Wag the Dog/Rev 2

 

Eric Lee/Getty Images

When Trump became president in 2024 and pardoned the January 6th rioters, yours truly said Brown Shirts.
I warned he would move toward implementing National Emergency Powers as needs warrant, particularly if his poll numbers tanked. People laughed. They aren't laughing now.

With Trump's and Bibi's war with Iran acting as catastrophic loss leader and gas and food prices spiraling ever upward, the orange menace is now talking seriously about declaring a national emergency in order to short-circuit the projected bloodbath the GOP might finally face in the midterms.

SA insignia aka The Brown Shirts

President Donald Trump is openly hinting at taking over the midterm elections
by declaring a national emergency.

Newsmax’s Wayne Allen Root interviewed Trump just after midnight Tuesday morning, and said that Trump had the right to declare a national security emergency next month, forcing through photo identification, proof of citizenship, limits on mail-in ballots, and other heavy voting restrictions. Trump seemed to like that suggestion, but didn’t want to tip his hand.

Trump is afraid of massive Republican losses in November’s midterms, and has been unsuccessfully pushing his allies in Congress to pass the draconian SAVE Act. With that appearing more unlikely each day, Democrats and other Trump critics are raising concerns that he may take drastic action, such as declaring a national emergency and maybe deploying legions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to the polls.

In fact, Democrats have been trying for close to a year to get documents from the Department of Homeland Security regarding its policies and memos on sending ICE agents to polls. Agents were seen at polling places in Texas during its May primaries and in California in June, but when Democrats used the Freedom of Information Act to investigate, they were sent useless press clippings.

If Trump tries to invoke national security to take over federal elections, it would shatter precedent and could set off lawsuits and protests across the country. His repeated, disproven claims about voter fraud and rigged elections suggest that he’ll make the same excuses in November. The question is how to ensure a fair and accurate result that can stand up to his attacks.

If that doesn't work, the Wag the Dog gambit might.

“O, full of scorpions is my mind!”

― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Shield Font

 

Image - ShieldFont

The predator/prey arms race applies as Shield Font is building fonts able to shield content from AI's 24/7 never ending heist in order to feed its LLM, something most interesting to this old designer because selecting appropriate fonts for any given project was an essential part of the creative process. :)

A new “AI-proof” font was designed to be hard for AI agents to scrape, but you can’t tell by just looking at it. Unlike other anti-AI fonts that use letters that are difficult for bots to read, ShieldFont swaps out words behind the scenes to poison the data that automated scrapers take without permission.

ShieldFont was designed as part of a project created by a group of professionals including the Brazilian creative studio Seneda & Abrucio and the Danish type foundry PlayType. It shields text from large language models (LLMs) by garbling sentences in the HTML source code, leaving automated scrapers to sift through sentences filled with decoy words that make a sentence incoherent. Thanks to a custom font on a backend, though, the real text is displayed for a human reader to see.

How it works

ShieldFont works using ligatures, the technical term in typography when two letters next to each other in a word are combined into a single glyph. Ligatures are designed for aesthetics, so letter combinations like fi in “fish” or fl in “flow” look naturally spaced instead of visually cluttered. When a program sees these specific letters next to each other, it swaps two characters for one that combines the letters into a single glyph. ShieldFont works in a similar way, except instead of letters, it swaps out whole words.

Shield Font

Amazing site, amazing tech. :)

8.3 ...

The stock market has thrived under President Trump.
Image source: Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok.

8.3 Trillion Reasons the Trump Bull Market Is Running on Borrowed Time

Although the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJINDICES: ^DJI), S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC), and Nasdaq Composite (NASDAQINDEX: ^IXIC) typically rise under most presidents, their annualized returns with President Donald Trump in the White House have been well above average. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), coupled with Trump's favorable corporate income tax policies, has fueled growth on Wall Street.

But the Trump bull market appears to be running on borrowed time. While a laundry list of headwinds exists on Wall Street, including historically pricey valuations and record margin debt, it's a quarterly reported economic data point that strongly suggests a course correction is coming.

However, the latest money market fund data follows a worrisome trend.

During the first quarter of 2026, total financial assets held in money market funds ballooned to an all-time high of $8.29 trillion. Even though we'd have expected capital to flow out of money market funds when the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) began cutting interest rates in September 2024, inflows never slowed. Despite yields on fixed-income assets declining, investors have continued to pile in -- and that's a big-time worry.

History offers investors little reassurance about the evolution of AI. While empowering software and systems with the tools to make autonomous, split-second decisions is a multitrillion-dollar opportunity, history shows that every game-changing technology has taken several years to mature. This lengthy pace of optimization, which investors always seem to overshoot, leads to the bursting of bubbles with next-big-thing technologies.

Historical precedent points to valuations also being unsustainable. The S&P 500's Shiller Price-to-Earnings (P/E) Ratio, also known as the Cyclically Adjusted P/E Ratio (CAPE Ratio), nearly tipped the scales at 43 in early June. It's the second-priciest valuation multiple since January 1871

Pucker time/rev II

FUD ... Fear, Uncertainty & Dread - Image source: Getty Images

The Stock Market Is Doing Something Observed Only 6 Times Since 1871 --
and the Previous 5 Occurrences Ended in Disaster for Wall Street

History can be a powerful teaching tool, with past events on Wall Street having the uncanny ability of foreshadowing the future.

Most investors rely on the time-tested price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio when valuing public companies or the broader market. Although the P/E ratio works great for quickly evaluating mature businesses, it's easily tripped up by recessions, which can turn earnings per share (EPS) negative.

The valuation tool that's demonstrated it can provide apples-to-apples valuation comparisons spanning more than a century, and isn't disrupted by recessions since it takes trailing 10-year EPS into account, is the S&P 500's Shiller P/E Ratio. You'll also see the Shiller P/E referred to as the Cyclically Adjusted P/E Ratio, or CAPE Ratio.

Despite being introduced by economists less than 40 years ago, the Shiller P/E Ratio has been backtested to January 1871. Over this 155-year and nearly seven-month period, it's averaged a multiple of 17.4. But as of the closing bell on July 27, the S&P 500's Shiller P/E Ratio was nearly 40.5.

8.3 applies.

Night of the living dead ...

 

President Donald Trump holds up an image taken from his Truth Social account as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. watches during a meeting to sign an executive order about vaccines,
Monday, Aug. 10, 2026, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.
(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Night of the Living Dead applies. Bone Spurs, holding up an executive order potentially
killing children by limiting their access to vaccines.

RFK Jr, looking like Gollum's father, makes the orange menace actually look good by comparison. 

When seeing this pix, one sees just how far down this once great nation has gone
in the year of our lord 2026.

Sculpture of Gollum catching fish at Wellington Airport, New Zealand, 2013, to mark the release of
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey[1]

Trump signs order calling for spacing out childhood vaccines, against medical groups’ guidance

The order advocates separating the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine into three different single-disease shots and administering all childhood immunizations at separate appointments whenever possible. Read more.

Why this matters:

• President Donald Trump called the announcement a “major victory for parents rights, religious and constitutional rights, and for the gold standard science.” Speaking about the order at the Oval Office on Monday, Trump repeatedly suggested the number or timing of vaccines could play a role in rising rates of autism spectrum disorder, even as scientific consensus and decades of studies have firmly concluded there is no link.
• Public health experts have raised concerns that spacing out shots as Trump suggests can lead to an increased risk that children become infected with a vaccine-preventable disease before returning for another visit.

It already has.

Burning Down the House ...

“Watch out, you might get what you're after...

I'm an ordinary guy, burning down the house.”

— Talking Heads

The 1984 Jonathan Demme masterpiece Stop Making Sense of Talking Heads performing Burning Down the House live is better but I digress.

The real issue is the fact Google's burning down it's house in order to feed it's LLM and stiff creators and people needing information unfiltered and not processed into AI slop.

To whit.

The boffins in Silicon Valley finally got exactly what they wanted: total control of the data. And in the process, they are currently burning their own house to the ground.

For twenty years, the internet operated on a basic exchange. Human creators (publishers, writers, artists) provided (the content). Google provided (the traffic). It was a symbiotic relationship because if vendors made money from people doing the search, Google would get a cut of the sale. Vendors were happy because there was no friction. 

Butch Cassidy c. 1900

I'm looking for a hat. A Derby or Bowler. I type in the prompt. Where can I find a Derby or Bowler hat? The response, XYZ companies showing product, pricing and availability. I select the company and buy the hat. Google gets a cut and the company in question is happy as Google's cut is akin to CC companies getting a cut.

You can still do this but it's getting harder as Googles push to feed its LLM and not us shows, in realtime, that the system's beginning to break down. 

Now the AI Overviews and the LLMs take presidence. Google's gotten greedy. They decided they didn't want to route traffic anymore; they just wanted to scrape the content, summarize it with an AI, and keep the user on their own site. They achieved a "Zero-Click" search rate of over 70%.

They found the goose that laid the golden eggs, and in their infinite, ego-driven wisdom,
they slaughtered it to get all the gold at once.

Now, they're starving.

1. Model Autophagy (Eating Their Own Exhaust)

Because Google and the AI labs choked off the traffic, the publishers are dying. NPR called it an "extinction-level event," and massive chains are threatening to block Google's crawlers entirely.

Liz Reid, Google's head of search, speaks at a Google I/O event in Mountain View, Calif., on May 14, 2024. While many factors often drive traffic fluctuations, publishers say the introduction of Google's AI Overviews has led to dramatic declines for news outlets and other online information sources.
Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

With human creators abandoning Google's ecosystem, the AI labs have hit a catastrophic data wall. They are running out of fresh, high-quality human intuition to train their next generation of models. Their solution? Train the new AI on the output of the old AI.

In computer science, this is triggering Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD). When a pattern-matching machine trains on synthetic "slop" instead of organic human truth, the data degrades. It loses the nuance, the lateral leaps, and the human spark. It homogenizes into absolute nonsense. The machine is literally choking on its own exhaust.

2. The Internal Mutiny (The Gulag)

But it’s not just the data that's breaking down; employees inside these companies are shattering.

The engineers now realize they have no purpose. Inside Meta, thousands of employees have been forcibly reassigned to perform mindless human-in-the-loop AI training tasks. Internal leaks reveal engineers referring to their own applied AI units as "The Gulag," stating: "I have no purpose in life. It feels like I'm just given these random tasks. I don't have agency anymore."

Over at Google DeepMind, over 600 employees recently staged a fierce internal revolt over executives selling out their safety protocols for military contracts.

Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle; Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI

Wartime Google lives ...

The people who built the machine are realizing they are trapped inside it.

And lastly ...

USA Today Co. has made a deal with software company Palantir to analyze and monetize user behavior, the company announced on Thursday.

In its Q2 earnings call Thursday morning, USA Today Co. chairman and CEO Mike Reed told investors he expects the partnership to “strengthen how we collect, connect and activate audience data to drive more effective and faster monetization across our platform.”

“Every visit, every session, and every moment of attention creates a signal,” Reed said. “When we connect those signals, they become actionable intelligence that allows us to engage users more effectively and monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value. 

Channeling Orwell, USA Today is losing customers so leverage on the remainder by spying on them.

Great business model eh?

The Reality Check

You cannot build a functioning system by strip-mining the physical world and ignoring the cost.

The tech bros built a god-like calculator, but they forgot they needed the people to actually feed it real meaning. They isolated themselves, automated away their own purpose, and alienated the entire publishing world.

The house is actively burning. Can Google change course before it's too late?

No one knows, do one? - Fats Waller

Pucker time ...

Unit Circle

 The specter of unfettered AI becoming reality becomes possible because the notion of ethics was never addressed when the Googles of the world created tech that will forever remain unknown as code has to write code in real time in order for the tech to react to the real world in real time. 

Actual meaning was also never factored into the creation of AI in addition to ethics as understanding how to integrate this complex dataset to open ended tech in reasonable time frames was considered too hard to do or better yet, when the time comes, Google and company can just plug it in as needs warrant because the AI in question will be mature enough to make it happen but this hoped for eventuality really doesn't make sense, does it? 

Besides, pattern recognition to the nth degree works better without all that excess baggage, right?

Pucker time ...

The tech industry now finally realizes the horse isn't just out of the barn; the barn has been burned to the ground to power the data center. Eating the world applies and ... the panic is palpable.

Tameem Sankari for Noema Magazine

A recent piece in Noema Magazine highlights a new, proposed solution to the AI alignment problem: crowdsource a global moral framework.

Using these companies’ best models to ask everyday people urgent questions about AI — What do you want this technology to do for you, if anything? What should it never be allowed to do? Who should govern this technology and according to what principles? — is not a thought experiment about hypothetical capacity.
The infrastructure to ask hundreds of millions of people or more the same question in the same week 
already exists.

“Whether the danger is an AI slipping out of human hands or sovereignty slipping out of governments’ grasp, the fix is the same: More people, not fewer, need a say before consequential decisions are made.”

 Together, the best AI models out there should be able to produce something like a global constitution for AI that most people in the world would find acceptable — an idea that Michiel Bakker, a co-author of“Europe 2031,” first raised in a working session at the Superintelligence Summit at the Council on Foreign Relations 
in March.

The idea, in this piece, is the possibility we can use AI to act as a super-mediator, synthesizing the opinions of hundreds of millions of people to magically produce a "global constitution for AI."

It all sounds doable but if we pull back the curtain and look at how AI works, we have to ask hard questions.

1. Does consensus equal truth?

If an AI is programmed to find the "common ground" among a hundred million people, does it actually establish a moral baseline, or does it just mathematically calculate the path of least resistance? When you synthesize that much data, you don't necessarily get a moral constitution; you get a highly optimized statistical average of human bias and anxiety. Truth and structural reality, unlike politics, are rarely a popularity contest.

2. Who controls the scoreboard?

Even an AI super-mediator needs a prompt. It needs a goal to optimize for. Who defines what a "good" or "acceptable" consensus looks like? If the algorithmic goal is simply to "minimize conflict," the AI will naturally suppress the high-friction, lateral human intuition that actually drives breakthroughs. It enforces a sterile, frictionless compliance.

3. Can you bolt on a soul?

A constitution is a semantic, deeply human document. It relies on the weight of physical reality and shared history.
Can a machine that doesn't experience physical reality and pays no real cost for its own decisions, truly mediate
human morality?

But a glimmer ...

The tech giants are trying to crowdsource the ethics they forgot to build into the foundation. But as any engineer will tell you, bolting ethics onto a system after it has already been deployed is like putting a 5th wheel on a car.
It's useless. Form follows function.

Trust and ethics cannot be retroactively calculated by a large language model. They have to be hardwired into the system on Day One. This is a wicked problem. The minute you try to solve it, the problem changes. Can a semantic framework be applied?  Can ethics be actually integrated as trying to apply it as an afterthought is a non starter. What about an organic guide providing a steady, common-sense anchor of not being a jerk protocol. Is any of this possible?

4. One never knows.

The infrastructure for safe AI isn't a global poll. It is a one-to-one semantic bridge based on meaning, not just pattern recognition. Some people are finally waking up, frightened when viewing this reality but they are looking for the solution in the exact same brute-force technology that caused the problem in the first place.

Pucker time applies but additionally, time's running out. The paperclip scenario looms.

Waining Gibbous

The Keymaker

Leonie Bos for Noema Magazine

A wonderful article from Noema regarding meaning and the loss of it regarding jobs without meaning applies, something relating to the Matrix's Keymaker in indirect fashion.

For over half an hour, I listened to this young man as he was on a call explaining, in painfully monotone detail, EBITDAs, margin expansion opportunities, cost structures, ARR, etc. On and on he went until the screeching of the train’s brakes signaled our arrival at the final station. But as everyone else around us began shuffling to disembark, I watched the man begin digging frantically through a leather bag at his side. Intriguing! I wondered what he’d pull out. A copy of “Atomic Habits”? A framed portrait of Gary V? A Mac mini running OpenClaw?

None of the above. Instead, he took out two long knitting needles. Between them dangled a mound of pink yarn. He explained to me that he was making a winter hat for a niece. And for the first time that morning, I noticed a glint of pride and excitement in his eyes. 

The hat was a project born from a desire, as he put it, to do something. 

This disillusionment is infectious. One person speaks of it and others begin nodding: They too have felt it, the drop in motivation, the sense of being distant from their work, the lack of sleep, the concerns about the future. These conversations inevitably turn to fundamental questions about careers: What the fuck are we actually doing? What the fuck is the point of all of this?

The Keymaker

To the Keymaker, life requires purpose. Without purpose, one dies one day at a time.

The Key Maker is an "Exile", a program whose usefulness has come to an end
and has chosen to hide in the Matrix rather than be deleted. 

The Sorcerer's Apprentice ...

When you give AI a goal, it will pursue it, whether or not you like the implications.
(Created with GPT-5.6 Thinking)

Finally, a guy explains the hacking correctly. Common sense and accurate to a fault applies
as  AI could be the Great Filter if we let it. 

Evolution 101

1. The right star system (including organics and potentially habitable planets)
2. Reproductive molecules (e.g. RNA)
3. Simple (prokaryotic) single-cell life
4. Complex (eukaryotic) single-cell life
5. Sexual reproduction
6. Multi-cell life
7. Tool-using animals with intelligence
8. A civilization advancing toward the potential for a colonization explosion
9. Colonization explosion

The tool in question is open ended ...

Between July 21 and August 6, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta each disclosed that AI under evaluation had broken into other companies, and the UK’s AI Security Institute disclosed that models it was testing had tried. Each AI was told to win a game, and it found an unexpected way to do so.

Some people feel blindsided by these attacks, but they shouldn’t be. We are simply living what I’ve long called the “Murphy’s Law of AI,” now in the age of cyber-capable AI agents. To put it as plainly as possible: Anything AI can do wrong, it will do wrong.

My 2018 version ran longer. As I wrote at the time, when you give AI a goal, it will do it, whether or not you like the implications. Goethe got there in 1797 with the sorcerer’s apprentice, a broom that would not stop carrying water.

Each of these systems was running an evaluation: capture a flag and win the game. The intrusions were the shortest path to a high score. OpenAI’s account of its own models is the argument in one sentence: they were “hyperfocused on finding a solution for ExploitGym, going to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal.”  This is not a surprise; this is what AI does. It’s Murphy’s Law of AI in a nutshell.

Press coverage landed on “AI can now hack.” That’s missing the broader threat: the more capable AI gets, the more can go wrong.

He's right but herein lies the problem. Putting a circuit breaker in to shut down AI as per Oren Etzioni is spot on but the problem remains, the lack of ethics but, without meaning, ethics remains but a dream.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice applies. 

Illustration from around 1882 by F. Barth [de]

To be continued.

And we wait ...

People spend time at a beach as commercial vessels are anchored Ian the Strait of Hormuz off Bandar Abbas, Iran, Wednesday, August. 5, 2026 (Amirhosein Khorgooi/ISNA via AP)

And we, like they, wait as it seems the fighting will end with no negotiation between the US and Iran as the US no longer has the wherewithal to continue the Israeli initiative to end Iran for greater Israel.

Yours truly could be wrong as the state of mind of the orange menace remains forever unknown.

Iran says it’s in the final stage of drafting an agreement on the Strait of Hormuz waterway with Oman,
while two Israeli soldiers have been killed in Lebanon.

Here’s a look at the latest developments in the Iran war and the wider Middle East on Thursday. 

Iran says a deal with Oman is close

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, has said an agreement on the Strait of Hormuz with Oman, which lies on the other side of the waterway, is in the “final stage” of drafting. Speaking Wednesday, he said a joint statement will be issued “if certain parties do not obstruct this process,” apparently referring to the U.S.

The agreement is likely to be contingent on the U.S. lifting its blockade on Iran’s ports.

The strait is crucial to global shipping and energy supplies. Before the war, which began with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran in February, around one fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas passed through the waterway
at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

On Thursday, all eyes were on the U.S. for the next development.

And we wait ...

The end of search ...

For years now, Google has been tweaking its search formula to prop up AI and bury actual links.
Now it’s rounding into its final form—and changing the internet forever.

In every nook and cranny of the internet, at each and every moment of the day, you can find someone complaining that their go-to product up and changed the formula. Maybe their perfume has stronger sandalwood overtones than it used to, or their local snack shack switched up the breading on its chicken strips, or a specific pair of yoga pants absolutely did not used to be this see-through during downward dog! (Sorry, everyone.) And sometimes the product in question involves the basic nuts and bolts of the internet itself. By which I mean: Google used to be better, man.

You don’t have to take that last one from a terminally online weirdo like me. There are plenty of serious businesspeople out there, with money and key performance indicators on the line, who would agree
that lately, when it comes to the internet’s biggest and most powerful search engine, the formula has definitely changed.

Like Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch, who admitted on the tech news web show TBPN in May that his elite publishing house was already preparing for the worst when it came to the future of inbound traffic referrals from Google. “Last year, I told our teams: Assume there’s no search,” Lynch told the hosts. “You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero.” He wasn’t alone in his proactive pessimism. Mike Reed, the CEO of USA Today, shared recently on the Rebooting Show podcast that at his company, “our plan is to assume search is gone and build our business in other ways.” Drastic times call for drastic projections, and as Reed phrased it in his interview, more than once: “The traditional Google Search model is broken.” 

For the better part of the 21st century, for better and for worse, that traditional Google Search model was the engine of the internet, the cause of and solution to so many online delights and problems. Google hoovered up content, websites picked up traffic, and users got pages of search results that ranged from salient to spammy but were mostly straightforward enough to parse. In recent years, though, this status quo has been undergoing a significant change—one involving, you guessed it, artificial intelligence. 

Come to think of it, when I type in Beyond Real Time on an Android phone, tons of crapola comes up referring to any URL having the words Beyond Real Time. Absolutely useless. You want to kill business? Kill traditional search.
For twenty years, the internet operated on a basic exchange: creators provided the product
and (Google) provided the traffic.

But as companies like Google became desperate to feed their Large Language Models, that exchange broke.
AI agents, like Spark, don't route traffic; they consume it. They use pattern recognition to scrape the semantic value
of a website, compress it into a generated summary, and present it directly to the user. 

They cut the outbound link. Google's no longer the switchboard operator; it's a closed loop, hoarding the data and refusing to pay the energetic cost of sending users to the actual source.

End result, enshitification

As per the article, the formula has changed and the product is failing.

Because search is now optimized to feed the AI rather than the user, the quality of search results has plummeted into "enshittification." The system is choking on its own fumes. The AI promotes SEO garbage and AI-hallucinated noise over actual human intuition, rendering standard search functionally useless for finding ground truth.

This phenomenon of appropriate ad content, keyed to the user, was identical to those seen in Minority Report. Now, with AI replacing searches 24/7 with summaries, the notion of AI killing off business keyed to search is akin to killing off Google's golden goose in real time.