TGIF: No Fatties, No Beardos, No Weirdos

Hello and welcome back to TGIF, where we do news summaries. Just the facts, ma’am.

In housekeeping notes: Our October and November Supper Clubs are now live! Sign up here. And please watch this endorsement from Free Press Supper Club Queen Sylvia. And a quick note: We’ve published so much on the Cornell 7 this week that I’m skipping it today. Read Kat’s brilliant essay. We will dive into all that next week. For now, this will have to suffice.

→ America got a website!: Joe Gebbia, Chief Design Officer of America, co-founder of Airbnb, has given this country its first proper website. No, not X, and not Brazzers, you freaks. It’s America.gov. And it’s a search bar powered by AI, so you ask it things and it pulls from about 29,000 government websites. It also has helpful suggestions like, “Which military service is best for me?”

I tried to come up with Magic 8 Ball questions I had for America (Where is my closest polling place? R u racist? Will Bryan Johnson live forever? Do you want me here or should I leave?), but my mind went blank. I don’t have any questions for America, more like musings and the occasional yell. Still, it’s very nice-looking. The more we see the government as a consumer product, the more we will demand it work and be cheaper and tax us less. This website says “How can I help you, citizen,” and I like that. The more it looks like Uber Eats, the angrier we will be at what’s missing and damaged or wrong, and how long it took to get here. A country in 2026 is mostly a delivery service. It’s a thing we give money to in exchange for services, like roads or fire engines, and now search engines. Good for Joe Gebbia. And Hello, America!

→ AI summit delivers some great body language: All the Big Tech leaders came together with President Donald J. Trump to sign a “morally binding” pact that they won’t build artificial intelligence that kills us all. I love that. Morally binding. Call it what it is: a pinky swear for boys. I feel as though morally binding is another term for not legally binding, if you get me. It’s like if someone says they’re “morally monogamous” in this marriage, so I immediately understand they are cheating on each other. Here’s the president: “The biggest people in the world signed that and I signed it as president. And it really is a form of protection.” And: “I’m seeing tremendous self-policing.” Again: Self-policing means absolutely no policing. This meeting of kings was organized by House Speaker Mike Johnson. Now, on the one hand, morally binding and self-policing are both completely fake things that mean utterly nothing. Morally binding to whom? Trump? Morally binding. . . to Trump. At best, that means nothing. At worst, it means our tech leaders are about to collectively get a new set of younger, hotter wives. On the other hand, do I actually want the government regulating AI? The man who gathered everyone together for this high-tech summit of the future, Speaker Mike Johnson, literally doesn’t believe in evolution. Sorry, he believes in morally binding evolution. Intelligent self-design, if you get my drift. I’m not faulting the speaker for that, per se; I’m just suggesting that perhaps our government bodies are not the best group to decide complex regulations for developing technologies. Maybe it’d be better if AI regulated our government. Just an idea. It already made such a good website for us. I think AI would make a nice president. Cold, direct, and yet sycophantic. Take my vote!

The best part of the summit was watching Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei trying to act normal. At some point he gave a brief statement and then when someone in the press asked a question, he got so flustered that he started stimming, excused himself from the dance circle, then turned to hide behind someone (anyone), and it’s all so awkward that everyone around him tried not to laugh. Poor Dario. He wanted to make the computer do tricks and talk about rationalism on a bean bag chair and now there’s a CNN reporter screaming at him about data center water usage. Someone get this man his fidget spinner and give him back his over-the-ear headphones.

As part of the summit, Trump rebranded artificial intelligence to “super intelligence.” And I guess this encouraged everyone to get .si domain names. Trumpo has so many corruption schemes that at this point I’m very open to new, baseless corruption conspiracies, and here’s one: Maybe Trump told insiders about his “super intelligence” rebrand early because before anyone announced anything, a lot of people scooped up all the good .si domain names. It’s lucrative stuff. For example, Build.si seems to be for sale for $10 million. That’s a nice, tidy sum. Also, if you didn’t think artificial intelligence versus super intelligence would become a new culture war issue, think again, my homies!

Uh, thank you? But is this what America is asking for? Is this the new Gulf of Mexico versus Gulf of America? Artificial, super, I don’t really care. Just as long as it tells me I’m right.

→ Is this a new racial stereotype?: Here’s Trump speaking about his new ballroom to, presumably, a Hispanic group. “So there’s a tunnel going to what will be, I think, the greatest ballroom ever built—it’s also a tremendous military complex with a drone port on top. It’s quite the place. And you literally will be the first group ever to enter the premises. So be very careful. Don’t fall over the edge, ’cause it’s a long way down. And only a Hispanic could survive that fall. So I’m not overly worried.” My question: Are Hispanic people really durable? ¿No son frágiles como Humpty Dumpty? Is this a racial stereotype I missed? Hispanic readers, please answer in the comments, thank you.

→ New army motto: Here’s our Secretary of Defense announcing the new, more hardcore military.

My fear is where exactly Pete intends to recruit from if these are his parameters. No fatties and no weirdos? There are only so many Mormons, Pete. Everyone else here is a little fat and pretty weird.

Also, hold on—the future of war is AI with robot soldiers and drones that can bomb. The whole thing is going to be recruiting fatty weirdo beardo wimps. You think warriors build frontier computer programs? Honey. Weirdo Beardo is their middle name, Pete. You’ll be throwing your body at their feet, Pete, begging them to turn down $1 billion at Anthropic to help with the Houthis instead, please. You’ll offer to pay these freaks in rare Pokémon cards and Baja Blasts. I’m now going to include a photo of the founder of America’s foremost defense technology company, Anduril Industries. Here’s Palmer Luckey:

It’s not too late to apologize, Pete. The country depends on it.

→ Oh, hell yeah, they’re going after ticks: Trump is launching a new anti-mosquito and anti-tick campaign, via (what else) executive order.

The goal is to “reduce the Asian tiger mosquito, Egyptian mosquito, and other invasive mosquito populations, as appropriate, by 90 percent and reduce the tick population by 50 percent, with further reductions as practicable.” Oh, I get it: They’re branding the mosquitoes as illegal immigrants. Nice. I gotta say, figuring out a way to carpet-bomb ticks is where Republicans will win. You know the Dems are going to be against this. They’ll say calling Asian and Egyptian mosquitos invasive is racist. Or they’ll say it’ll harm a local newt, wilt some beautiful wildflower, and give us all a little extra cancer. When I was a kid on the family farm, my dad used to put on a backpack of Roundup to spray the weeds and I would follow behind, and I’m fine. I’m completely fine, minus some stuff. My point is, ticks are a choice. They are tiny terrorists, and they must be crushed by the iron fist of the American empire. Read my friend Ross Douthat’s Lyme disease memoir and tell me how you feel about eliminationist rhetoric around ticks. Trump, if you have to burn down Connecticut and Martha’s Vineyard just to do a reset on the whole tick thing, I support it. We’re at war. No fatty (ticks).

→ D.C. loves its corrupt council member: D.C. council member Trayon White was allegedly so corrupt that he was caught on camera in 2024 accepting cash in exchange for political favors, authorities say. It was really well documented, as far as crimes go: According to prosecutors, an FBI informant paid White $35,000 on four occasions, showing that he was accepting cash for helping to extend government contracts. His fellow council members dutifully ousted him after that. And then I need you to know that in the subsequent special election, his district reelected him to the open seat. And now a jury has declared a mistrial in the criminal proceedings. According to White’s attorney, they voted 9–3 to acquit. Nine to three! My only conclusion is that D.C. loves its corrupt council member, and they want him to keep going. Corruption is resistance. I say, let them have him. America is a diverse nation. If a group of people likes living in squalor with a corrupt official leading them and pocketing the community’s resources, just let ’em. I mean, don’t bail out Ward 8 when they start asking why all their services are crap. But the only alternative to this is to abolish jury trials, which I think is less than ideal. So. Godspeed to Ward 8!