Much as I hate to admit it, pun­dit­ry (dread word) is on a par with vari­a­tions of the old adage that today’s news­pa­per is tomorrow’s bird­cage lin­er. Bare­ly ten months ago, I post­ed an offer­ing enti­tled “When Absur­di­ty Pass­es for Wis­dom”.

It not­ed, among oth­er things, the AI industry’s resis­tance to reg­u­la­tion and Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s inane insis­tence that cli­mate change is “a hoax”.
A few days ago, the  UN  released a 141-page report that warned the world is no longer faced with the chal­lenge of meet­ing the goal of lim­it­ing glob­al warm­ing to 1.5 per­cent above pre-indus­tri­al lev­els. We have already reached the point of  “the best remain­ing option”, lim­it­ing the “over­shoot” of the breach.
For at least a decade, cli­mate change denial has been absurd.
Floods, droughts, heat­waves, col­laps­ing glac­i­ers, dis­ap­pear­ing  sea ice, ocean warm­ing and rag­ing for­est fires even in coun­tries where they were hereto­fore minor at worst, now make that lev­el of will­ful igno­rance an obscenity.
And yet Trump wants more oil drilling, keeps rant­i­ng against the green ener­gy tur­bines he thinks are “wind­mills”, and is putting  the U.S. mil­i­tary in the fos­sil fuel indus­try by invest­ing one of its funds in Venezue­lan oil
pro­duc­tion.
A tenured pro­fes­sor at the military’s West Point Acad­e­my was fired for refus­ing to what he called “defy sci­ence” and elim­i­nate cli­mate change from his lectures.
Add that to the cost of Trump’s increas­ing­ly fruit­less efforts to sub­due Iran at the cost of more than 7,000 dead and 46 thou­sand injured (the lat­est being an Israelis ‑in-Gaza-and-Lebanon lev­el of action, bomb­ing a wed­ding par­ty), bil­lions of dol­lars in weapon­ry and a world-wide eco­nom­ic cri­sis, and you have a new def­i­n­i­tion of obscene. 

                             THE LORDS OF CRASS   

In a stag­ger­ing­ly igno­rant flaunt­ing of hubris, the mas­ters of the social media plat­form META paid — with­out so much as a blink or a blush  —  $18-bil­lion to set­tle a law­suit over alle­ga­tions they mis­lead the pub­lic about the safe­ty of their prod­ucts, agreed to  tight­en safe­guards includ­ing lim­it­ed usage by chil­dren, and then had the unmit­i­gat­ed gall to con­tin­ue to deny any wrongdoing.
That’s in keep­ing with META founder Mark Zuckerberg’s school­boy lev­el mot­to: “Move fast and break things.” (I’m torn between con­sid­er­ing that obscene, or mere­ly stag­ger­ing­ly stupid.)
Seem­ing­ly obliv­i­ous to the evi­dence the pub­lic is wary of the claims and tac­tics of the tech indus­try, U.S . tech advis­er Michael Krat­sios called on del­e­gates at a G20 event to adopt prin­ci­ples that would avoid “writ­ing entire­ly new reg­u­la­tions for AI”, and allow com­pa­nies to focus on innovation.
Ope­nAI founder Sam Alt­man adopt­ed the fear fac­tor offence. He warned that coun­tries which do not embrace AI risk miss­ing future tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs, going so far as to claim it would be like reject­ing electricity.
Admit­ted­ly, I am no fan of the ram­pant use of AI.
But the argu­ments the indus­try is using to defend  ram­pant and bare­ly-at-best reg­u­lat­ed devel­op­ment and use, bear an eerie and repug­nant sim­i­lar­i­ty to those the fos­sil fuel indus­try prof­fered to push its ben­e­fits. with­out regard to the dan­gers they knew it posed, and did noth­ing to address, until forced to do so.
Unfor­tu­nate­ly for the world, the fos­sil fuel and AI titans have a cheer­leader who con­sis­tent­ly flaunts what for a man in his posi­tion is a lev­el of igno­rance that Roget’s The­saurus could add as a syn­onym for obscene.
On Sun­day, a  post on his Truth Social plan­form includ­ed an A.I.-generated video of what he claimed was Iran’s Kharg Island, “…being blown to smithereens!!!,”  over the week­end.  (Kharg was last bombed in April).
But then, as the no-end-in-sight war with Iran has repeat­ed­ly shown, Trump’s mil­i­tary exper­tise is on a par with his grasp of real­i­ty, his­to­ry, geog­ra­phy and truth.
Defend­ing his trade war with Cana­da, Trump claimed: “Cana­da has been rip­ping us off for a long time on trade, very sad­ly. Even the mil­i­tary, you know, we defend Cana­da for nothing.
We don’t get anything.”
Defend against whom?
Unless I missed some­thing, Cana­da has no ene­mies wor­thy of the name, and the only inva­sion we have ever had to fend off was by the U.S. — 212 years ago. And  Trump being a slow learn­er, I’ll remind him again: your side lost.
But then, the head­line on a poster Trump dis­played depict­ing Lake  Ontario as “Lake Amer­i­ca” blared:“Mak­ing the Great Lakes Even Greater.”
The Cana­di­an reac­tion ranged from mild out­rage to deri­sive laugh­ter to head-shak­ing pity for Amer­i­cans who have to call His Trump­ness their leader.
The only enti­ty to adopt the non­sen­si­cal rename with alacrity was Google Maps, which did the same for Trump’s renam­ing of the Gulf of Mexico.
One has to won­der where on the absurd/obscene scale a quid pro quo for that fits?
In per­cep­tion from abroad, and for many, in prac­tice at home, MAGA now stands for “Made Amer­i­ca God-Awful.”
Con­sid­er­ing what the Unit­ed States used to be, and was once seen as, that state of affairs epit­o­mis­es absurd tak­en to obscene.
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