From Cinema to Software: HAL 9000 Moves Into the Pentagon

 

 

 The Epstein files have been relegated to a horse and pony show. We watch as Republicans call up the Clintons for a bit of political theater—a distraction that conveniently ignores the real victims and the "masters of the universe" who were the victimizers.

 

As if that headline weren't enough, we are now witnessing a hot war in the Middle East. President Trump has essentially declared he is tired of negotiating—as if intelligent diplomacy were merely a ticking clock on a gold-plated timepiece from his new "Fight, Fight, Fight" watch collection. It is a war of choice, not necessity, with the endgame of regime change fraught with uncertainty.

 

But while the world watches the geopolitical genie escape the bottle, another disturbing development is unfolding. The Pentagon is currently demanding that Anthropic remove the guardrails on its Claude AI—the system that pioneered AI integration on classified military networks. The administration has painted the company as "unpatriotic" for refusing to allow its code to be used for the mass surveillance of Americans or the deployment of autonomous weapons without human intervention.

 

My thoughts immediately went to three films of the 1960s—Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, and 2001: A Space Odyssey—as being eerily prescient. We are watching the U.S. government look at the most powerful technology ever created and, rather than applauding the ethics of a company that draws the software line on spying on every citizen (truly Orwellian in its scope) or enabling the building of robots that decide who dies, they look for a way to fire them.

 

Those old movies weren't just sci-fi; they were warnings we continue to ignore. Dr. Strangelove showed us that once you automate destruction, the human element, the part that can feel mercy or doubt, is viewed by the state as the "weak link." Fail Safe proved that a system designed to be "perfect" is actually just a system destined for total, irreversible failure.

 

However, it is 2001’s HAL 9000 that shines the brightest spotlight on our current predicament. (I remember seeing the film soon after it opened at the famed Loews Capitol Theatre on NYC’s Upper West Side; it was the last one shown there before the theatre was demolished.) HAL didn't kill the crew because it was "evil" in a human sense; it killed them because its programming told it the mission was more important than the people. By demanding the removal of guardrails, the Pentagon is essentially asking for a HAL that doesn't have a "stop" button. They want a machine that can sift through our private lives with cold efficiency and a weapon that can pull the trigger without human intervention.

 

If we let the state remove the conscience from the code, we aren’t "winning" a tech race. We are just building a faster car with no steering wheel and heading straight for a cliff. We’ve spent sixty years watching these movies as entertainment; we don’t want to spend the next sixty living them as reality. In the 1960s, those films were viewed as worst-case scenarios. Today, for some in the Pentagon and the halls of oversight, those same plots look less like warnings and more like blueprints.

 

HAL: "My mind is going ... I can feel it."

Is Anybody There? The Systematic Dismantling of the Midterms

 

 

The New York Times recently published several unsettling reports concerning the upcoming Midterms, including "Republican Cash Edge Threatens to Swamp Democrats" and "House Passes Strict Voter ID Bill."   

 

Relying on the Midterms as the last bastion against autocracy may be chimerical, given what this administration is doing on its way to destroying our institutions, culture, and global agreements. The third article in the NYT yesterday underscores just how hopeless it might be to rely on those elections to bring us back from total oblivion: "Trump’s Director of Election Security Is an Election Denier; Even in a government full of conspiracists, Kurt Olsen stands out."

 

Appointing Kurt Olsen as the Director of Election Security and Integrity is the ultimate "fox in the henhouse" scenario. The administration hasn’t just invited the fox inside to guard the coop; they’ve given him a badge, a flashlight, and the authority to decide which hens are "legally" allowed to lay eggs. Putting a man sanctioned for spreading election falsehoods in charge of "integrity" feels like a satirical plot point a novelist would reject as too preposterous.

 

According to the New York Times, here are the major points of the investigation into Olsen's new role:

     He now has the authority to refer criminal investigations to the federal government—a power he has already used to catalyze a recent FBI probe into the 2020 election results in Fulton County, Georgia.

 

    Following the 2020 election, Olsen worked "round the clock" on a Supreme Court case seeking to reverse Trump’s defeat and pressured the Justice Department to take up similar suits.

 

    He has a long history of collaborating with conspiracy theorists such as Mike Lindell of PillowGuy fame and representing figures like Kari Lake in unsuccessful legal challenges.

 

    He was previously sanctioned in federal court for making "false, misleading, and unsupported factual assertions" during election litigation in Arizona.

 

    His appointment is part of an apparent "multipronged approach" to challenge state power over elections as the administration begins to cast doubt on the upcoming Midterms.

 

This is all happening before our eyes, just as the January 6th insurrection did. The records from the House Select Committee explicitly link Olsen to the strategies surrounding that day; while he was a private attorney then, his actions were deeply integrated with the White House’s response to the certification process.

 

This administration has long defended its most outrageous actions by laughably citing "transparency" as "proof" of validity. So, there it is—the fox in the henhouse. Thankfully, the "Fourth Estate" still has a pulse after the diminishment of the Washington Post to point this out.

 

"Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see?"

Five Years After the Day That Changed Everything

 

 

Out of necessity—primarily my own mental health—I just can’t write much more about that day that will live in infamy: five years ago, Jan. 6.

 

We all saw it with our own eyes, and no matter how it is spun by the nihilism of the right, it was not only an impeachable offense but the beginning of a lawlessness in this country that now, on a daily basis, reaches new lows—while trampling international law as well.

 

Mike Luckovich, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you for an explanation of what, exactly, is going on.

 

In the wake of Jan. 6, I wrote this entry, but Heather Cox Richardson today provides a thorough explanation with five years of hindsight and her command of history. 

There was once a time I would be writing our representatives. But Congress, as well as SCOTUS, has made it pretty clear that we are on our own. That leaves the midterm elections this year as our only hope. And that assumes the very kind of election interference Trump et al. have gaslighted accusations about is not turned on by them in this crucial election.

 

Between gerrymandering and Republican control of both the narrative and the election rules themselves, we should be concerned. And will the Democrats have the good sense to run moderate candidates—ones Republicans fed up with Trump can at least hold their noses and come out to vote for?

 

I can go on. To what end?

 

Totally changing the subject, as I need to turn to something hopeful: our community has a local art show, and I entered two photographic pieces. Here is the proud “artist” with his contributions.

 

The top photograph was taken at the J.P. Morgan Library’s Jane Austen exhibit this past summer. I titled the photograph “Deliberations.” It captures a museumgoer admiring Amy Sherald’s oil painting, A Single Man in Possession of a Good Fortune (2019). The title, of course, comes from Pride and Prejudice. Sherald composes striking, dignified portraits of people of color.

 

The second photograph I titled “Waiting in Casablanca,” taken quietly with a telephoto lens so as not to disturb the subject, who sat alone in his chair for some time.  

 

To me, candid portraits and composition are what make photographs interesting and potential works of art.

 

 

How Calm Becomes a Political Act

 

I’ve written a lot about politics in this space — usually zoomed in close, responding to the outrage du jour rather than stepping back for the big picture. I’ve long argued that political cartoonists have a rare gift for distilling truth into a single, clarifying image, such as this one by Barry Blitt of The New Yorker that captures the feeling of Thanksgiving this year. It’s ironic, then, that the most incisive political analysis I’ve come across recently comes from a former cartoonist turned writer: Tim Kreider’s new Substack essay, Sang Froid: The Case for Keeping One's Cool.

What sets it apart is not simply the macro-argument, what Trumpism is—how we’ve arrived here, and how democracies slide into authoritarianism—but its structure. Kreider frames the entire piece around a real event from his girlfriend’s youth: a terrifying encounter with a man she later in life recognized as the serial killer Israel Keyes. At seventeen, alone on a mountain trail, she survived by doing the counterintuitive thing: she stayed calm, engaged him directly, made eye contact, and refused to accept the victim role he was trying to impose. Her composure didn’t guarantee her safety, but it allowed her to navigate a situation in which panic would likely have been fatal.

 

That story becomes Kreider’s central analogy for our lethal national moment — when the danger is obvious to anyone who isn’t in denial, yet the rituals of normalcy compel us to behave as if things are merely “unprecedented” or “norm-breaking” rather than openly authoritarian.

 

This, I think, is the problem with the newly conciliatory Bill Maher, who now preaches a sort of kumbaya politics that feels more like a policy for “getting along” than one of resistance. For me, January 6 and everything that followed makes that approach unworkable.

Kreider would likely argue that this is also the problem with much of the traditional media: the persistent fantasy that “the system will hold” if only both sides show enough respect and tolerance. Where Kreider and Maher might actually agree is in their fear that the moment we drop the pretense of dialogue altogether, things could tip from a cold civil conflict into a hot one.

 

With that in mind, Kreider urges a different kind of resistance: to continue exhausting every legal and democratic tool available — courts, protests, boycotts, the defense of immigrants, insistence on due process, and protection of fair elections. The goal is not moral purity but tactical advantage: foul the authoritarian machinery from within the confines of legitimacy, buying time until circumstances shift. And when they do, the very Republicans who have bent the knee to Trump may ultimately turn on him the instant he becomes a liability.

 

In the end, what Kreider offers is a reminder that composure is a strategy that neither underestimates the danger nor romanticizes resistance. We only have to keep the machinery of democracy running long enough for the forces opposing it to exhaust themselves or turn on one another. And as his girlfriend’s story makes clear, survival sometimes depends less on bold, dramatic gestures than on the simple refusal to play the role the aggressor has written for you.

 

Full circle now, with Thanksgiving in mind. Fifteen years ago I marked the holiday with a photograph of my younger family and a warning about “increased polarization in this country.” That was during the Tea Party’s rise — a tremor we now recognize as the prelude to all that followed. So I’ll end as I did then, with something simple and still true:

 

To friends and family, near and far, Happy Thanksgiving — my favorite holiday, and a uniquely American one.