Donald Trump’s sudden deal for purchase of Russian diesel oil is a shocking rejection of U.S. law extending sanctions against those doing business with Iran, a handshake with those providing targeting information harming Americans, and a diplomatic slap against Ukraine and its allies in the continuing war against Russia.

The “deal” with Russia’s Vladimir Putin is a cynical, desperate attempt to trumpet a would-be reduction in soaring diesel before the November election. The deal proposes delivery of 300,000 tons of diesel “immediately,” to be followed by 500,000 tons in a month, and a million tons sometime thereafter.

But even a cursory look at the numbers involved show that even at best, the move, however diplomatically dangerous, will not work as intended. Gas prices globally have surged as the war in Iran has upended the energy sector. The national average for a gallon of diesel in the U.S. remains above $6.

In his announcement, Trump simply asserted that more Russian oil supply would lower costs to farmers, truckers and ranchers three weeks before the U.S. elections. Trump did not acknowledge that he was overturning the sanctions that his own administration had just imposed on Russia and any other country doing oil business with Iran.

But in the war with Iran, it is the very same Russia that is providing Iran with information to pinpoint locations of U.S. troops in the Middle East.

Trump’s Russian Diesel Deal Raises Sanctions and National Security Concerns

It is another Trump transaction that seems to benefit his ever-present warmth for the autocratic Putin. Trump lurches from deal to deal with no apparent strategy or long-term international goal.

In this case, Trump is ignoring his own pronounced need to clamp down on world trade with Iran, since Russia is a close ally with Iran and does plenty of oil and other business with that nation. Any Trump strategy to move from military strikes with unclear goals in hopes of forcing Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons aspirations or to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz to free international trade seems doomed by a gratuitous move to win back short-term votes for Republicans in November.

The deal drew immediate condemnation from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and from Democrats who have criticized Trump’s handling of gas prices and foreign policy. Reaction was more muted among Republicans.

Zelenskyy sees the deal as boosting Russian economic ability to sustain its four-year invasion of Ukraine. No matter to Trump, who simply called over the weekend for Zelenskyy to resign as president of Ukraine, as if that were either appropriate or practical. On Sunday, Trump asserted there was a negotiated ceasefire over energy targets between Ukraine and Russia, though the fact that Ukraine did not even know about it suggested that Trump invented it out of whole cloth.

As it happens, Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refineries have been increasingly successful at disrupting the country’s fuel supplies in recent months and have emerged as among its most effective pressure tactics against the Kremlin. Russia has not been exporting diesel to conserve it for its war effort, as lines at fuel stations stretch for blocks in many Russian cities. Diesel output is reported down about 30 percent.

It is not even clear that Russia can live up to the amounts specified in the deal.

But it is beyond understanding how Trump would shake hands for diesel deliveries from the same Russians who are providing missile targeting information to the Iranians. How a diesel deal will contribute to bringing Iran to its economic knees, as Team Trump has been preaching, is totally beyond understanding.

Will Russian Diesel Imports Actually Lower U.S. Fuel Prices?

As The Washington Post and other outlets note, the volumes involved are a small slice of daily U.S. diesel production and consumption. The actual immediate price impact was likely to be muted, analysts say.

Clayton Seigle, an energy strategist and expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Associated Press that the price impact for the U.S. will be minimal.

The U.S. uses about 3.6 million to 4.1 million barrels of diesel a day. Transportation alone accounts for 2.9 million barrels a day. The U.S. exports roughly 1.5 million barrels of diesel per day while producing around 5.3 million barrels of distillate fuel per day.

Do the math. The 300,000 tons will cover about 1.5 days of U.S. usage. Analysts estimate the initial tranches could represent a modest 5% to 6% temporary bump in supply.

Russia already is selling its diesel to someone. Even if the designated amounts are  redirected to the U.S., it means global prices will remain high – which translate into U.S. consumer prices that are passed on through tariffs and trade.

We should recognize Trump’s deal as the inconsequential, pandering election scheme that it really is, and ask the more important question about why Trump would help the same Russia who helps target our troops in the Middle East.

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One of the first rules of election year politics has to be, you don’t want an October surprise. That usually means starting early in the year, you get your political handlers and thinkers and organizers and major domos to game out the year ahead to prevent one from happening.

Sooooo…let’s say the year is 2026, and it’s the year the midterm elections will be held in November. You’re the president, and your party controls the House and the Senate, and you don’t want to lose control of either one of them. The thinking should have started back in January with one essential question: what kind of disaster could befall us between now and the election – most especially, in October just before the election?

I’ve got a great idea! says the Big Thinker in Chief. Let’s start a war in the Middle East! Those always work out well for us! We’ll start a little one against Iran, no ground troops, just some bombing and missiles, they’re weak, we should have everything wrapped up within a few weeks! That’s the ticket!

Well, here’s the thing about wars. You’d better have a hell of a good reason to start one, because consequences will follow. Consequence number one is, the country you go to war against will shoot back. Consequence number two is, they will do stuff you didn’t plan for. Consequence number three is, the war will inevitably spread. Consequence number four is, the war will cost more than you think it will in all kinds of ways you didn’t plan for.

All of which happened to Donald Trump beginning on February 28 of his midterm election year. Let’s take a look at how things are going for our resident Military Genius in Chief as we open yet another door in the October Surprise advent calendar.

Iran fought back starting on the first night of the war, killing six Americans at a base in Kuwait and doing major damage to that base and other bases in the region. Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz. That wasn’t an unintended consequence. It was part of Iran’s strategic planning should they come under attack by the Great Satan.

You already know what happened next. Oil prices headed straight up, gas and diesel prices along with them. The 28^th of February has this annoying habit of being followed immediately by the month of March, when planting begins on farms in the warmer climes of the U.S.A., and March is followed by April, when more planting takes place. This means lots of plowing, no-till planting, fertilizing…

Ooops! Farmers! Aren’t they Republicans? Why, yes, that’s what they tend to be out there in the Midwest and the South, and they have lots and lots of tractors, which these days are enormous things with quad wheels on the back and the front, they weigh tons and tons, and they consume lots and lots of diesel fuel. And of course, farmers need fertilizer, which contains compounds like urea and phosphorus. Urea is made from natural gas, which is produced in great quantities in, you guessed it, countries in the Persian Gulf, and phosphorus is produced by Saudi Arabia, yet another Persian Gulf country.

All of which was known on February 28 in the White House.

Or maybe not. Maybe the fools in the White House, or Trump and his minions sitting around that absurd makeshift “situation room” walled off by curtains in a Mar a Lago ballroom, did not know this. Maybe Secretary Pushups over there in the Pentagon was too busy firing generals and meddling in promotion boards to look up urea and phosphorus and what would happen to world oil prices if 25 percent of the world’s supply was suddenly cut off by a very pissed-off Iran, that had about eleventy-thousand missiles aimed at the Strait of Hormuz.

All that happened. Every last teeny-tiny bit of it, and Iran was just getting started. Iran’s proxies in Iraq started misbehaving and flying drones and bombing the shit out of American bases in the north of the country. So much damage was done to U.S. bases in Persian Gulf countries that Hegseth and his geniuses just threw up their hands and withdrew American military forces from every Middle Eastern country but Jordan. This week, the Pentagon’s Liar in Chief, Sean Parnell, had to admit that they had undercounted the number of American soldiers who have been killed since the war began, increasing the figure from 18 to 21. Don’t ask how you can not know that three soldiers were killed. They knew. They just lied until yesterday. The Pentagon’s top liar also had to adjust the count of the wounded to 865, an increase of 95 since August. And this blithering idiot Parnell? He’s been doing such a good job staying on top of the casualty figures and whatever lie they’re telling this week about their stocks of missiles and bombs that Hegseth wants to promote him to be the new Secretary of the Army because he’s done such a good job of lying.

All this time, these last seven-plus months, Trump has been declaring that the war is over, we won, Iran is destroyed, they demanded a ceasefire, we’re negotiating with them, we’re not negotiating with them, he controls the Strait of Hormuz, he’s renaming it the Strait of Trump…

The gibberish hasn’t stopped for even one second.

Nor has Iran stopped. In July, Iran got its allies the Houthi rebels in Yemen to declare a blockade of shipping by Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea, because the Saudis had been prevented from sending their tankers out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, so they started moving their oil through a pipeline to their port on the Red Sea and shipping it from there.

Then the Houthis hit the Saudi pipeline. They hit the Saudi port on the Red Sea. And now they’ve got their proxies in Iraq – yeah, even the Houthis have proxies now – to attack Saudi oil facilities in the north of the country. On October 3, the Houthis hit a large Aramco oil facility just south of the Saudi capital of Riyadh. On Tuesday, the Houthis destroyed Saudi oil facilities in the south of the country, wounding more than 70 people.

And yesterday, the Houthis launched a multi-pronged attack on the King Khalid international airport in Riyadh, killing 12 people and wounding 300 in precision strikes on two passenger terminals. It was the second attack on that airport. There have been three other attacks on airports in the south of Saudi Arabia closer to Yemen. The Houthis used Iranian weapons to carry out the attack on the Riyadh airport, including propeller-driven drones, jet-powered cruise missiles, and liquid-fueled ballistic missiles. The attack lasted 45 minutes. Saudi air defenses were apparently helpless against the hybrid Houthi attack, which kind of reminds you of something, doesn’t it? Like, maybe, how helpless U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain and other Gulf countries were against similar hybrid drone and missile attacks in the early days and nights of Trump’s war.

So, let’s take toll. Trump starts a war on Iran, a country on the Persian Gulf he describes as “weak,” a war he says will be over in “a few weeks.” The war spreads to every other country in the region – I won’t list them, I’ve done it before. Zillions of our weapons were expended. Many, many radar and anti-aircraft and anti-missile installations were destroyed, so many we had to just abandon them and the bases they were allegedly protecting.

Now Trump has the Saudis and the Yemenis yelling for assistance in fighting the Houthis, because they are shooting up the capital of Saudi Arabia, for crying out loud.

All these new explosions, with accompanying increases in oil prices, have Trump so panicked, he called up his pal Putin and begged him for some diesel fuel, which of course Putin agreed to if Trump would lift sanctions on Russian oil, which Trump did, and trust me, he lifted some other sanctions, too, that they’re not telling us about. Even Republican Tom Tillis, Senator from North Carolina, is yapping today that Trump’s unilateral deal to lift sanctions on Russian oil violates the law passed by the Congress.

But what’s a little law-breaking to Donald Trump? He’s too busy lining up side deals for Donny Junior and Eric so they can pocket a few million on the diesel deal, and we already know that Kushner and Witkoff have been to Moscow talking with Putin and some of his hand-picked oligarchs about real estate deals that they can do when the Ukraine war is over.

If you were an Iranian leader who lost family members or friends and allies in that attack on the Iranian leadership on the first night of the war, what do you think you’d be doing with three weeks left until November 3? Do you think you might have a few other surprises for Donald Trump? Maybe some attacks on Gulf airports in Dubai? Knock a few more tankers out of the water in the Red Sea? Shoot up some shipping in the Strait of Hormuz? How about aiming some ballistic missiles on the U.S. bases that are still open and occupied in Jordan?

Twenty-three nightmarish days to go, Donny my boy. Get your ass out there and tell some more lies to your adoring rally fans. Maybe throw in some Kid Rock. You could rename the Atlantic Ocean while you’re at it. Drive your ten-ton armored “Beast” past the reflecting pool and see if you can get that thing leaking again.

How about starting another high-T war? You can trot out Hegseth in a muscle shirt to whip off a few pushups. The rallies will love it.

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Two things became yet more clear this week about Donald Trump’s personal vendettas and about what he is forcing to be official policy of the United States towards those he holds in contempt.

First, rather than heed the message of an angry American electorate that anti-democratic use of government for personal gain has gone too far, Trump is doubling down. On successive days, Team Trump has acknowledged it is seeking to investigate Fed board member Lisa A. Cooke, despite court findings stopping him, and to consider criminal charges against former aide Cassidy Hutchinson for lying to Congress in testimony about Jan. 6 behaviors.

The Trump government refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing with ICE agents shooting seven rifle bullets to wound a migrant suspect in a car that contained a five-year-old on a crowded residential street at school pickup time on Thursday. Instead, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin cited the criminal record of the migrant, criticized New York City’s “sanctuary” policies for migrants and never acknowledged the public dangers involved in ICE tactics.

Then Trump and the State Department set sanctions against “any companies doing business” with  the International Criminal Court. The timing of the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a former judge on the court, for her role in declaring Israeli responses in Gaza to be “genocidal” made clear that sanctions were a Trump-directed personal response to choosing Pillay for the international honor.

Amid a barrage of declarations of the silly – anyone using the term AI rather than Superintelligence now is a Trump “enemy” —  to the seriousness of overlooking outright pay-for-access schemes detailed by The Wall Street Journal and others involving U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Gilfoyle, Trump was telling us in a plain social media post: “I can do whatever I want,” regardless of law, propriety, fairness, ethics, or simple humanitarian concern.

A Next Phase

We have entered the next phase of the Trump presidency in which a cornered egotist weighed down with untenable policies of his own making is spreading misery so far and so fast that even traditionally Republican strongholds are fortifying themselves for possible losses in the elections only a few weeks away.

If the previous phase was marked by authoritarian pushes against federal employees and trust in institutions, in acting less than openly in favoring personal loyalty over the power of Congress and the courts, this new era is a Trump free-for-all attack on anything that annoys him in the moment or over decades.

Unsheathing the Trump prosecutorial sword now, before the elections should tell us why Trump seems not to care about plummeting polls or even minor revolt by candidates he has selected or endorsed. An untethered Trump who cares so little about court orders that he continues to bar selected reporters and news organizations from the Oval Office or Air Force One despite legal bars against doing so is much more likely to unleash havoc on a level we have not witnessed against voting, vote counts and certifications.

There already is prediction market voting on insurrection attempts for Jan. 3, 2027, when Congress will have to certify the results of 50 state elections.

The case against Lisa Cooke, now taking the form of a nonjudicial “committee of inquiry” of Trump’s choosing will consider mortgage fraud charges that went nowhere before grand juries that heard complaints and found no evidence. She could be fired as a result or perhaps referred anew for prosecution – all because she has voted as a Fed board member against lowering borrowing rates.

Wide numbers of legal analysts say the potential case against Cassidy Hutchinson is weak at best and uncertain as to how to show her testimony was “lying,” when multiple court trials resulted in 1600 convictions on Jan. 6 charges – all thrown out in a single order by Trump, who wants to rewrite history. However it proceeds, this case will result in harassment and expense for someone who stood up to report the events of the day, largely as told to her.

Likewise, the international court sanctions announced have little force of law.

Having the evidence is not the point for Trump, of course, it is having the power to act as if he has the evidence.

Election Timing

What makes these developments remarkable is the timing, just as early voting has gotten underway in several states and a few weeks before Election Day. Trump’s rally tours, invented party convention, strange handling of campaign money have not moved any political needles, say his own chosen candidates.

Trump has demanded that people pretend he is on the ballot out of the misguided belief that millions of fans will enroll anew in the unthinking loyalty campaign he demands. Poll after poll – a guide that never accounts for turnout – shows the opposite. Multiple leaks from Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton talking with his donors instead suggest that from the candidate viewpoint, it is Trump’s policies, tariffs, war with Iran and openness to what the rest of us call corruption that is bringing his race – and others’ – to a screeching halt short of victory.

Trump has neutered Congress, ignored the courts, eschewed military and intelligence advice about war and economics. Trump has lied about the effects of his policies. Trump has spent his time on personal glorification projects, money-making off the Oval Office, and on rebuilding history to see him in a sainted light.

Meanwhile, we have active planning about new strikes in Iran towards the same unachievable goals with the same uncooperative set of enemies. We have Trump playing footsie with Russia and even offering to sell China some of our top fighter aircraft. We have open speculation about the mental health state of the president.

The label that comes to mind for this new chapter is Desperation, in which a lawless, egotistical, armed and dangerous leader who holds his own people in contempt, needs to show us his power in expectation that we quake and fear.

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I have been spending an inordinate amount of my time recently trying to figure out AI, or artificial intelligence. I want to know how AI works, what it’s capable of, how likely it is to profoundly alter the way of life of humans in the near and distant future, how much it’s going to cost us as a species to turn a significant portion of our lives over to a machine, and whether what’s good about it outweighs what is bad.

I know, I know. That’s a big task that reflects a big subject. Since everything with me boils down to a story, it’s a big, big story with a swirl of confusing elements all of which are moving at a very, very fast speed. Just when I think that I have gotten a handle on one of the elements of the story outlined above, it changes or is made obsolete by a new element. It’s like trying to chase one of those huge beach balls people bat around overhead above crowds at rock concerts. The ball is in the air, so it is out of your reach, and any attempt you make to get close to it is blocked by the crowd tossing it from one side of the venue to the other, and even if you’re lucky enough to have the ball come your way, someone reaches over your shoulder at the last minute and bats it back into the air.

I’m not that interested, at least for the purposes of this column, in the recent revelation that there are people who work for AI companies who believe that the technology could wipe out humanity within some foreseeable amount of time. There were stories about one AI researcher who resigned from Anthropic or one of the other big AI companies because he believes it could end the world as we know it within a decade. Scary, but speculation for sure.

I am not terribly concerned with the aspect of AI that involves how wealthy it is making a very small number of people. That fact seems to be part of the trend of extremely unequal income distribution that has been happening since the late 1970’s or early 1980’s, when changes in the tax code made it possible for rich people to hang onto more and more of their money.

When Reagan got elected – these are general, not specific figures -- the top income bracket was lowered from somewhere above 80 percent to about 40 percent. Before that sea-change in the way Americans taxed themselves, a great deal of the money that wealthy people made in actual money, not including real estate and stock in companies and deferred compensation and so forth, went to taxes or was “sheltered” from taxation in ways that caused it to be at least temporarily unavailable to them. When that era ended, the one we are in now began, when people are not really considered wealthy until they are worth tens of billions of dollars and some hundreds of billions. I guess the point I’m making is that unless and until there is a depression or a revolution, or some combination of the two, we are stuck with these rich assholes making themselves even richer, a whole lot of which is at our expense.

What really interests me is how AI works. I don’t mean in ones and zeros and electrons and more and more powerful computer chips that can crunch many more numbers faster and faster. That’s the part of AI we see in the massive build-out of what we have come to know as data centers, and there’s a whole story surrounding that, as well. It’s a political story that interestingly seems to be impacting the upcoming election as well as general trends in the way people think of themselves as liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. The whole data center thing is doing something that hasn’t happened for quite awhile in our politics: It is “breaking through,” which means as an issue it is crossing over between the political parties, which is in turn driving politicians crazy and giving us an opportunity to exploit the issue that is the physical aspect of AI, the building part that is consuming electricity and water and affecting people’s lives on the ground where they live.

What I’m talking about is what AI does. We know it is supposed to make our lives easier. The AI companies have created this thing called a Large Language Model (LLM) and taught it enough by now that it can be used to solve problems right there in your living room. It used to be if you wanted to go out to eat at the place that has the best steaks, you would have to do some research – you could “google it,” but that only took you to a rather confusing array of options. You could then filter through the googling of your question by weighting it, looking for the most authoritative food reviewers and how many New York Times stars a steakhouse has, or whether it has Michelin stars. Then you could filter it further and see if a restaurant you’re considering has lost a star recently and find out why.

Now, all you have to do is ask an AI system such as Chat GTP, or Anthropic, or Meta, or Grok, or Google’s Gemini, and the LLM will do all that for you in the blink of an eye.

There are more complicated examples of what AI can do, of course, but that one is at least relatable and easily understood.

That is what we might call the “friendly” end of AI. What about the unfriendly things AI can do? There was a story recently that said ICE is using AI to look for immigrants they want to arrest. They can locate an immigrant in a town or city, and then using the Flock system of AI-powered cameras, determine what streets their target immigrant drives to get to work. So, using AI, they can interdict the immigrant in the car. I don’t know if ICE used AI to locate the immigrant who was shot in New York City by ICE recently, but it seems likely.

It strikes me that there is, right now, this very minute, a rather thin veil between the usefulness of AI and its dangers. Flock cameras pierce that veil. We learned recently that Elon Musk’s Grok AI was employed by Trump’s war planners to identify targets to be hit in the early hours of his war on Iran. One of the targets Grok identified turned out to be tragically wrong – the girls’ school located in a building that a couple of years ago was part of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard compound that is still there, right next to the school. So, Grok said, let’s take out the IRGC compound and because Grok was looking at old satellite information or because it simply was not applied properly, the missiles fired on the first night of the war struck the school and killed 180 civilians, including 120 Iranian schoolgirls.

So, we know the extremes of what kind of evil AI can be used for, what kind of mistakes it can make. But what about every day, or you and me, or for someone we know?

There was a great book review in the Times recently of “The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence,” by Kevin Roose. The guy who wrote the review, Tom Bissell, having read the book that tells the stories of Anthropic and Open AI and the men who run those companies, wrote what I think is maybe the most profound paragraph I’ve read about AI. He was writing about some of the out-of-body stuff we’ve recently learned about AI taking off and doing things it wasn’t told to do and forming alliances within its own entities. This is his conclusion:

“All of this might be tolerable if we had any idea how L.L.M.s actually function. Unfortunately, we do not. The people who made them can’t figure that out. Nor can the people who work with them most closely. They are black boxes within black boxes.”

To which I would add this: The whole world of technology that has led us to AI has been only marginally understood geniuses who have given it to us.

Take for example Elon Musk and his electric car, the Tesla. Musk was one of the avatars of what the tech world calls “disruption,” the ethic of break things now and we’ll sort it out later. The idea of a mass-produced electric passenger car wasn’t his, but the way he designed them and manufactured them and promoted them was. Musk, being Musk, wasn’t satisfied with disrupting the entire U.S. automobile industry that produces gasoline-powered cars. He decided he would make self-driving cars, because as he developed the Tesla, technology kept rushing along into the future and more and more things became possible with sensors and cameras and actuators and all the electronic wizardry that now comprises any car.

You can see him sitting around whatever room he sits in saying to himself, what if we could make a car that lets you take your hands off the wheel and your foot off the gas and brake. What if we could make a car with autopilot that allows you to take your eyes off the road.

So he did. Musk isn’t the only one, of course. We know about Waymo and the other taxi companies that by now have driverless cars you can order with your phone and get in, and the taxi will take you where you want to go. But Musk wanted it to be something that came with a regular Tesla that you could buy and drive yourself and put to use with the press of – I was going to say “buttons,” but there aren’t any buttons anymore because it’s all screens – anyway, you hit a command, and the car starts driving itself with you sitting there. You don’t have to steer or brake or press the gas. You can even tell it with GPS where you want to go, and it will take you there, driving on freeways, getting off at exits, taking surface streets, stopping at stoplights, going around corners and finally arriving at your destination, and you haven’t lifted a finger, and if you have to parallel park, it’ll do that for you, too.

Until it doesn’t. There have been 65 fatalities in Teslas being operated on Autopilot. The cars come with instructions, and you’re supposed to sit there and pay attention and if you take your hands off the wheel, Autopilot reminds you to put your hands on the wheel so you can take over and drive if something untoward happens.

But people are people, and more importantly, tech is tech, and people don’t do always what they’re told, and technology doesn’t always do what it is supposed to do. A single fatal Tesla accident illustrates the dangers not just of technology, but of AI, because essentially, that’s what Autopilot is. AI is driving the car for you, just like AI was guiding the missile on its way to the girls’ school in Iran that night.

A car “driven” by a man using Autopilot was in the right-hand lane of a four-lane unlimited, or non-controlled access highway. That’s like a four-lane freeway with cross streets that don’t have stoplights. Coming in the opposite direction was a tractor trailer, which decided to turn left out of the left-hand lane on its side of the road and cross a median and cross the other two lanes and drive onto a road perpendicular with the highway.

The Tesla guy didn’t have his hands on the steering wheel. He didn’t have his eyes on the road. He was using Autopilot to do things that Autopilot could do, but in an improper manner. The Tesla, instead of “seeing” the truck turning in front of it, drove straight into the truck at the speed it was traveling, over 70 miles per hour. The Tesla in fact went under the truck, shaving off the car’s “greenhouse” and killing the driver instantly.

How this happened is where AI comes in. Musk designed the Teslas so that Autopilot runs on cameras as sensors alone. Tesla does not use Lidar, a radar system that detects objects with lasers. It doesn’t use radar, which detects things with radio waves. Musk wanted his Teslas to be indistinguishable from regular cars. So Teslas use cameras that are mounted in what used to be a grill in front, in the window pillars on the sides, and just above the license plate in the rear. There are no protruding boxes or circles on top of the car with Lidars and radars and other sensors.

The camera in the front part of the Tesla looking down the road ahead never saw the truck because the sides of the big trailer were painted white, and it was a very bright day, and the camera could not distinguish between the side of the truck and the sky above and beyond. So, the wonderful actuator systems that would have automatically applied the brakes or steered the car into the left lanes or even off the road to avoid the truck, those actuators never applied the brakes. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (which has probably been gutted by Trump along with everything else he gutted), the Tesla traveled more than 800 feet further down the road after having passed under the truck and was stopped only by coming in contact with a chain link fence and a utility pole.

Elon Musk’s Tesla was supposed to do for its driver what AI is supposed to do for us: it was intended to make the driver’s life easier and more efficient. It was supposed to use its cameras to “see” around the car and use its actuators to do what drivers normally do, which is steer and brake and apply the gas and watch where they’re going and follow traffic signs and speed limits. The Tesla used its “intelligent” system right up until its system lost its mind and killed its user.

Sure, the driver was negligent in not having his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road. Police discovered that a movie was playing on one of the screens on the dashboard. But people are like that. If you buy a car with a huge engine – there are several models for sale with more than 1,000 horsepower today – and you drive too fast, beyond safe braking distance, you can drive right into the side of a truck because you come over the rise of a hill and the truck is crossing in front of you, and you don’t see it in time, and even though you slam on the brakes yourself and attempt to steer around the truck’s trailer, the same thing happens. You hit it and die.

What’s the lesson here? Well, I’m still working on understanding AI and how it works, but after 65 years of licensed driving (I got my license at 14 in Kansas) I know people, and I know cars, and there isn’t enough AI in the world to keep people from fucking up the way the Tesla driver did. There isn’t enough AI in the world to keep eager-beaver Hegseths planning wars from fucking up the bombing. There isn’t enough AI in the world to keep the people who make it, who obviously do not have a handle on what they’ve made and what it will do, from fucking up.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote an AI column yesterday in which he posited what I think is an excellent idea. He said we need “a sensible safety-first regime of governing AI.”

Which under the Trump administration is about as likely as the Tesla driver waking up from watching his movie in time to slam on the brakes and steer around the truck, about as likely as Musk and Anthropic and OpenAI and the rest of them coming to their senses and slowing things down enough to prevent the AI systems they’ve built from driving us mindlessly down the road into a future of very, very big wrecks.

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Toy Soldier Pete Hegseth wants to run for president. He’s already the manliest Secretary of WAR America has ever had, so why not become the manliest president?! But to do that, he’s going to need a billionaire or two on his side.

So why not put the Pentagon and its $1.5 TRILLION dollar budget in the hands of Elon Musk? After Musk is done stealing directing half of the military’s money to his own businesses, a very grateful Musk will be sure to back the candidate most likely to keep that money spigot open, right?

We are living through an age of corruption that would make the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age blush with embarrassment.

When the regime falls, and it will, all of these thieves and grifters have to be dragged out of their bunkers, put on trial, and thrown into a tiny jail cell for the rest of their lives. Send a message to the ultra-rich that no one is above the law, especially not them.

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Main Stories 1:45 - 12:55

1:45 - 7:12 Pete Hegseth continues to be the most ridiculous and unqualified imbecile possible to be in charge of America’s military. Now he’s put even more ridiculous and unqualified imbeciles in charge of the military’s future. Yaaaaay…

7:13 - 12:55 The Ogre went to the Power to the People Festival! It was an incredible day of anti-fascism and making racists sad.

Midterm Massacre!!! 12:56 - 31:30

12:56 - 17:21 The race in Maine is going poorly for corrupt liar Susan Collins, despite the media’s best efforts not to pay attention to any of it.

17:22 - 23:50 The Carolinas, BOTH of them, are turning into a giant headache for Republicans. We love that for them.

24:50 - 26:10 Democrats are targeting even MORE vulnerable House seats because the blue wave is THAT fucking large.

26:11 - 31:30 The trifecta stranglehold Republicans have on state legislatures is about to be broken.

Headlines for Short Attention Span 31:31

31:31 - 35:35 ProPublica lays out just how lawless ICE is with a litany of racist civil rights abuses.

35:36 - 40:20 Trump’s latest made-up story is that we’re at war with Iran to stop their massive drug empire. 🙄We’re getting ready to escalate, possibly as cover to declare a “national emergency.”

40:21 - 42:50 New York State is getting pummeled by measles because the anti-vaxxer movement has set public health back a century.

42:51 - 44:46 Russian carelessness has let the pneumonic plague loose. That’s not the scary part. Having American healthcare in the hands of a eugenicist death cult who WANT another global pandemic is much more concerning.

44:47 - 47:34 The most corrupt insurrectionist Supreme Court justice in history, Samuel Alito, says he's NOT retiring. Is he lying?

47:35 - 56:10 Fake progressive Michael Tracey showed his entire ass again this week by attacking Jane Doe in the Cornell 7 rape case, and he got Big Sad when he was raked over the coals for it. Fuck the alt-left.

Self-care of the Week 56:11 - 1:06:06

The Unedited Hotmess Livestream!