Pastor Pete's Pulpit

@SecWar's Office of Religious Affairs.
   

Sept 28th, 2026

Among a half-dozen program announcements he made at his latest Quantico "State of the Force" presentation was his establishment of the "Office of Religoius Affairs," slated to report directly to him, noted theological scholar that he is.

 

I helpfully annotated the document image posted on X by his war.gov deputy Sean Parnell.

 

 

IN RELATED NEWS

 

New book release coming from Matthew D. Taylor.

 

Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists
by Matthew D. Taylor 

"Quite simply, Defying Tyrants is a book every Christian should read." --Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne.

In this powerhouse book, an expert on Christian extremism issues a profound and biblical rebuke to all who would claim the name of Jesus but disdain his way.

Christian fixation with political power is the theological emergency of our time, and in Defying Tyrants, Matthew D. Taylor, author of The Violent Take It by Force, traces the origins of Christian supremacy. Jesus directed his followers away from the race for power, but somewhere along the way, many Christians turned Jesus into a mascot for imperial domination. Where did it all go so wrong?

A trenchant reckoning with the murder, mayhem, and monsters of Christianity--from the early church and the Crusades to colonialism, slavery, and the Holocaust--Defying Tyrants demonstrates how imperialism has infected the body of Christ. With cogent argument and moral precision, Taylor excavates scriptural texts and unpacks the notion of Christian antichrists. When the term antichrist occurs in the Bible, it's frequently plural--not "The Antichrist" who populated the nightmares of fundamentalism's young people. Antichrists originate within the church and abuse people in the name of Christ. Christian antichrists justify harm and vengeance theologically, pointing people away from the God who entered humanity as a colonized peasant in the hinterlands of the Roman empire.

Both searing polemic and lyrical meditation, Defying Tyrants challenges us to put steel in the spine of Christian resistance to tyrants and reprimands the Christian leaders who bless them. It also spotlights a countertradition of Christians who have lived generous lives of sacrifice and stood up to authoritarians through the centuries. The gospel of Jesus pulls the rug out from under all human hierarchies, Taylor argues. In this brilliantly conceived and scrappy quarrel with Christian supremacy, he calls us to find in the teachings of Jesus and the witness of the early church a model of rebellion against tyrants of all kinds. Because if Jesus is Lord, Caesar isn't. [Amazon blurb]

I've cited Matthew before amid prior "Christian Nationalists" posts.

 

More shortly... 

Fly Dubai?

Wow.

"SI" Day at the White House

 

Trump met with The Silicon Valley Usual Suspects today at the White House. I think only OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and the Palantir guy were no-shows.

 

Donald used the event and subsequent north lawn presser to announce the launch of his new America.gov browser-based ChatBot. He also proclaimed that "AL" is no more, by POTUS fiat. It's now "SI"—SuperIntelligence

 

 

I'm going through the Privacy Policy and Terms of Usage. Stay tuned.

 

I queried just a bit... 

 

 Hmmm, OK...

 

It curtly efused to reply to my question.

 

Rumor is that the underlying AI engine—'scuse me, "SI"—is Elon Musk's Grok ChatBot. Gotta further check that out. What might possibly go wrong there?

 

More reading for y'all:

 

  

Inside the Biggest Feud in Artificial Intelligence
A new world has arrived. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman cannot stop fighting over it.
By Kevin Roose

Being in San Francisco in the mid-2020s sometimes feels like what I imagine living in Los Alamos was like in 1943, when the Manhattan Project rolled into town. The air is heavy with excitement and dread. Engineers toil, day and night, on systems of profound consequence. Wild-eyed prophets sell visions of a transformed world, and politicians drop in to check on the progress of the project. ­Everyone knows that the fates of nations, and trillions of dollars of capital, rely on what happens here, yet no one can fully appreciate what it would mean if the project succeeds.

One person consumed by this question is Dario Amodei, a Princeton-educated physicist who in 2016 left Google to join OpenAI, then a fledgling nonprofit AI research lab. He looked the part of a mad scientist, with round glasses and short brown ringlets that he twisted in his fingers whenever he was feeling nervous or thinking hard about something. He was known among his colleagues as a brilliant, bullheaded researcher with deep convictions about AI, which he often expressed by writing long essays that he circulated inside the company…

...One thing that hasn’t changed is the Amodeis’ rivalry with OpenAI. Dario and Daniela still despise Altman and Brockman, according to several people who know them well. And Dario, who is less filtered on Anthropic’s Slack than he is in his public appearances, has written in internal messages that Altman and OpenAI are “evil.” (An executive on Anthropic’s communications team asked him to delete one such message, around the time of the 2023 OpenAI board coup, out of fear that it might leak.)

The feud goes both ways. In private, some people at OpenAI have described the Amodeis as power-­hungry virtue-­signalers, not principled humanitarians. OpenAI employees gossip about Anthropic’s connections to effective altruism and accuse the company of hypocrisy, for publicly warning of AI’s risks while privately accelerating the race. And despite the companies’ recent willingness to cooperate on safety measures, few people who know Altman, Brockman, and the Amodeis expect them to make amends anytime soon. Workers at both companies have noted the irony that although their bosses train AI models to be kind and compassionate, they can’t stop trashing one another. For now, it seems, the “machines of loving grace” will be built by humans of bitter spite.

GARY MARCUS

 

Saw him on TV today. Got his book.

 

REMINDER

 

You are encouraged to watch the new documentary "The AI Doc: Or, How I Became an Apocaloptimist." I've watched it twice, and will surely view it again.

 

More to come...

Superintelligence arrives in the U.S.

BTW: I'm re-watching Netflix's documentary "The AI Doc." Strongly encourage everyone to see it and pay close attention. It squares tightly with everything I've studied and reported on across the past decade.

 

SUPERINTELLIGENCE?

 

TRUMP "SUPERINTELLIGENCE," MEET ACTUAL INTELLIGENCE:

   MORE JESSICA TARLOV

 

Doctorate (pdf) from the London School of Economics.

DOGE boy

 Will this documentary actually be released?

 

Jessica Tarlov, continued

Recent book tour appearance on Bill Maher's HBO Real Time.

 

Well worth enduring Christopher Rufo. 

 

ONE MORE: JESSICA ON THE DAILY SHOW

 

Fun interview. "Why is it so hard to change peoples' minds?"

 

Well, one basic factor is that THERE IS NO FIRST PERSON SINGULAR PRESENT TENSE EXPRESSION OF THE WORD "WRONG."

 

No one ever says "I AM wrong." 

 

A BIT OF PERSONAL BACKGROUND TOPICAL CONNECTION

 

While, as I've noted, I was mostly unaware of Jessica and her work, i did see a jpeg of her prospective book cover many months ago. I thought at the time "hmmm... well isn't that interesting?"

 

Back nearly a decade ago I'd planned to use the same top title, based on my experience as a post-grad school faculty adjunct teaching collegiate "Critical Thinking." 

 

"Oh, well, ya can't copyright a book title."

Adverse life events stalled the idea, but in the last year I've thought about perhaps taking another crack at it under a different title, after first thinking about using "We Disagree."

 

 

My intent would be to "drill down" a bit deeper into the broader technical nuts & bolts mapping to the academic & clinical literature. My scary-smart wife and I both have Psych degrees, so we can likely collaboratively vet sufficient, material documentation. I've also done a good bit of post-academic self-study on topics such as "Deliberation Science."

 

A fun Word Cloud

As Jesse would no doubt say, "data-driven." Stay tuned...

Jessica Tarlov

Click

I was not really hip to her My Bad. Just saw her on a Kara Swisher PIVOT episode. Her new book is very, very nice. Update: I just finished it. Well worth my time. She reminds me somewhat of CNN alum Laurie Segall. I particularly like the frank personal life revelations in both of their memoirs. (As I did in geologist Marcia Bjornerud's autiobiography. We exchange emails now & then. I always call her "Dr. Smarty-Pants." It was her line.)

 

BELOW: RAGING MODERATES PODCAST

 

One impressive woman. Doctorate in PolySci from the London Scholl of Economics. Humane, clear thinker. Encourage you to watch the foregoing in its entirety.

 

Also, watch her recent podcast interview with Kara Swisher. 

 

I GUESS I MIGHT QUALIFY AS A "RAGING MODERATE."

''eh, Ma?

______

 

FOLLOW-ON NOTE

 

At the end of her book, Jessica lays out a short list of policy reform and interpersonal attitude adjustment ideas:

1. Medicare for All / Single Payer Healthcare
2. National High Speed Rail
3. Merit-Based Immigration
4. Actually Drain the Swamp
5. Reverse Learning Loss (e.g., COVID upshot)
6. Rehire Veterans
7. Career Opportunities for the non-College Educated
8. Zero Interest Home Loans
9. Talk Openly & Neutrally About Religion
10. Stop Being Reflexively Offended / Aggrieved 

Interesting. 

 

JESSICA ON MEDICARE FOR ALL

I’ve never typed those words before. At least not in the context of expressing my own sentiments. But considering how unaffordable and unsatisfactory American health care is, the time for incrementalism is behind us. Fighting to merely restore Obamacare subsidies that still leave Americans with a huge bill just isn’t fair. When I was writing this, I asked my mom if she thought we should have a single-payer system. It was the fastest she’s ever responded to a question. “Yes, of course.” She continued, “I’ve been on so many different plans: employer insurance, COBRA, and Medicare. Medicare is leagues better. Health care is part of the social contract.” Then we talked about how my dad used to say that the job of the government is to alleviate as much anxiety as possible. What are Americans afraid of? Crushing health care costs. Two thirds of them, according to KFF. Nearly 60% can’t afford a surprise thousand-dollar medical expense, and 95% of insured adults worry about hospital bills from an emergency. The cost of Medicare for All isn’t as high as people think: Many businesses and working-class Americans would pay additional taxes but come out ahead because they’re no longer paying for insurance, copays, or deductibles. It’s also not some fringe, socialist cause. Congresswoman Debbie Dingell is as pragmatic and bipartisan as they come, and even she backs the bill, saying, “Every American has the right to health care, period.” I know getting this to sixty votes in the Senate is an enormous hurdle. But it would save nearly seventy thousand lives each year and give all Americans the confidence to get treated when they’re sick. That is change worth fighting for.

 

Tarlov, Jessica. I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends (pp. 211-212). (Function). Kindle Edition.  

 

I can only speak personally and as a relative SME to her #1, having been a Medicare Peer Review analyst (and repetitive next-of-kin acute caregiver). From my 1994 grad school Single Payer "argument analysis" paper.

ABSTRACT

Notwithstanding public misgivings about making significant public policy driven changesin the U.S. health care industry, there is extensive and persuasive empirical evidence of costly inadequacies in the system-such as lack of access/coverage, uneven levels of quality of service and outcomes, market-driven rather clinical priorities, waste and duplication, etc.-that can best be corrected by a unified approach to improvement driven by a scientific focus on quality issues (broadly defined) rather than those of short-term cost-control, competition, and piecemeal regulatory strategies and tactics. A single-payer health care system reformed byn implementation of the ten principles detailed herein would at once extend medical access to all, reduce costs, improve clinical outcomes of the sick and injured, and elevate the overall health stafus of the nation, resulting in win-win consequences for providers and citizens alike.

I got a dad-gumbed 100 hours in that one paper. 28 years hence, we've not made all that much sustained, systematic progress. See my 2015 "Shards" post.

 

Go, Jesse... 

A Must-See: The Netflix AI Documentary

 

I have Netflix. I've just watched all of this (~1 hr 45 min run length). Excellent.

Dr. Susan Neiman throws down: Defining "Evil"

Click here.

This was just released. I'm well into it. A very interesting read.

 

This struck me at the outset:

Donald Trump has made it easy to be shamelessly racist, misogynist, and homophobic at a time when we’d made some progress in beating hatred back. Even worse, he has done so by making it acceptable to have no values at all beyond the search for wealth and power. Everything else is for losers. He’s the reductio ad absurdum of a set of old ideas that blossomed throughout the world as the Cold War ended. For as the Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran argued in How to Lose a Country, the loss does not begin when you notice that unprecedented breaks with justice have become routine.

Looking back, it becomes clear that the process only really starts after severe damage has been wreaked on the fundamental concept of justice, and once the minimal morality you didn’t know you depended on has been destroyed. 

What is it about the moment that makes the word evil ring true? Social psychologists argue that only 2 percent of the world’s population are psychopathic, people who not only lack empathy but take pleasure in others’ pain. There’s some evidence that the president of the United States is among them. His rise to power reflects a culture that sells cruelty as entertainment and finds buyers willing to pay high prices for it. Yet it’s hard to argue that the twenty-first century is fundamentally more brutal than others. The largest structure that remains of a republic once justly proud of its legal system is the Roman Colosseum, built to amuse people by watching others die miserable deaths. (“Bread and circuses” was not a reference to clowns.) Well into the eighteenth century, families in London, Paris, and Madrid vied for the best seats in elegant public squares to watch men and women be dismembered or roasted alive. 

Trump’s enjoyment of staged violence is unnerving, but I am less concerned with cruelty than with something less obvious and more insidious, the sort of thing signaled by his remark, in an interview on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, that he now had the tallest building in Manhattan. It’s unlikely that he actively enjoyed the desperation of those frantically seeking signs of life in the still-smoking ruins of the World Trade Center. He simply focused on the one thing that he thought mattered. Nor did he possess a sense of shame that prevented him from blurting it out. 

How could anyone be elected—twice—whose response to the deadliest attack on his country’s soil was to crow about its benefit to himself? Before you stop to be appalled, however, consider what George W. Bush said in September 2001: “Lucky me, I won the trifecta.” At the time, only fans of horseracing recognized the word; hit the jackpot captures the same emotions. You may be tempted to overlook it as a chance remark that slipped out the under stress and strain of the moment. Perhaps that’s how it began, but Bush thought it clever enough to repeat in fundraising speeches that he made to thirteen Republican audiences from February to June 2002. Here’s an example:

When I was campaigning, I said, would you ever deficit spend? And I said, yes, only if there were a time of war, or recession, or a national emergency. Never thought we’d get (laughter and applause). And so we have a temporary deficit in the budget, because we are at war, we’re recovering, our economy is recovering, and we’ve had a national emergency. Never did I dream we’d hit the trifecta. 

Were this speech, like the others, not documented by the office of the White House press secretary, you might suspect it was invented by hostile critics—a charge made against Paul Krugman when he first reported it in The New York Times. Anyone still persuaded by the myth that the Iraq War was driven by misguided idealism would do well to google the speeches. The repeated jokes about the windfall provided by the terrorists left no visible traces, but Bush’s gloating marked a milepost in moral discourse. There is, to be sure, a difference between the presidents’ reactions. Trump really did crow over an attack that left him with the biggest, uhh, tower in Manhattan. Bush’s joke was not just tone deaf; it reveals a lack of moral seriousness at a moment when that was what we needed. When an international leader cheapens death by jesting about its blessings, moral language is lost between coarseness and kitsch. 

In public, however, Bush was concerned to defend the moral legitimacy of his attack on Iraq by presenting a series of excuses that would have been unnecessary had even one of them been true. If heard often enough, this instrumentalization of moral language leads many to conclude that no claim to moral purpose is genuine. Bush’s misuse of concepts like moral clarity to describe things that were neither moral nor clear contributed to undermining the legitimacy of both. When ideals are abused to support torture and murder, it’s the ideal that suffers most. I’d be willing to bet that neither moral nor legitimacy is a word Trump comprehends. Had he understood them, he would have at least pretended to honor the sacrifices of American soldiers. The renaming of the Department of Defense is especially chilling when you know that even the Nazis called their army a Wehrmacht—defense power…

Neiman, Susan. Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era (pp. 8-10). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

"Understanding The Trump Era?"

UPDATE

9-17 UPDATE 

 

I finished her book overnight. Will have more to say. A wonderful read. Compelling. I will have to read her prior qorks. One formidable scholar and thinker. Much of the time I find those citing western philosophers from Plato thru today's Existentialist Nihilists to be doing a lot of fashionable name-dropping. Not Susan Neiman. She Takes No Prisoners. Love it.

Pace yourselves?

Full essay here.

Sorry for not pacing my Snark Reflex. Will the autonomous Pace Car be a Tesla or a Waymo? (Or, a BYD?)

 

 

Dunno, man...

 

So, I was channel-surfing just a bit ago, looking for a football game ('Bama), and ran across Smerconish.

 

 

Richard A. Clarke (@about 5:05)? Haven't heard his name in a while. Nice.

 

Good Harbor Consulting.

 

Look, I'm just an addled 80 yr-old smartass long out to pasture (now wrassling wth Parkinson's), but, back before indoor plumbing I was an ASQ Certified Quality Engineer, risk mgmt analyst (digital industrial maintenance diagnostics, credit risk, healthcare), wrote 3GL/4GL code and SOPs in a forensic-level environmental radiation lab in Oak Ridge, did a Master's in Applied Ethics, and was blessed to do a fun 5 yr adjunct stint teaching collegiate Critical Thinking. My Sheet is credible. Not interested adding more noise (unless I get too deep into the Bourdeaux).

 

I've done a first pass through Dario's essay. Lots to consider. It's getting a ton of "ink" today.

 

More shortly. Gotta Roll Tide... 

 

UPDATE

KARA IS NOT AMUSED

 

JACOB WARD

Dario Amodei Wants a Time Out

Jacob concludes:

…I think one of the broader critiques I have for this whole category of principle-writing and letter-signing is that it’s being done by people like Amodei who, in spite of advice from some of the top ethical and political minds in the nation, somehow seem to believe that we can pre-program ethics into these systems, and also seem to believe the arbiter should be an AI company plus a nonprofit evaluator the AI company chose. As my guests John Patty and Elizabeth Penn explained in my interview with them, you can’t find two people on Earth who would agree on what those ethics should be. So claiming you’re going to handle that for everyone is bonkers

It may be that we get to the end of this wild, unchecked period in AI development and discover that we do have the restraint, the intellectual curiosity, and the philosophical rigor to pilot this stuff in a way that amplifies the best parts of being human. But if industry cooperation alone is how we pull that off, it’ll be the first time in history that’s the case. It’s going to take lawsuits, injunctions, trade deals, horrific poll numbers, and presidential campaigns to put AI in its rightful place as a useful tool that doesn’t make us into the worst version of ourselves, much less wipe us all out.

'eh?

 

BTW: keyword search "Ben Goertzel." Dude is way above my (now old coot part-time Walmart Greeter) pay grade. I hope he will soon weigh in on this AI "Pace" stuff.

 

OK... BEN ROCKS IT

The Depth-Psychology of Dario’s Precalculatedly Abortive “AI Slowdown”
Deconstructing Dario Amodei’s dubious call to “pace the frontier” through the lens of rational social theory - individual vs. group selection, civilized self-deception, and the math of emergent ethics

…Nations are groups, group selection built us to identify with them, and civilization gave every nation a self-model as full of bullshit as any individual’s. So it should surprise nobody that the US-China AI rivalry shows the same dynamics as the psychology of one CEO, scaled up.

Beijing’s response to the pacing essay has been, in essence: you want everyone to slow down because you’re ahead. However much I dislike that government saying it — I lived in Hong Kong for nine years and left partly because the national security laws the CCP imposed there didn’t agree with me as a loud-mouthed freedom-loving American — they’re not exactly wrong about that. If you’re behind in a race and the guy ahead proposes that everyone slow down by ten percent, you know what that proposal is. We saw this movie with pollution, where the US built its economy on fossil fuels and then asked China to stop polluting before China had caught up — and China’s answer, eventually, was to go win clean energy outright. They intend to do the same in AI, as they already have in humanoid robotics, and they won’t accept a freeze at a point where the US is ahead, not least because they don’t believe the US would slow down — an eminently reasonable belief, given that the essay proposing the slowdown also proposes widening the American lead…

A long-read. Study all of it, closely. Here's a prior post, too.

 

UPDATE

 

A commenter responding to an article in The Atlantic: 

“I can only imagine what happens if AI is specifically told to take down an adversary. Without firing one shot a whole society can collapse. Everything is digitized and connected. Imagine you wake up, your 401K and bank account is 0, financial systems are no longer working, your power and water is offline, groceries can no longer be produced and rot because of the lack of cooling and electricity, your medical record is destroyed and for good measure the record that you exist is gone. Communication is severely limited and anarchy is the result. Sounds like a bad movie but I believe this movie is right at our door.”

 'eh?

 

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

 

 

The screenplays just write themselves...

 

BEST LAUGH OF THE WEEKEND

 

 

Need I elaborate? Seriously?

OK (w/appropriate exasperation), under U.S. federal governance, enacted "Legislation" (statutes) tell us the "What" and (optionally) "Why." The subsequent "Regulations" (e.g., set forth in the CFR) tell us the operational "Who," "How," "Where," and "When" the "What" gets done. CFRs go through lengthy NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rulemaking) processes (I personally participated in them while in healthcare analytics). The CFRs have to hew to their parent statutes (lest they be challenged in court and perhaps invalidated for "exceeding the scope"). Yeah, it's tedious. Expediently "Self-regulate?" Can you say "Regulatory Capture?"

Human affairs get "governed/regulated" one way or another. Again, need I elaborate?

_____ 

 

FROM THE "EVEN-A-BROKEN-CLOCK-IS-RIGHT-TWICE-A-DAY" WHITE HOUSE TECHNOLOGY OFFICE

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.

You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.

I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.

But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.

Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.

Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.

So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.

If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop. —David Sacks

Yeah...

 

Tru, dat.

 

UPDATE

Dollars and doomers in the AI safety debate

Good article by Axios' Dan Primack.

Most AI industry bigs— including Sam, Dario and Demis — have expressed at least some (p)doom concerns. Much like early subprime lending leaders warned against lowering standards (before they did). So far,, the money seems to still be talking louder, including in their own heads.

 Ahhh... "Subprime."

 

UPDATES

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SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

 

Click her

Tuesday, September 11th, 2001