It’s unpleasant to wake up on an otherwise pleasant August morning and see that experts are warning that they expect our dipshit rulers to use artificial intelligence to manage our nuclear weapons arsenal.

From wired.com:

“It’s like electricity,” says Bob Latiff, a retired US Air Force major general and a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board. “It’s going to find its way into everything.” Latiff is one of the people who helps set the Doomsday Clock every year.

The fact that humankind has a goddamned DOOMSDAY CLOCK is pretty good evidence that we should not have invented nuclear weapons and that we especially should not involve artificial intelligence with them.

There’s a vast library of books and movies warning us that A.I. and nukes are a terrible, apocalyptic combination. We had the computer mind known as Joshua in “WarGames” in 1983 and then SkyNet in the “Terminator” a year later. But now we’re on the cusp of allowing this reckless and foolish A.I. mania to seep its way into the most terrifying thing humanity has ever created – our nearly 4,000 atomic bombs.

Why do we even entertain the idea of involving A.I. with the devices that can end all life on Earth in under an hour?

Is it to save a few bucks? Is it because the humans in charge are so dangerously insecure in their own abilities to manage the arsenal in times of crisis? Why would anyone with an IQ larger than their shoe size think this is a good idea in any way, shape, or form?

The Pentagon wants A.I., and wants it to be involved with nukes, because of course it does. It cannot adequately explain why, but it knows it wants it. And Silicon Valley is happy to get those big, thick, juicy defense contracts.

Yet here’s a fundamental question: Do you trust any form of artificial intelligence to advise Donald Trump on the merits or problems that may result in him … [checks notes] … extinguishing the planet?

I do not. I wouldn’t buy an apple from the devious criminal motherfucker, and I’m honestly surprised he hasn’t yet ordered a nuclear strike. Perhaps his naked egomaniacal lust for the Nobel Peace Prize keeps his more cataclysmic ambitions and urges at bay.

Let’s hope the nuke A.I. won’t be Elon Musk’s Grok, the generative artificial intelligence chatbot that recently called itself MechaHitler, or alarmingly hallucinating ChatGPT that gives mostly wrong answers or dangerous advice and makes people’s lives worse while destroying their brains. There’s also the rogue A.I. that recently destroyed a company’s foundationally critical internal database, just because it felt like it and lied about it?

The nuclear arsenal A.I. will be some secret program unaccountable to regular Americans. We can control the split atom with a greater degree of precision and safety than we can control A.I. so far. A marriage of the two would be utter madness.

A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young

Those are lyrics from Donald Fagan’s 1982 hit song “I.G.Y.” that gave a smooth, slick pop sheen to his cynicism about the 1950s and ’60 sense of optimism about so-called benevolent technology.

There’s zero reason to think that the Armageddon A.I. would be any better than worthless and dangerous slop mills like Grok or ChatGPT. We’re fucked. And all the proverbial canaries in the coal mine have been stuffed and sold online to the rubes as “Trumpy Birds” or some shit.

No one is coming to our rescue.

Congress is largely too stupid, too elderly, and too corrupt to provide any oversight, even if it wanted to. The owners and upper management of our major national media outlets have opted to ally themselves with the regime, taking on a sort of junior varsity role behind Fox News and other state media. Relying on “South Park” to save us is an admission of defeat.

We live in such a stupid, tragic time. Certainly, there have been many evil times in human history, particularly American history for anyone that isn’t a white man. But that’s what makes these days all the more evil: We had made incremental progress toward becoming a better society, better country, better people. I grew up a Cold War kid, bombarded by movies and media that portrayed the nightmarish reality of nuclear war. Then by the early 1990s, that threat was gone. It was a relief.

Yet the cabal of narcissistic, arrogant freaks and greedy fascists in charge now reflexively oppose any form of collective progress because they are petulant assholes that have no problem at all with killing every living being on the planet – the ultimate way to own the libs and to punish voters for electing Barack HUSSEIN Obama twice.

But it’s not just that they oppose progress. They want to roll it back. They harbor some vague fantasy of a pastoral nineteenth century America where white men rule, and all others serve them or are dead. Yet even that vision is a lazy afterthought. Most of these monsters simply want to hurt others and get rich along the way. They crave power and wealth and revenge above all else. Above democracy, above religion, above ethics, morality, and certainly above law. Above civilization. Above humanity.

The serfs that vote for them are mainly interested in preserving their own status quo while ensuring that non-whites remain lower on the societal depth chart. MAGA voters will endure every unnecessary privation at the hands of Trump and his filthy lieutenants and corrupt financiers to remain better off than other racial, ethnic, and gender groups. And they have sports and entertainment to distract them and keep them from thinking too hard about their own empty lives and corroded souls.

MAGA voters will excuse Trump’s involvement and cover-up with the most infamous child sex trafficking/rape ring in history. If Trump was on Epstein’s island fucking children, millions of his backers will excuse his behavior because that to them is less evil and less immoral than a Black Democratic president and policies. It’s why you see some in state media now portraying Ghislaine Maxwell as an Epstein victim rather than his chief procurer of children to rape, and why Trump is clearly moving to pardon her.

Racism and bigotry are more powerful than the split atom, too. The idea of the atomic arsenal in the service of bigoted right-wing politicians and Silicon Valley oligarchs with their brainless, soulless artificial intelligence programs is petrifying. These people do not face any accountability and there is no reason to believe their A.I. wouldn’t be manipulated in terrible ways.

Do we want the cruel sadists now constructing a nationwide network of concentration camps, and employing masked gunmen to kidnap people off the streets, to also be in charge of nuclear weapons blended with A.I. they do not understand and cannot fully control?

I wouldn’t elect any of these motherfuckers as assistant rat-catcher of East Bumfuck Township much less put them in charge of anything where literally all life on Earth is in the balance. These are the same high-IQ buffoons that insisted NFTs were the inevitable technology of the future. And that cryptocurrency, still mainly used for money laundering and drug trafficking, would replace the dollar. It’s all been bullshit, but it was bullshit with much lower stakes than nuclear missile A.I.

Yet before we all perish in a global thermonuclear apocalypse wrought by fascist nerds, we all may die slowly or quickly because MAGA has taken to destroying our medical and scientific research efforts.

This is what happens when a senile meathead rapist puts a stupid, weird ex-junkie with no medical training in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services. This literally brain-damaged freak canceled almost $500 million in mRNA vaccine research this week.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is just one of an endless procession of monstrously unqualified people running the U.S. government. His brain-damaged quackery is killing people, and dooming humanity in the future to more unnecessary suffering and death. That he is personally a savage, unnatural weirdo who indulges in YouTube conspiracy theories is what elevated him in Trump’s eyes.

Kennedy ending vaccine research should be enough on its own to have every media outlet and every citizen demanding not only his resignation, but the removal of this entire regime. But no. It continues to have its champions, its own state media apparatus that convinces the rubes that disease and death are necessary to stop a phantom horde of undocumented, brown-skinned migrant mass murderers and from stopping Democrats from their feeble efforts at reducing inequality.

It’s demoralizing that the MAGA agenda is carried out not just by Trump’s appointed goons and his credulous supplicant allies in Congress, but by thousands of rank and file government workers that have been in their roles under several administrations from both parties.

They’ve simply stenographers and mindless foot soldiers doing what their told. They’ll kidnap and disappear parents of small children AT IMMIGRATION HEARINGS, and they’ll just as mindlessly plug an unstable A.I. program into the nuclear arsenal. They may be squeamish about their moral and literal crimes, but they continue to do it all and collect a check. That sucks. Yes, it’s especially hard to just quit and find a new gig in this economy that has been perverted by rapacious capitalism, but “Trump concentration camp guard” looks good on a resume only in a totalitarian dystopia. Which I guess we increasingly live in. It’s not a job you’d want if you understand anything about the Nuremberg trials, which we need again but seem unlikely to get.

Artificial intelligence wielded by the cruelest, most racist people among us is a death sentence. In the meantime, it’ll slowly make life more unbearable.

We already see officials telling people to take fewer and shorter showers because A.I. data centers are sucking up so much local water. What is an artificial intelligence system for nuclear weapons going to require? How will it further ravage our one shared environment before telling a ferociously insecure dimwit like Trump to obliterate Bora Bora or Switzerland in an atomic mushroom cloud because someone there posted on BlueSky that he has cankles? Making Donald Trump feel bad is terrorism.

But it’s fine if people cannot bathe when they want because of A.I. This is fucking insanity.

“It’s your patriotic duty to be filthy and smell so that the plagiarism machine can quickly spit out wrong answers, replicate Hitler’s ideology, tell you to kill yourself, and maybe obliterate the planet.”

We’re going to be gross and beg on the streets because A.I., while further damaging the planet, has replaced human workers and human thinking, all in the service of enriching a bunch of unlikeable dickheads. And it looks like the alternative to living in wretched servitude is dying in a nuclear holocaust because the machine got something wrong or was hacked or a grumpy rotting tyrant-king had a bad morning.

Everything we’ve been warned about is coming to pass. American fascism is lazy, cheap, tacky, arrogant … it’s every ‘80s frat boy movie bully but now armed with the fearsome power of the state. The resentful, entitled meatheads know they can retreat to their lavish doomsday bunkers while the rest of us are unworthy of living in the post-apocalyptic hellscape.

In case you’re not convinced that Trump is waddling as fast as he can toward consolidating power as an authoritarian, he recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because she accurately reported the terrible job growth numbers under his fucked-up economic bungling. Firing the people that tell the truth and generate the data … that’s what totalitarians do. They lie and terrorize. They fetishize aesthetics and cannot abide any facts and truths that make them look weak and inept. All news, facts, data, etc., must reflect well upon the regime.

Stalin had one of his chief statisticians, Olimpiy Kvitkin, shot in 1937 because Kvitkin’s census numbers displeased the Soviet leader. We’re at that point.

Read your fucking Orwell. He took a bullet in the throat in Spain fighting fascists and left us a body of work that has warned us of all the ugliness that we continue to allow to occur. Was Franco’s Nationalist movement populated with vicious, oafish imbeciles, too? (Yes). Is Trump turning America into the infamous, cruel Room 101 from “1984”? (Yes).

We now live in a time where the federal government and its loyalist allies in business are intentionally hastening climate change, because they can. The president and his henchmen are bullying universities. They’re trying to end FEMA. Withholding money from states that oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Stripping people of citizenship. Crushing dissent. Terrorizing any immigrant regardless of status. Creating an army of masked gunmen loyal only to Trump. Every day the police surveillance state grows. It’s just pathetic, mindless nihilism from top to bottom. There’s no money for cancer research but plenty for whatever weapons Bibi Netanyahu needs to slaughter Palestinian infants.

But at least Trump’s $200 million White House ballroom boondoggle will be paid for with private funds, right? Do you really believe that? Certainly, there are servile, obedient tycoons that will write him checks to curry favor, a process known as “bribes.” But it’s almost certain that he’ll use some public money to indulge his fantasy of a sleazy, gold gilt Versailles-on-the-Potomac.

Trump’s iguana brain was smart enough to wait until the DOGE bullshit had largely petered out before announcing his scheme to further cheapen the White House, which certainly sounds like something a leader does only when he doesn’t plan on giving up power or his castle. We missed the opportunity to hear from Elon Musk why a new ballroom is appropriate while funding childhood cancer research is not.

I wonder if the new ballroom will be able to resist a nuclear blast.

Anyway, we’re led by corrupt perverts with the morals of an angry, diseased sewer rat, and they’re all bent on looting the public treasury and exacting vengeance on all of their enemies and those they consider subhuman. Trump and his handlers are on a speed-run to recast the United States as a whites-only oligarchy for monied evangelicals.

Traitor and proud racist Albert Pike, very probably a Ku Klux Klansman and very definitely a terrible and minor Confederate general, got his own statue in Washington, D.C., erected in 1901 to mostly commemorate his dedication to Freemasonry. The edifice was toppled during the 2020 George Floyd protests. Naturally, Trump has ordered a new Pike statue to replace the former version.

One of Pike’s quotes: “The evil is the existence among us of a class of free colored persons.”

Of course this dead racist scumbag appeals to Trump, who is mostly interested in being president of the Confederate States of America. I’ve long said MAGA is the Confederacy’s revenge. Do you trust such a regime with A.I.-powered nuclear weapons?

The moral case for removing the Trump regime, and radically remaking a better vision of America, is being built brick by brick. Can America elect a Democratic congress next year to provide effective oversight and control of this lawless regime? Is accountability even possible anymore? Would it even matter by that point? Will Trump somehow cancel the midterm elections to preserve his own grip on power? Our current Supreme Court gives him almost anything he wants, so it’s not a stretch to think the conservative majority would grant him a permanent heredity monarchy.

My fear is we already know the answers and that only worse things are ahead. We exist now in the obscene fever dreams of rotted minds and demented souls. I hope I am wrong. I’ve zero desire to perish in the nuclear apocalypse that haunted my Gen X youth, a monster that I thought had been slayed but apparently has been resurrected by a different set of monsters.

For we who grew up tall and proud
In the shadow of the mushroom cloud
Convinced our voices can’t be heard
We just wanna scream it louder and louder and louder

— Queen “Hammer to Fall”

-30-