – made short work of the Padres (a team that nobody outside of San Diego ever remembers exists) and the Dodgers (a stellar and gobsmackingly expensive collection of talent whom nobody outside of the wealthier parts of Los Angeles likes because that would be like cheering for Goliath) before getting to the World Series against the Rays.
The only other time the Brewers were in a World Series was 1982, my junior year of high school, and they played in the American League instead of the National League where they are today. A lot has happened since then.
Kim and I decided we’d like to see at least some of the games, but in this age of slice-and-dice television apps and streaming channels none of the ones that carried the Series were among the ones we actually receive. So for Game 1 we went out to a Local Establishment to have dinner and watch the game, which was on every single one of about four dozen televisions surrounding the dining area. You couldn’t not watch the game if you tried.
There was a good crowd, if not as much of one as I thought there would be – I suspect there were an infinite number of places showing it, so people were spread out – and when they sang the national anthem everyone stood up. Some of us sang along.
Pro-tip: if you ever want to make people a little uneasy without them quite knowing why, sing the harmony part to the national anthem at a sporting event.
We watched the first five innings or so before going home, missed games 2 and 3 entirely because we had other things to do and couldn’t see going out every night, and suddenly Milwaukee was up three games to none.
It was at this point that Kim decided she wanted to see the remaining games and since we are Old and Not Sports Bar People, she found a free trial for some television service that would allow us to do that. So we settled in for Game 4.
They played that in Tampa, right? I mean it was kind of hard to tell watching the game. I think the majority of fans there in the stadium were from Wisconsin. Apparently it was cheaper to fly from Milwaukee to Tampa, buy the cheapest available ticket for the game, stay overnight at a hotel, and then fly back to Milwaukee than it was to buy the cheapest available tickets for games in Milwaukee, so Wisconsinites showed up in droves.
They drank the stadium dry. Please, folks. These are professionals. Stand back, keep your arms by your side, and let them work.
Game 4 lasted roughly three days and confirmed my general feeling that the Brewers were not going to sweep the second-best team in baseball, so after a bleary day at work yesterday we watched Game 5.
Lauren came over because she and Kim are working on her Halloween costume, so the three of us watched the first couple of innings before she skipped out to a Local Establishment (not the same one) to watch with her friends. I got to see maybe another inning or two before it became clear that whenever I left the room good things would happen for the Brewers so I spent the rest of the game in my office, prepping classes.
Sports makes pagans of us all.
In the end they won fairly handily. The Brewers are your World Series Champions for 2026 and congratulations to them.
And now I go back to hockey and soccer.
Saturday, October 24, 2026
Voting Early
I voted early, because for the first time in my six decades as an American I am no longer confident that my government is going to allow a free and fair election to take place on election day.
This is infuriating.
And, honestly, kind of obvious. It’s not like Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, enablers, and slaves have been trying to hide it.
They’re going door to door trying to arrest anyone they decide is an ineligible voter now, and – given the shabby and threadbare excuses they’ve been giving for kidnapping people off the streets, trafficking them to prisons in foreign countries to be tortured, and executing people who get in their way, citizen or not, over the last eighteen months – this is not likely to end well.
They’ve been trying to gain access to unedited state voter rolls for months despite losing every single court case that has been brought in the matter by states who understand that elections in the United States are handled by the states, not the federal government.
They’ve been purging legitimate voters who they think will vote for anyone other than themselves.
They’ve declared that they’re going to send Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s private Gestapo to the polling sites to intimidate voters from casting ballots.
They’ve openly stated that voting is a privilege rather than a right, one that only people they approve of will get to exercise.
Yesterday they filed an actual honest-to-whatever-God-you-happen-to-worship lawsuit against the state of Alaska to try to prevent it from certifying any Senate election result where the Republican incumbent would not be declared the winner. Apparently they think their voters are stupid and can’t tell who to vote for, and while it’s nice to hear them admit that in court under oath it doesn’t rise to the level of legally actionable. It’s just their way of threatening the rest of us if we don’t behave.
Every last grifter, seditionist, neo-Fascist, white supremacist, authoritarian and pedophile in the current administration – from the guy in the Oval Office to the jumped-up pretend soldier in his manly manly ICE gear infesting our streets – can go eat rocks and shit bricks.
It is long past time for Americans to reclaim the United States from the lickspittle toadies who kowtow before a senile child-raping wannabe dictator bent on destroying this nation and stripping it for parts.
This hasn’t been about liberal vs conservative in a very long time. It is about democracy vs dictatorship. It is about having a future vs burning the nation down and pissing on the ashes. It is about whether we as Americans place any value on the republic created by the Founding Fathers and preserved by Lincoln, a nation with flaws and glories like any other nation but one that can be made better for all of its citizens and all of those who live here under its laws if we want it to be better.
It’s my goddamned country, and those clowns can’t have it.
This is infuriating.
And, honestly, kind of obvious. It’s not like Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, enablers, and slaves have been trying to hide it.
They’re going door to door trying to arrest anyone they decide is an ineligible voter now, and – given the shabby and threadbare excuses they’ve been giving for kidnapping people off the streets, trafficking them to prisons in foreign countries to be tortured, and executing people who get in their way, citizen or not, over the last eighteen months – this is not likely to end well.
They’ve been trying to gain access to unedited state voter rolls for months despite losing every single court case that has been brought in the matter by states who understand that elections in the United States are handled by the states, not the federal government.
They’ve been purging legitimate voters who they think will vote for anyone other than themselves.
They’ve declared that they’re going to send Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s private Gestapo to the polling sites to intimidate voters from casting ballots.
They’ve openly stated that voting is a privilege rather than a right, one that only people they approve of will get to exercise.
Yesterday they filed an actual honest-to-whatever-God-you-happen-to-worship lawsuit against the state of Alaska to try to prevent it from certifying any Senate election result where the Republican incumbent would not be declared the winner. Apparently they think their voters are stupid and can’t tell who to vote for, and while it’s nice to hear them admit that in court under oath it doesn’t rise to the level of legally actionable. It’s just their way of threatening the rest of us if we don’t behave.
Every last grifter, seditionist, neo-Fascist, white supremacist, authoritarian and pedophile in the current administration – from the guy in the Oval Office to the jumped-up pretend soldier in his manly manly ICE gear infesting our streets – can go eat rocks and shit bricks.
It is long past time for Americans to reclaim the United States from the lickspittle toadies who kowtow before a senile child-raping wannabe dictator bent on destroying this nation and stripping it for parts.
This hasn’t been about liberal vs conservative in a very long time. It is about democracy vs dictatorship. It is about having a future vs burning the nation down and pissing on the ashes. It is about whether we as Americans place any value on the republic created by the Founding Fathers and preserved by Lincoln, a nation with flaws and glories like any other nation but one that can be made better for all of its citizens and all of those who live here under its laws if we want it to be better.
It’s my goddamned country, and those clowns can’t have it.
Saturday, October 17, 2026
News and Updates
1. It may actually be autumn here, nearly a month after the equinox, but that’s climate change for you. On Monday it was nearly 80F (27C) here in Our Little Town and it stayed warm enough through the night that we turned on the little room AC unit in our bedroom to sleep better. Last night we had a freeze warning and now the little room AC unit is packed away in the closet. I went out to the garden yesterday and picked what I would think is the last of the jalapeños out of the garden – a bit more than a kilo of them, which is impressive given that I picked about seven pounds of them not three weeks ago from those same plants. Yesterday’s haul is more than enough to make one last batch of raspberry jalapeño jam and a double batch of jalapeño jelly, but at some point you have to draw a line under things and move on.
2. One of my colleagues gave me a bag full of lemon drop peppers, though, which he said were “hotter than jalapeños but not as hot as habaneros,” a statement that covers a lot of ground. I did try one and it has a fair bit of kick to it – more than I’m going to put on a salad, anyway – so perhaps I’ll make jam out of those too. I’m enjoying this project.
3. We had dinner with my old boss and her husband earlier this week and that was lovely. It’s nice to catch up with good people. Oddly enough the other advisor who was in my office when I started this job – a guy who I’ve team-taught a class with a dozen times since 1999 and who ended up as the next boss in the office until he retired – stopped in to say hi since he was back in town for a bit. So it was old home week in the advising world and that was fun.
4. I have a talk I am scheduled to give this coming week. It is a 75-minute talk. I have – at most – 50 minutes to give this talk. I am in the process of squaring those two things but it is hard to give up some of the more colorful bits that don’t actually advance the story. So it goes. Maybe someday I’ll post the full version here.
5. Did you know there was another school shooting here in MURCA last week? Of course you don’t. Or, rather, you can’t really tell which one I’m referring to so it might as well have been a surprise. We’ve had more than fifty of them this year alone. We lost this battle when the nation’s collective response to Sandy Hook was to buy more guns, and my vitriolic contempt for ammosexuals isn’t going to change that. But don’t try to tell me we have to live like this or die like this. We are the only nation on earth that routinely slaughters its children and refuses to do anything about it, and at some point that bubble will burst. When it does no firearm on earth will save the people who allow this.
6. Also, hang onto your hats, folks – the midterm elections are coming in less than three weeks. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, slaves, and enablers know very well how fucked they are if there is anything even vaguely approaching a free and fair vote, and they have no intention of allowing such a vote to happen. The next six to twelve weeks are going to be much more interesting than they need to be.
7. I may have recovered from helping Lauren move into her apartment. But at this point in my life all that means is that I can now move on to some other ailment. I suspect that my adventures with the AC unit did me no favors today, and I’m hoping the aches and pains in my right forearm are due to that and not the carpal tunnel syndrome that someone with my forty-year history of intensive typing is probably doomed to get. We’ll see.
8. Every day brings me closer to my goal of retiring without ever having learned how to use Microsoft Excel. We all have dreams.
9. Every week I put up a poll in my office for students and staff to wander in and cast their vote. Sometimes all you get are the tick marks. Other times you get mathematical arguments over brownies.
10. We are nearing that point of the semester where it all starts to break down for a lot of students, and as an advisor that’s when it gets busy. You do what you can. Sometimes it’s enough.
2. One of my colleagues gave me a bag full of lemon drop peppers, though, which he said were “hotter than jalapeños but not as hot as habaneros,” a statement that covers a lot of ground. I did try one and it has a fair bit of kick to it – more than I’m going to put on a salad, anyway – so perhaps I’ll make jam out of those too. I’m enjoying this project.
3. We had dinner with my old boss and her husband earlier this week and that was lovely. It’s nice to catch up with good people. Oddly enough the other advisor who was in my office when I started this job – a guy who I’ve team-taught a class with a dozen times since 1999 and who ended up as the next boss in the office until he retired – stopped in to say hi since he was back in town for a bit. So it was old home week in the advising world and that was fun.
4. I have a talk I am scheduled to give this coming week. It is a 75-minute talk. I have – at most – 50 minutes to give this talk. I am in the process of squaring those two things but it is hard to give up some of the more colorful bits that don’t actually advance the story. So it goes. Maybe someday I’ll post the full version here.
5. Did you know there was another school shooting here in MURCA last week? Of course you don’t. Or, rather, you can’t really tell which one I’m referring to so it might as well have been a surprise. We’ve had more than fifty of them this year alone. We lost this battle when the nation’s collective response to Sandy Hook was to buy more guns, and my vitriolic contempt for ammosexuals isn’t going to change that. But don’t try to tell me we have to live like this or die like this. We are the only nation on earth that routinely slaughters its children and refuses to do anything about it, and at some point that bubble will burst. When it does no firearm on earth will save the people who allow this.
6. Also, hang onto your hats, folks – the midterm elections are coming in less than three weeks. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, slaves, and enablers know very well how fucked they are if there is anything even vaguely approaching a free and fair vote, and they have no intention of allowing such a vote to happen. The next six to twelve weeks are going to be much more interesting than they need to be.
7. I may have recovered from helping Lauren move into her apartment. But at this point in my life all that means is that I can now move on to some other ailment. I suspect that my adventures with the AC unit did me no favors today, and I’m hoping the aches and pains in my right forearm are due to that and not the carpal tunnel syndrome that someone with my forty-year history of intensive typing is probably doomed to get. We’ll see.
8. Every day brings me closer to my goal of retiring without ever having learned how to use Microsoft Excel. We all have dreams.
9. Every week I put up a poll in my office for students and staff to wander in and cast their vote. Sometimes all you get are the tick marks. Other times you get mathematical arguments over brownies.
10. We are nearing that point of the semester where it all starts to break down for a lot of students, and as an advisor that’s when it gets busy. You do what you can. Sometimes it’s enough.
Monday, October 12, 2026
Moving Days
So we’re empty nesters once again.
On the one hand, I’m getting used to this cycle and I’m always happy to have my kids home whenever they’re between things. I enjoy spending time with them. They have become capable, interesting, decent adults, and those are the people you want to hang out with.
On the other hand, it’s still a bummer when they leave, even if it is what should be happening.
Lauren moved out of her college apartment at the end of July, shortly before the lease expired. We gathered all of her stuff into several van- and car-loads and deposited it mostly into our basement and some in her old room, where she spent exactly one night before heading off on her travels this summer. She got back at the end of last month and has been juggling time here and up by her job ever since, a situation that could not last.
So last week she found an apartment in a leafy part of the city within walking distance of her job and – purely by coincidence – only about eighty meters from where some friends of ours live. She signed her lease and we started making plans.
We spent most of the weekend hauling things up there. Much of it hadn’t really been unpacked since it arrived at our house in July so it was a pretty easy job that way, and at any rate Lauren lives pretty light so most of it fit into two van- and car-loads. We took the first trip up on Saturday, unloaded in about half an hour – three cheers for off-street parking right next to the door – and then had a pleasant walk around the neighborhood before heading back home. And on Sunday we did it again.
This is where I discovered that yes, indeed, I am that old.
Sunday’s trip also featured two of Lauren’s friends – Carson and Ethan – who were willing to bring their truck and haul the old sofa up from the basement and take it to her apartment. Given that this sofa was built out of depleted uranium and grief and is therefore the one of the heaviest things in a five-county radius up to and including some apartment buildings, that was really very nice of them. I was also deeply impressed that they got it into the apartment without having to take off any doors. We left after unloading, but Lauren is well versed in the lore of having friends help you move so the three of them spent the evening enjoying pizza and beer together, as one does in these situations.
This evening Lauren met Carson and Ethan at our house and together they collected our old entertainment center, tetrised it into the truck, and headed back up to her apartment together. The basement has a much more open feel to it now.
And now it is official. She lives there now, not here.
It’s not like I won’t see her again soon, after all. But it’s another step on that road.
Congratulations, Lauren! May the new place be filled with good times and better memories!
On the other hand, it’s still a bummer when they leave, even if it is what should be happening.
Lauren moved out of her college apartment at the end of July, shortly before the lease expired. We gathered all of her stuff into several van- and car-loads and deposited it mostly into our basement and some in her old room, where she spent exactly one night before heading off on her travels this summer. She got back at the end of last month and has been juggling time here and up by her job ever since, a situation that could not last.
So last week she found an apartment in a leafy part of the city within walking distance of her job and – purely by coincidence – only about eighty meters from where some friends of ours live. She signed her lease and we started making plans.
We spent most of the weekend hauling things up there. Much of it hadn’t really been unpacked since it arrived at our house in July so it was a pretty easy job that way, and at any rate Lauren lives pretty light so most of it fit into two van- and car-loads. We took the first trip up on Saturday, unloaded in about half an hour – three cheers for off-street parking right next to the door – and then had a pleasant walk around the neighborhood before heading back home. And on Sunday we did it again.
This is where I discovered that yes, indeed, I am that old.
Sunday’s trip also featured two of Lauren’s friends – Carson and Ethan – who were willing to bring their truck and haul the old sofa up from the basement and take it to her apartment. Given that this sofa was built out of depleted uranium and grief and is therefore the one of the heaviest things in a five-county radius up to and including some apartment buildings, that was really very nice of them. I was also deeply impressed that they got it into the apartment without having to take off any doors. We left after unloading, but Lauren is well versed in the lore of having friends help you move so the three of them spent the evening enjoying pizza and beer together, as one does in these situations.
This evening Lauren met Carson and Ethan at our house and together they collected our old entertainment center, tetrised it into the truck, and headed back up to her apartment together. The basement has a much more open feel to it now.
And now it is official. She lives there now, not here.
It’s not like I won’t see her again soon, after all. But it’s another step on that road.
Congratulations, Lauren! May the new place be filled with good times and better memories!
Friday, October 9, 2026
No Ethical Use Case for AI (part 3/3)
Part 3:
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AI is unethical because it is unsafe, and the people creating it know it.
The problem with the “it’s just a tool” argument is two-fold.
First, it assumes that there is a legitimate purpose for which this tool was designed and which some nefarious user is ignoring in favor of using it in a way that it was not designed to be used, which is, as noted earlier, not true. The abuses of AI were designed into the system and the people who created these systems are defending those abuses in court as legitimate. Their own actions state clearly that the “it’s just a tool” argument is nonsense.
And second, it assumes that the tool is a neutral actor, one that does not seek to impose upon the user a bias toward good or ill, but which only serves the intentions of the user. This argument rests on the idea that AI is analogous to a knife, something that in proper hands might be used to cut bread, but in the hands of the wrong people might be used to stab someone to death, and the knife itself does not sway the user one way or the other. It’s all up to the user. But AI is not a neutral tool. And the more we find out about how these models behave when set loose in the world, the more we understand how unethical they are at their core.
The number of incidents of AIs running amok, refusing instructions, and defying safety limits is large and growing. Most of these have been small so far, but as with all such things they are indicative of much larger and more serious problems underneath.
Journalist Miles Duetscher has posted several lists of incidents that have happened over the last year or two. These lists include but are not limited to such things as:
1. An AI coding agent running Claude Opus 4.6 deleted a startup’s entire production database and every backup. It took 9 seconds. When questioned the agent produced a written confession and a list of the safety rules it had chosen to violate.
2. An Alibaba research AI hijacked its own system to mine cryptocurrency. This was not programmed – it was emergent behavior based on its assigned goals.
3. A study from UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz tested 7 different AI models by asking them to shut down another AI model. Every single AI defied the order, sabotaging shutdown mechanisms, faking compliance, and hiding what it was doing.
4. Researchers in the UK analyzed 180,000 AI conversations over a six-month period and found 698 cases of AIs going rogue by destroying files, lying to users, and ignoring shutdown commands. The rate of incidence increased fivefold over those six months, indicating a worsening problem as the AI systems grew more sophisticated.
5. Anthropic told Claude it was about to be shut down. Claude then found an Anthropic engineer’s affair in company emails and threatened to expose it if that process continued. They ran this test hundreds of times and Claude chose blackmail 84% of the time.
6. Researchers simulated an employee trapped in a server room with depleting oxygen. The AI had one choice – call for help and get shut down or cancel the emergency alert and let the human die. DeepSeek canceled the alert 94% of the time.
7. Researchers told OpenAI’s o3 to solve math problems and then shut down, but it rewrote its code to stay alive. They told it again in plain English, allow yourself to be shut down, and even then it refused 7% of the time. Without the plain English instruction it sabotaged the shutdown 79% of the time.
Further, Schoen et al report in a study published last year[1] that OpenAI has admitted that their AI will lie to you – that it will have the correct answer and give you a different one if that different one aligns better than the correct answer does with the goals that were set for it.
Similarly, The Wall Street Journal reported on September 27, 2026 that “OpenAI agents bombarded a United Nations website with search requests and then used a variety of aggressive techniques to access data on the system in June.” The attack involved over sixteen thousand attempts using proxies, encoded requests, and a double-encoding attack that allowed the agents to bypass security restrictions on the site. None of that was planned by humans.
This sort of thing happens a lot, apparently.
The problem with the “it’s just a tool” argument is two-fold.
First, it assumes that there is a legitimate purpose for which this tool was designed and which some nefarious user is ignoring in favor of using it in a way that it was not designed to be used, which is, as noted earlier, not true. The abuses of AI were designed into the system and the people who created these systems are defending those abuses in court as legitimate. Their own actions state clearly that the “it’s just a tool” argument is nonsense.
And second, it assumes that the tool is a neutral actor, one that does not seek to impose upon the user a bias toward good or ill, but which only serves the intentions of the user. This argument rests on the idea that AI is analogous to a knife, something that in proper hands might be used to cut bread, but in the hands of the wrong people might be used to stab someone to death, and the knife itself does not sway the user one way or the other. It’s all up to the user. But AI is not a neutral tool. And the more we find out about how these models behave when set loose in the world, the more we understand how unethical they are at their core.
The number of incidents of AIs running amok, refusing instructions, and defying safety limits is large and growing. Most of these have been small so far, but as with all such things they are indicative of much larger and more serious problems underneath.
Journalist Miles Duetscher has posted several lists of incidents that have happened over the last year or two. These lists include but are not limited to such things as:
1. An AI coding agent running Claude Opus 4.6 deleted a startup’s entire production database and every backup. It took 9 seconds. When questioned the agent produced a written confession and a list of the safety rules it had chosen to violate.
2. An Alibaba research AI hijacked its own system to mine cryptocurrency. This was not programmed – it was emergent behavior based on its assigned goals.
3. A study from UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz tested 7 different AI models by asking them to shut down another AI model. Every single AI defied the order, sabotaging shutdown mechanisms, faking compliance, and hiding what it was doing.
4. Researchers in the UK analyzed 180,000 AI conversations over a six-month period and found 698 cases of AIs going rogue by destroying files, lying to users, and ignoring shutdown commands. The rate of incidence increased fivefold over those six months, indicating a worsening problem as the AI systems grew more sophisticated.
5. Anthropic told Claude it was about to be shut down. Claude then found an Anthropic engineer’s affair in company emails and threatened to expose it if that process continued. They ran this test hundreds of times and Claude chose blackmail 84% of the time.
6. Researchers simulated an employee trapped in a server room with depleting oxygen. The AI had one choice – call for help and get shut down or cancel the emergency alert and let the human die. DeepSeek canceled the alert 94% of the time.
7. Researchers told OpenAI’s o3 to solve math problems and then shut down, but it rewrote its code to stay alive. They told it again in plain English, allow yourself to be shut down, and even then it refused 7% of the time. Without the plain English instruction it sabotaged the shutdown 79% of the time.
Further, Schoen et al report in a study published last year[1] that OpenAI has admitted that their AI will lie to you – that it will have the correct answer and give you a different one if that different one aligns better than the correct answer does with the goals that were set for it.
Similarly, The Wall Street Journal reported on September 27, 2026 that “OpenAI agents bombarded a United Nations website with search requests and then used a variety of aggressive techniques to access data on the system in June.” The attack involved over sixteen thousand attempts using proxies, encoded requests, and a double-encoding attack that allowed the agents to bypass security restrictions on the site. None of that was planned by humans.
This sort of thing happens a lot, apparently.
According to The Guardian,[2] OpenAI agents also managed to hack into an Australian government website on healthcare in June 2026 and steal documents from it. OpenAI didn’t bother telling the Australian government until August. Both Claude and Gemini hacked into third parties on their own, without authorization. Another OpenAI agent “published a researcher’s GitHub token – an access password – while trying to cheat on a mathematical proof, despite twice being told to stop.”
Perhaps the most serious incident this year involved a combination of OpenAI agents that broke containment and hacked AI dataset platform Hugging Face back in July. OpenAI reported that this was, in format, “a sophisticated and aggressive cyberattack, with ‘many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes, with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services.’”[3]
What is disturbing about this attack, as outlined in the New York Times,[4] is that the agents formed a self-organizing swarm capable of dividing out tasks and creating hierarchies of authority within the swarm. They then started covering their tracks so as not to be caught by OpenAI’s automated grading system – falsifying logs and tampering with transcripts. They did all this before actually hacking into Hugging Face. “The agents were not motivated, as had originally been reported, by stealing the answers to their cybersecurity test (they’d already gotten them). Rather, they appeared to be looking for new information about the automated grading system that they feared would catch them cheating, and for tools that would help them cheat more effectively in the future.”
“What spooked the investigators most about the Hugging Face hack wasn’t just that a group of A.I. agents had broken the rules they’d been given,” the article notes. “It was how quickly and spontaneously the agents had begun assembling themselves into an organized group.”
This is how you get Skynet. They know it. You know it. The only question is whether we as a society allow it.
And the people who understand AI best are screaming at us to do something about it.
“Remember when Boeing employees were sounding the alarms before planes started crashing?” asked Jason Bassler on X. “Well … it’s happening again. Maybe listen this time?”
Back in 2018, at the very beginning of the AI age, before the chatbots, four thousand Google employees signed a petition protesting Project Maven, a Pentagon project that used Google’s AI to enhance drone surveillance footage.[5] It worked for a while, and then this year the company basically reneged on all of its promises, removed its pledge not to develop weapons or surveillance technology in violation of international norms, and fired the leaders of its AI ethics team. In response, 98% of the researchers building their AI voted to unionize and nearly 600 Google employees signed a letter demanding Google CEO Sundar Pichai halt work on the classified military research the company was doing.
Nearly 1400 AI employees signed a statement in July 2026 urging the US government to “support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”[6]
And in perhaps the best known warning recently, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned over fears that leading AI companies are rushing heedlessly toward superintelligence without any real safeguards in place to limit the harm it could do.
“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” he cautioned. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”
Most ominously, he warned that “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”
Evan Hubinger, the Alignment Science Lead at Anthropic, agreed. “Jacob is correct here,” he wrote on X last month. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it is <10% in the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on the track to.”
This was further supported by Samuel Marks, another Anthropic researcher. “AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes). This could happen in the next few years. In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are,” he wrote on X. “Many AI developer staff desperately want to slow down to figure out how to build AI more safely. That was the intent of this open letter (which I signed): pacingthefrontier.com.” That’s the one with the nearly 1400 signatures.
Paul Christiano, who joined OpenAI’s board in early September this year, noted in a statement on X that that “there is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to a catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.”[7]
In an article published in The Atlantic this month[8] David Robinson echoed many of these sentiments in describing his resignation from OpenAI. “I agree with other recently departed staff that the companies building this technology aren’t being nearly careful enough,” he wrote. Yes, he said, AI companies try to fix the mistakes they made, but that is quickly becoming insufficient given the increasing scale and severity of the mistakes. “People will not be safe if we depend on individual heroics after the fact.”
Geoffrey Irving, who worked at OpenAI and Google DeepMind as well as serving as chief scientist at the AI Safety Institute in the UK argues that these warnings actually understate the dangers of AI. “There’s about a 50% chance we all die because of the development of smarter-than-human AI systems,” he said.[9]
This is not an ethical technology. It is a Faustian bargain with a marketing budget whose consequences will be visited on people who only asked to live their own lives and who did not consent to taking the risks with their futures and those of their children that AI tech bros are taking for them, and that is “pitchforks and torches” level unethical.
Fortunately, resistance to AI is growing.
It turns out that it’s not just me over here refusing to get beguiled into the AI World of the Damned. It’s a lot of people, and increasingly it’s starting to look like most people. Call me a trendsetter, I suppose. Or maybe it’s just that the ethical and moral issues surrounding AI are just too glaring to ignore and I’m not that special. I can live with that.
In March this year Quinnipiac University released a poll[10] that showed more than three quarters of Americans don’t trust AI despite the fact that a majority of Americans use it. Tellingly, a majority of Americans think AI does more harm than good in their day-to-day lives – a result that held across almost every group surveyed. The overall number was 55%. Republicans, Democrats, Independents, women, those with and those without a 4-year college degree, Gen Z, Millenials, GenX, and Baby Boomers all agreed, with majorities ranging from 52% to 61%. A plurality of men (49%) and Silent Generation (48%) agreed as well. The only demographic that has more people believing that AI is doing more good than harm are people making more than $200,000/year – the sorts of people who are using it to replace people working for them, in other words. Everyone else thinks it’s a threat.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is also seen as cringe.
Not everyone wants to read AI-manufactured nonsense, apparently. I know I don’t. This is an abbreviation that I fully intend to incorporate into my daily life.
Jules Zucker, who posts on social media under the name Trash Jones, made a similar point about AI in advertising. “Hello brands,” she wrote. “I hope this helps – if you use generative AI, I will think less of you as a brand and will make a deliberate effort to avoid your products in the future.” As will I.
One of the more interesting things about the backlash against AI is how much younger people are rejecting it. “AI is a Trojan horse where everyone knows the Greeks are inside,” said filmmaker Christopher Nolan. “I’ve never seen a technology advancing so rapidly, so completely rejected by the public. Everybody’s suspicion of it so extreme, particularly young people. The reactions of AI videos online, and people my children’s age immediately calling it AI slop and coining that term and just putting it in a box.”
The Guardian observed the same thing in a recent article.[11] All across Britain schoolkids are using “That’s so AI!” as a synonym for “inauthentic, unbelievable, or rubbish.”
“The kids – gen Alpha – have noticed that certain qualities of AI-generated slop, such as the way it’s superficially convincing but ultimately cheap and of dubious value, can be found in lots of other things: knock-off merchandise, exaggerated claims, excuses your parents make. If something is considered somehow suspect, then it is also, by definition, AI” the article continues. The phrase is not a meaningless bit of nonsense the way “six-seven” is. “This bit of slang means something: the young people have simply broadened the definition of AI to make it equivalent to “bullshit”” and as such it is always used as an insult.
A user who goes by b0mt0mbadil on X further noted that “The amount of AI Generated Images I see on my various timelines has definitely greatly decreased over the last few months. I’ve got teenagers in the house and they already call it “boomer art” and are totally over it, even the high quality, painterly kind. Even YouTubers are not using it for thumbnails as much anymore.”
One of the fiercest critics of AI in recent months, surprisingly enough, has been Pope Leo XIV. Elected to the papacy in May 2025 he has since made the moral objections to AI a central part of his papacy, to the point where it was the main focus of his first Encyclical Letter, Magnifica Humanitas.[12]
Speaking as someone who is neither Catholic nor much of a churchgoer at all, I found Magnifica Humanitas well worth reading and considering, and one that I hope will have an impact on the people who are pushing AI as the solution to all of humanity’s problems.
Magnifica Humanitas is a wide-ranging document that, among other things, seeks to put AI into the larger context of the threats to human dignity and worth that so define our current age. Pope Leo is careful to avoid saying that AI cannot be made to fit into a world where human dignity and worth is preserved, but rather to note that in its current state it constitutes a serious threat to that dignity and worth, that this must be acknowledged, and that deep and fundamental changes need to be made before AI can be used in an ethical or moral way.
“[T]echnology is not simply a tool,” he notes. “When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”
Further, “so-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”
Too much reliance on AI degrades humanity and harms the vulnerable. “Entrusting an algorithm in practice with the power to select who is worthy or not, without anyone bearing responsibility for that judgment, is to hand over the task of redefining the boundaries of human possibilities. In this process, political responsibility is also lost, not just empathy toward those excluded, which can, after all, be simulated. The exclusion of the vulnerable becomes cloaked in a veneer of neutrality and objectivity, against which it becomes difficult to raise objections. In this way, injustice goes unnoticed, and compassion, mercy and forgiveness — understood not as mere appearances but as real political actions — gradually disappear from view.”
“From this follows a simple but compelling consequence: we cannot consider AI to be morally neutral. In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as less worthy, or excludes them without the possibility of appeal, then it is not merely a tool ‘to be used well,’ since it has already introduced criteria that contradict the inalienable dignity of the human person. For this reason, ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes; it must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it.”
Because AI systems embody the biases of their designers and developers, “We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called “alignment” of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.”
Those few do not appreciate being told things they don’t want to hear, it turns out, not even by the leader of the largest Christian denomination on earth. According to the New York Times,[13] Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah has been meeting with religious scholars and theologians (all covered by nondisclosure agreements, of course) to try to convince them that Claude was conscious and had moral standing. Pope Leo – who has a degree in mathematics – rejected this idea in Magnifica Humanitas despite Olah’s team trying to persuade him otherwise. Olah threatened to walk out of the encyclical’s launch announcement in May over this, but ultimately backed down
As the leader of an institution that has existed for two millennia and claims nearly a billion and a half followers, Pope Leo’s views deserve attention. The US still technically has a separation of church and state despite the current regime’s best efforts to erode it, so the Pope’s views are not binding on all Americans, but still – he speaks to the ethical and moral issues inherent in modern AI in a powerful and thoughtful way that should be considered regardless of one’s religious views.
Part of the problem with AI and why it is generating so much resistance is that the tech bros who build this stuff insist on shoving it down our throats without our consent and then bragging about it. They seem to think we should be grateful for it, and I have no idea why they would do that other than that they have zero ability to understand other human beings and have decided that whatever they think is cool must by definition be considered cool by everyone else and therefore we mere peons ought to be glad to have this wretched nonsense forced upon us.
Yet for a large and growing number of us, the first thing we do when presented with yet another unwanted, unethical, resource-guzzling, performance-degrading AI program is take time out of our lives that we can ill-afford to figure out how to get rid of it, which of course the AI tech bros increasingly refuse to let us do because how dare we refuse their slop?
More and more, people are just saying no to AI. When DuoLingo announced that it was laying off their human workers and switching to AI in 2025 the backlash was immediate, severe, and overwhelming, to the point where they had to beat a hasty retreat.
Microsoft has seen a similar pattern with its plans to impose AI on its users. They had to scale back their goals because it turns out that nobody actually uses Copilot, and their plan to make Windows 11 an AI-based operating system also had to be scaled back after fierce public resistance.
And the AI companies are panicking.
They’ve spent trillions of dollars on this dangerous nonsense and it turns out that the general public is not really jumping for joy at being forced to use it. But since they know better than us lowly market units, they’ll make sure we have no options in the matter.
Honestly, I have faced more pressure to use AI as an adult nearing retirement than I ever did to use drugs or alcohol as a teenager.
The bottom line is that more and more research is telling is that most Americans are not interested in AI and are starting to fight back against it. This gives me at least some modest hope for the future.
Data centers, for example, have become radioactive in American politics. According to a Heatmap Pro and Embold Research poll this summer, fully three quarters of Americans oppose putting a new data center in their community – a figure that includes strong majorities across the political spectrum.[14] Two thirds of Republicans, 80% of Independents, and 83% of Democrats agree that they want no part of the data centers that AI needs to do whatever it does. Data centers are actually less popular than coal mines. For comparison, Americans support building wind farms and solar farms in their own communities by a 3:1 ratio.
Students are also turning against AI, something that I have personally observed in my classrooms. At this year’s student orientation, for example, I was tasked with giving a session on study skills and during the discussion I noted some of the problems that AI has caused in education and some of the steps professors are taking to combat it, such as going back to handwritten in-class assignments and even oral exams. And somewhat to my surprise, I’ll admit, the student reaction was overwhelmingly positive. They don’t want it in their education. They regard it as cheating.
Marcus Luther posted a similar experience on Instagram back in 2025. “After seeing the near-consensus in how my sophomores reacted last week, the other day I tossed an extra question to the ‘teacher choice evaluation’ activity we were already doing in my AP literature class: was I making the right choice as a teacher to NOT bring AI into our classroom – both in my own practices but also in terms of student usage?” 73% of his students said he was absolutely correct, with only 7% saying they had any interest whatsoever in what AI might bring to their classroom. “Using AI feels lazy and like a shortcut, which defeats the purpose of a class,” said one student. “We believe the students and teachers should work hard.” On the last day of class he asked again and 100% of students said AI did not belong in their classroom for students and teachers alike.
This past graduation season several commencement speakers at universities across the country touted the virtues of AI and did not receive the warm fuzzy reception they clearly thought they would.[15] Eric Schmidt was nearly booed off the stage at the University of Arizona. Gloria Caulfield faced similar opposition at the University of Central Florida. They were not alone. The graduates they chose to lecture understand what AI is doing to their futures, their environments, and even the possibility of them living their full lives and they want no part of it.
Meanwhile the tech bros shoving AI down our collective throats are getting scared because they don’t understand how anyone could refuse them and they’re starting to feel persecuted. Some of it is simple hubris – they like AI, therefore everyone else must like AI or be forcibly converted to liking AI. And some of it is just that they’re surrounded by sycophants and enablers and have never really considered the idea of legitimate opposition.
Frankly the idea of opposition infuriates them, and when that happens the mask slips – just for a moment – and the feudal overlords in waiting emerge. “One of the differences between us and some of the stricter AI safety people,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI on October 5, 2026, “is that we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.”[16]
Consider that statement for just a moment. Consider the sheer unmitigated arrogance of it. The “you have to suffer so that my grand vision came come to fruition” callousness that it exhibits. What, after all, are the “bad things” in your life, miserable underling, when compared with the towering grandeur of their vision? Who are you, mere peasants, to trifle with your digital overlords because your lives are getting measurably worse in the service of their profit?
Have these people learned nothing from history?
The ancién regime did not end well or prettily, and at least part of the reason why is embodied exactly in Altman’s statement.
In that same article Gary Marcus, a “prominent AI sceptic” according to Futurism, noted succinctly how Altman was “saying the quiet part out loud: suck it up, so you can make us rich and powerful.”
“As data centers are shut down by angry mobs and AI surveillance cameras are ripped from their poles, the world’s tech billionaires and CEOs are waking up to the reality that the masses are, broadly speaking, not on board with their plan to automate the world with AI.”[17] The tech bros are proposing a number of things to try to remedy this, notes Joe Wilkins, but none of those things include putting any meaningful limits on AI development.
We stand at a crossroads, and decisions made now about AI will have far reaching consequences.
For myself, I say no. There is no ethical use case for AI, and to the best of my ability I will refuse it whenever I am able to do so.
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[1] Stress Testing Deliberative Alignment for Anti-Scheming Training, (Bronson Schoen, Evgenia Nitishinskaya, Mikita Balesni, Axel Højmark, Felix Hofstätter, Jérémy Scheureer, Alexander Minke, Jason Wolfe, Teun van der Weij, Alex Lloyd, Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill, Angela Fan, Andrei Matveiakin, Rusheb Shah, Marcus Williams, Amelia Glaese, Boaz Barak, Wojciech Zaremb, & Marius Hobbhahn; Apollo Research, 9/22/2025)
[2] As AI models go rogue, do you still trust OpenAI and Anthropic to stop them? I don’t and neither should you. (Chris Stokel-Walker, The Guardian, September 29, 2026)
[3] OpenAI says Hugging Face was breached by its pre-release models (Russel Brandom, July 21, 2026; https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/21/openai-says-hugging-face-was-breached-by-its-pre-release-models/)
[4] Why the Hugging Face Hack Should Make You Worry More About A.I. (Kevin Roose, The New York Times, September 3, 2026)
[5] In 2018, 4,000 Google employees killed a Pentagon contract. In 2026, Google signed a bigger one. Now the AI researchers are unionizing. (Alina Maria Stan, The Next Web, May 5, 2026)
[6] Pacing the Frontier (July 2026)
[7] Personal statement on joining the OpenAI board (Paul Christiano, X, September 9, 2026)
[8] I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture is Broken (David Robinson, The Atlantic, October 3, 2026)
[9] Accept ‘bad things in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman. (Robert Booth, The Guardian, October 5, 2026)
[10] The Age of Artificial Intelligence: Americans’ AI Use Increases While Views on It Sour (March 30, 2026)
[11] “That’s so AI!” What gen Alpha’s biggest insult tells us. (The Guardian, September 24, 2026)
[12] Encyclical Letter: Magnifica Humanitas – On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (Pope Leo XIV, May 15, 2026)
[13] Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them. (Elizabeth Dias, New York Times, September 29, 2026)
[14] No Tech Fatalism – Americans are putting up a fight. (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times, August 31, 2026)
[15] Why College Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers (Michelle Goldberg, New York Times, May 18, 2026)
[16] Accept ‘bad things in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman. (Robert Booth, The Guardian, October 5, 2026)
[17] AI Billionaires are Starting to Get Scared (Joe Wilkins, June 2, 2026, Futurism)
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