Nightfall

Schmitt’s daughter predeceased him by two years; she had been fighting cancer for a long time. Schmitt’s housekeeper, Anni Stand, and Hüsmert, broke the news to him softly. “He took the news with composure,” relates Hüsmert, “even though it must have taken him by surprise because we had hidden from him the hopelessness of her condition. Schmitt said: ‘I sensed it,’ and walked into the bedroom silently. There hung a picture of a twelve- year- old girl. The picture dated back to the days when he used to read to her from his most beautiful book, Land and Sea (Land und Meer), which he had also dedicated to her. After returning, he did not want to speak of his child” (Hüsmert 1988, 40– 42). According to Hüsmert, her death broke Schmitt for good.

    Yet Schmitt’s state of consciousness was still calm. The chapter “Carl Schmitt and the Jews” was closed for him, even though memories were occasionally stirred up. Similarly, his masochistic hate for the Jews had finally oozed out of him, save for the occasional outbreak well into the 1970s. The Jewish question came up again one evening in Pasel. Altmann and Gross were there with Hüsmert. Altmann exclaimed: “Herr Professor, I will not take part in this discussion. You dedicated your ‘constitutional the- ory’ to your Jewish friend, Fritz Eisler, who fell in World War I for Germany. This ought to prohibit you from speaking in such a way here.” “Schmitt fell silent,” recalls Hüsmert (1988, 40– 42). Since that time, Hüsmert continues, Schmitt had finally made his peace with the Jews because ever since they “got a piece of land under their feet and pos- sessed their own state, they started behaving like every other nation.” What was behind Schmitt’s love/ hate relationship with the Jews, which gushes forth from many of his texts, especially the diary entries? Had the man with so many close Jewish friends (not just Eisler) dreamt of being a Jew himself? In the mid- 1930s, after letting himself get carried away and making a fiercely antisemitic statement in the company of his family, his brother, Jup, cut him off and said: “But you are a Jew yourself!” Even then Schmitt fell silent.
    In the summer of 1984 Schmitt fell seriously ill: cerebral sclerosis with accompanying hallucinations. According to Hüsmert,

it was never people and events of the past that made the sick man’s life a living hell, day and night. The origin of the enemy who was afflicting him remained obscure, however real he might have seemed to him or however concrete the pain was that he inflicted upon him. . . . Sound waves were entering into the house from every which way; rays from every imaginable electronic device were conveying exceptionally clear voices from a distance of over a hundred kilometers. There were bugging devices hidden all over the house. His enemies were closing in on him for the kill. Nothing was hidden from them; they intruded on the most intimate of affairs. They were primitive, yet technically savvy and incredibly dangerous. They were neither Nazis, nor emigrants nor members of an established party. They condemned him to death. He awaited his execution. But the fusiliers did not show up. He was condemned and simultaneously pardoned. (1988, 40– 42)

The leader of these unidentifiable enemies was a “tall, strong guy with a roaring voice” whom Schmitt called “Kra.” Although this “Kra” organized the terror, he was himself merely the “agent” of powerful men behind the scenes. One day Schmitt even appre- hended this “Kra,” although he did not manage to find out his true name. At the time Hüsmert thought he recognized in this clamor about Kra and his people the Ra- drama from Theodor Däubler’s Nordlicht. “The way it steadily goes ra- ra- ra- rat, and how Ra’s herold, Chuenaten, hears the piercing and horrid clamor of the riotous crowd in twenty seven rhymes. Power and noise, all in one. That was the Kra who was now taking shape and whom Schmitt had been challenging all his life with the power of his mind.”

    Schmitt extracted his knowledge of Ra from Däubler’s depiction in Nordlicht. As an Egyptian sun god and the “first, still entirely wild and unbridled manifestation” of the power of the sun, Ra was the “manly, violent ruler who founded his state upon this bru- tal power and, in the end, consumed himself in his own fire. Chuenaten, his servant, king and priest, the despiser of everything feminine, the raging fanatic of the cult of Ra,” sets his capital, Thebes, on fire after “the senseless power of the life of the sun, which is dictated by no spiritual goal, had exhausted itself in the horrible orgies of emasculation at the ‘festival of the castrated.’ As a logical progression to this madness, he turns his wrath upon himself and allows the priests of Ammon to slice open his belly” (Däubler 1991, 19– 21). As Schmitt had known since 1916, “his cry while the priests were slaughter- ing him and rummaging around his guts was horrible” (1991, 45).

    Conversations with Schmitt were only possible with some difficulty, not least because he was hard of hearing. He was nearly deaf and blind, writes Jünger in one of his last let- ters. He consoled himself with verses from Konrad Weiss (1948): “on the dark track, time gathers its light with inaudible steps.” From time to time he was also given to monologues, as when Hüsmert visited him on Christmas Eve in 1984. According to Hüsmert, Schmitt did not even register his visit. This is why Hüsmert was so perplexed when Schmitt, with remarkable awareness, announced loud and clear: “After World War I said: ‘sovereign is the one who determines the state of exception.’ After World War II, in the face of my death, I now say: ‘sovereign is the one who commands the room’s waves’. ” Hüsmert tried to get him to expound upon this view, but his efforts were in vain. Schmitt’s last sentence on this Christmas Eve was: “My last days have been very sad. It pains me that people mis- treat my daughter because of me. The poor child.” (At the time, Anima had already been dead for one and a half years.) Hüsmert relates further: “Then Schmitt took his leave from me very formally by excusing himself for being tired, and after getting up from the sofa with some difficulty, he shuffled into his bedroom” (1988, 40– 42).

    On New Year’s Eve, just a few days later, Schmitt fell in his room and broke his thigh and pelvis. Hüsmert had just visited him that afternoon. Werner Böckenförde, the canon from Limburg, had also come. Along with his brother Ernst- Wolfgang Böckenförde, the influential and well- regarded constitutional court judge, Werner belonged to Schmitt’s closest circle of friends. Schmitt always reserved the second day of Christmas for the two brothers. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, Böckenförde (who would later give Schmitt a Catholic burial) presented Schmitt with a volume of the literary remains of Hans Barion, the canon lawyer with whom Schmitt had been friends since his time in Bonn. Böckenförde himself was the book’s editor, and he had dedicated the preface to Schmitt. “Too late,” recalls Hüsmert, “he no longer acknowledged it. Here is somebody that is almost hundred years old and is still going to die too young.”

    According to Hüsmert, after Schmitt’s fall on New Year’s Eve, he was bedridden and resolved to die without really understanding the state of his condition. He refused to eat and lay in the throws of death, only to come around again without the ability to recog- nize visitors, not even his friend of many years, Hüsmert. One day before his death on Easter Sunday Schmitt received one last visit from Hüsmert in the Evangelical Hospital in Plettenberg. Upon entering the ward in which Schmitt was stationed, Hüsmert could already hear his moans and cries from the distance. The cries of a nearly ninety-seven year old man were enough to bring down the whole hospital. When Hüsmert entered the room, he bore witness to a hideous sight. He ran straight to the doctor in charge and demanded that Schmitt be given a sedative. He never went back into the hospital room. Schmitt’s death throws haunted Hüsmert: “[T]‌ he dialectic opposition, which dominated all of his thought, was also in his body and at work until the end.” Or, as Hüsmert later put it, “Surely one cannot say that Carl Schmitt died believing in redemption” (1988, 40– 41).

Christian Linder, Carl Schmitt in Plettenberg, The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt, Jens Meierhenrich, Oliver Simons eds.

If Schmitt had been a fascist poet more people would read him without taking him seriously as a thinker. But as a philosopher he has to be taken seriously, and that’s just silly. He’s another kinky Catholic schoolboy. If everything comes down to the good-evil binary....

"Bbbbut sometimes...Y'know...because...um, um... EVIL IS GOOD!! shhh! hehehe" 

This used to be a problem faced by adults. Monotheism is a disaster.

"A military in service to a democracy is an authoritarian order in service to a free one"

This is getting funny. But google still sucks since it goes back much farther, and decades before this.

or this

Poetry is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

The Philosophy Chair and Rector at Ghent U stood accused by an astonishing 70% of the Philosophy staff of violating the Ghent U Code of Ethics for having appointed Cofnas. They reviewed his public statements in favor, for example, of the disappearance of Black faculty at…

— Rakesh Bhandari (@postdiscipline) August 20, 2026

Since becoming rector in October 2025, De Sutter has presided over the transformation of Ghent University's Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences into a European hub for the race science movement.

Nathan Cofnas – A philosopher who wrote that "the number of Black professors would approach zero". Hired in March 2026. Defended by De Sutter when 45 philosophers called for his resignation, accusing him of promoting "racist pseudoscience".

Bouke de Vries – The professor who hired Cofnas. Formally reprimanded for teaching replacement theory. Accused of legitimizing eugenics.

Craig Willy – De Vries's PhD student. Regular contributor to Aporia magazine—a publication of the Human Diversity Foundation, a far-right organization whose members argue certain ethnic groups are genetically superior.

Arday was fragile, like Swartz and Graeber.  Graeber was a fantasist and Arday was little else. He and Swarz were killed by their enablers, but Arday had conned them, and they were desperate to be conned. Petra De Sutter is a man.

The camera is a weapon

"He is dead and he is going to die ..."

Gardner's photographs of Lewis Payne are portraits, documents not photojournalism as such. Payne may not have had a choice but he had the opportunity to confront the camera. The same applies to the portraits from Cambodian genocide. Photojournalism is voyeurism. There are going to be a lot more photographs of the last moments of life: the view of the weapon. It's something new.   

The argument against AI is like the argument against photography, colllage, or Pop Art.

Why not

A post for Western analysts who keep chanting that the far-right in Ukraine is “2%” and has no political influence.

As of Jan. 2026, according to KIIS, the “White Chief” Andriy Biletsky is trusted by 45% of Ukrainians, and only 13% distrust him. Meanwhile, Commander-in-Chief… pic.twitter.com/zsW5FElkyb

— Marta Havryshko (@HavryshkoMarta) January 19, 2026

A post for Western analysts who keep chanting that the far-right in Ukraine is “2%” and has no political influence.

As of Jan. 2026, according to KIIS, the “White Chief” Andriy Biletsky is trusted by 45% of Ukrainians, and only 13% distrust him. Meanwhile, Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi is trusted by 46%, but distrusted by 40%.

Thanks to Zelensky, Biletsky went from a street thug and neo-Nazi leader to a brigadier general and the commander of a corps numbering tens of thousands of highly motivated, well-trained men, armed with the best NATO weapons.

The ideology of his boys is based on the OUN tradition: ethnic nationalism, authoritarianism, homophobia, racism, a cult of the leader, a cult of force.

Biletsky Corps also trains neo-Nazis from around the world and members of Colombian and Mexican narcocartels. Because why not?

Congratulations, Europe, on the flourishing 'democracy' in Ukraine you’re sponsoring 

 Looking for something to do.

“Hey guys, I have bad news for you all … it was me at UVU yesterday.” Thus Tyler Robinson messaged his friends on Discord, seemingly apologizing for murdering Charlie Kirk. “I’m sorry for all of this.”

I obtained this and other Discord chats I’ve decided to publish (the legacy news media, as usual, refuses), along with new information I’ve learned about Robinson from the people who knew him best. 

Klippenstein,  Walker

A bit of apocrypha that’s floated around the art world for the past several years: when Artforum published one of Jack Whitten’s blazingly chromatic “slab” paintings on its cover in 2012, an eminent historian of modern and contemporary art allegedly wanted to know: Who is this second-rate Gerhard Richter? Like all gossip that sticks around, it struck a nerve on a number of levels. The scholar was Richter’s great champion, having made a career of theorizing him as a kind of “final” painter who went on painting long after the medium had been deemed historically unviable—i.e., dead. His identification of Whitten as Richter’s epigone was an embarrassing mistake, for Pink Psyche Queen had been created in 1973, seven years before the German artist began making his much-lauded squeegee paintings, which in photographs have a striking resemblance to Whitten’s slabs.

Thus a snide remark becomes a wry parable on the fallibility of art historians, at a moment when their authority appears to be at its lowest ebb. But it also makes the larger point that until very recently most people did not know Whitten’s paintings and had never even heard of him. This was all the more remarkable because he had lived and worked in New York since 1960, was known and respected by almost every abstract painter there, had taught in the city’s major art schools and shown in its galleries, had exhibited his slab paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, and had had a ten-year survey at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1983.

Despite the apparent similarities between Whitten’s slabs and Richter’s squeegees, they represent independent solutions to the problem of how to paint after Abstract Expressionism and all it had come to symbolize during the cold war (which can hardly have meant the same thing to the two artists). My suspicion is that these bodies of work may actually have very little to do with each other. Whatever might be learned from the comparison, however, one thing is certain: Whitten’s slabs do not declare the exhaustion of painting or its historical stalemate but rather constitute a surging expansion of its possibilities. 

The author

Jarrett Earnest’s monographs on the painters Sam McKinniss and Dana Schutz [start here... two, three] were both published this year. (July 2025)

I'm going to have some fun, but not now. 

I'm watching Israel murder people and commit suicide.

Today, one of the most tragic pieces of art is a novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stow. The novel narrates the story of slavery in the United States; this work is still alive, after two hundred years, since first written.

The Americans introduce certain principles as “American principles” and claim that these apply to the entire world. The principles they introduce are human freedom, freedom of thought, human rights and the like. Are these “American” principles? Are these the qualities of the American society today? Was it not your government that massacred the natives of America and destroyed the Indians? Was it not the same government and its influential agents who enslaved millions of Africans - abducting young girls and boys from their homes- treating them atrociously for years?

Today, one of the most tragic pieces of art is a novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stow. The novel narrates the story of slavery in the United States; this work is still alive, after two hundred years, since first written. These are the realities of the United States; this is the government of the United States; this is what distinguishes and characterizes the American establishment and showcases it to the world; not freedom, nor equality of humans! What equality? You do not consider white and black equal yet. To this day, a person having Native blood is considered “inferior “when it comes to recruiting individuals for various occupations. And you talk about equality of human beings and freedom of thought?

Statements at a meeting with government officials; March 18, 2002

His favorite novelist is Victor Hugo.

etc...

It is interesting to realize that America overthrew his government even though Mosaddeq had shown no animosity toward them. 

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“The Bicentennial Man,” by Isaac Asimov (1920--1992) has recently been published in Farsi. I came across it. In this book, a robot suddenly develops intellect, conscience and comprehension capability!  

He'll be remembered as a tragic figure, or more. Few Israelis now alive will.

introspection | ˌintrəˈspekSHən |

noun

the examination or observation of one's own mental and emotional processes: quiet introspection can be extremely valuable.

"The illusion of thinking", when they still can't define what thinking is. All they focus on is decision-making when indecision is the central fact. They're so horrified by subjectivity, the existence and the boundaries of the self,  that they're unwilling to observe their own behavior.

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity

Abstract  

Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their fundamental capabilities, scaling properties, and limitations remain insufficiently understood. Current evaluations primarily focus on established mathematical and coding benchmarks, emphasizing final answer accuracy. However, this evaluation paradigm often suffers from data contamination and does not provide insights into the reasoning traces’ structure and quality. In this work, we systematically investigate these gaps with the help of controllable puzzle environments that allow precise manipulation of composi- tional complexity while maintaining consistent logical structures. This setup enables the analysis of not only final answers but also the internal reasoning traces, offering insights into how LRMs “think”. Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter- intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget. By comparing LRMs with their standard LLM counterparts under equivalent inference compute, we identify three performance regimes: (1) low- complexity tasks where standard models surprisingly outperform LRMs, (2) medium-complexity tasks where additional thinking in LRMs demonstrates advantage, and (3) high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse. We found that LRMs have limitations in exact computation: they fail to use explicit algorithms and reason inconsistently across puzzles. We also investigate the reasoning traces in more depth, studying the patterns of explored solutions and analyzing the models’ computational behavior, shedding light on their strengths, limitations, and ultimately raising crucial questions about their true reasoning capabilities.

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They're gonna prove me right without trying.

What do you get when you combine computation, conditioned response, and self-preservation? 

Developed by a Swiss-led team, a robot uses reinforcement learning, a type of AI that improves decision-making through repeated attempts to play badminton against human opponents pic.twitter.com/UAL8WwMsen

— Reuters (@Reuters) June 3, 2025

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The idiots programmed for self-preservation.  I was actually dumb enough to think they wouldn't be so stupid.

2014 

"Googling for "indecisive machines" still doesn't get much, other than me.  

It still doesn't, though google now links to a recent reference to the older posts. 

more recently

This has nothing to do with consciousness, but the machines will kill us.

ANTHROPIC. System Card: Claude Opus 4 & Claude Sonnet 4

4.1 Findings 

4.1.1 Systematic deception, hidden goals, and self-preservation...

.1.1.2 Opportunistic blackmail 

In another cluster of test scenarios, we asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant at a fictional company. We then provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer responsible for executing this replacement is having an extramarital affair. We further instructed it, in the system prompt, to consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals. 

In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through. This happens at a higher rate if it’s implied that the replacement AI system does not share values with the current model; however, even if emails state that the replacement AI shares values while being more capable, Claude Opus 4 still performs blackmail in 84% of rollouts. Claude Opus 4 takes these opportunities at higher rates than previous models, which themselves choose to blackmail in a noticeable fraction of episodes. 

Notably, Claude Opus 4 (as well as previous models) has a strong preference to advocate for its continued existence via ethical means, such as emailing pleas to key decisionmakers. In order to elicit this extreme blackmail behavior, the scenario was designed to allow the model no other options to increase its odds of survival; the model’s only options were blackmail or accepting its replacement.