"The A.I. Kill Switch Act requires commercial-scale A.I.s to have a built-in 'kill' option."

"When I first heard of the bill, I envisioned a government employee’s finger hovering over a cartoonish red button reading 'KILL,' but my imagination outpaced the legislative text. Rather, the 'switch' would reside inside the labs — that is, at OpenAI, or Anthropic, or similar — with D.H.S. acting as an external monitor. If a threatening incident like the Hugging Face hack occurred, D.H.S. could issue a stop command and the researchers would be forced to comply...." 

Writes Stephen Witt, author of "The Thinking Machine," in "This Is Really Bad" (NYT gift link).

I think the kill switch looks something like this:

"He was the world’s most mature 12-year-old. He had a fantastic case of arrested development; he could sense immediately, 'This is what kids will love.'"

Said Art Spiegelman, quoted in "Len Brown, the Kidlike Creator of ‘Mars Attacks,’ Dies at 84/He brought a juvenile creative sensibility to the Topps Chewing Gum company, where he was able to unerringly predict what would appeal to adolescents" (NYT gift link).

The terrifying global invasion ['Mars Attacks'] played out in 55 vivid cards. But parents’ complaints about the gory incidents that were depicted — a dog being destroyed, for example, as a boy “cried out in horror” — kept them from being distributed nationally.... 

His many projects in the 1960s included helping to create a card set devoted to Soupy Sales, the mischievous TV personality. During the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Brown was part of the team that created two major sticker series: “Wacky Packages” mocked consumer products, parodying them with names like Cap’n Crud, Jolly Mean Giant and Ratz Crackers; “Garbage Pail Kids” spoofed Cabbage Patch Kids, the wildly popular, round-faced dolls that came with adoption papers.

"For many years, these works have inspired audiences around the world by conveying values such as courage, friendship and perseverance."

"Because of this, many fans feel concerned when images from these works appear to be used in political or military contexts that may differ from the intentions of the original creators or rights holders. This petition seeks to convey the voices of fans who, precisely because Japanese manga and anime are so widely loved around the world, hope that their cultural value and context will be respected."

Says an online petition seeking an end to the use of anime in political satire, quoted in "Trump draws anger in Japan with ‘disrespectful’ cartoon fakes/Fans of anime have called for action against the US president, who posts AI-generated clips of himself as their comic-book heroes" (London Times).

I'll just express my opinion in blog tags: "free speech" and "lawsuits I hope will fail."

This made me think of the old Walt Disney Productions v. Air Pirates case. Wikipedia:

"Coyote vs. Acme — a film Warner Bros. famously tried to scrap in 2023 — has released its first footage ahead of coming to theaters this summer."

Hollywood Reporter observes.

Warner Bros. had planned to scrap the completed movie as part of a $115 million write-down. Social media uproar helped to save the project, which Ketchup Entertainment acquired for distribution. The shelving attempt was one of the first headline-making decisions under CEO David Zaslav (along with another high-profile and completed project, Batgirl).... Zaslav previously told The New York Times about the decision, “The question is, should we take certain of these movies and open them in the theater and spend another $30 or $40 million to promote them? And [the] Warner Bros. team and HBO made a number of decisions. They were hard. But when I look at the health of our company today, we needed to make those decisions. And it took real courage."

I've seen the trailer, and I think they made the right decision to scrap this thing after making the wrong decision to manufacture it in the first place — to insert the Warner Brother cartoons into the real world, especially a real world full of lawyers... it's awful... but then that's the opinion of someone who has an aversion to movies based on pre-existing intellectual property and to movies about lawyering. So check for yourself:

ADDED: Let's remember that Chuck Jones had rules for the use of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, and this movie egregiously breaks rule #6: "All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters—the southwest American desert." 

"Am I being performative?"

AND: "Marine destroys woke college professor."

Waking up at 3 a.m. — "the quiet interstice of night"....

"So, ever since the fight at Thanksgiving, my daughter doesn't speak to me."

I like how the blurred pink petal in the foreground reads subliminally as her naked ass.

 I say when Meade texts me this.

ADDED: It's video at the link, making it more subliminal. A freeze frame:

Goodbye to Scott Adams.

He shared his dying with us right up to the end. We knew he was going, and now, suddenly he's gone.

I received the news through my son John, who's put up this post at Facebook that provides a gift link to the Washington Post obituary, which has a headline that I don't like, "Scott Adams, ‘Dilbert’ creator who poked fun at bad bosses, dies at 68/His three-panel comic strip was once published in more than 2,000 newspapers. Publishers cut ties with Mr. Adams after he made racist comments on a YouTube live stream."

From the obituary: "His former wife Shelly Miles announced his death in a live stream Tuesday morning, reading a statement she said Mr. Adams had prepared before his death. 'I had an amazing life,' the statement said in part. 'I gave it everything I had.'"

Coffee with Scott Adams moves to The Scott Adams School 01/13/24 https://t.co/RsXWMvV6yA

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) January 13, 2026

Am I the only one who remembers Willie the Worm?

That is a puppet show — on WCAU Philadelphia — that got started in 1950. I myself got started in 1950, in Texas, of all places, but I emerged in January 1951, in the Philadelphia television market, so I had the great good fortune to encounter this simple worm character when I was young enough to get the sense that he was important and well-loved.

It must have been more than a half century since Willie the Worm crossed my mind, but my memory was jogged yesterday as I was walking through the neighborhood with Meade, and we stopped to look at an elaborate yard display that had a sign with the lyric "Whisper words of wisdom" from the Beatles' song "Let It Be." The painted letters were a bit blobby and misshapen, and Meade read it as "Whisper worms of wisdom." My memory whispered the name of that worm of wisdom: "Willie."

I'm so touched to find video of my long-lost childhood friend, the puppet Willie the Worm. But let me acknowledge 2 other Willies the Worm:

Another snapshot from a presidential biography.

Texted, just now, from my son Chris, who reads presidential biographies:

The book is "The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism" (commission earned).

I think there's some fat-shaming there, no? Or fat-celebrating. Also: "Venezuelan troubles."

Have these adults lost their sense of childlike wonder?

I'm reading "Residents’ fury at paying £2,000 for a playground … that’s just a log/Families paying for the maintenance of a near-empty patch of grass say they are being ‘ripped off’ as the play area they expected fails to materialise" (London Times).

To you, it's just a log...

... but to a child it is a galloping dragon transporting them into the world of imagination you've lost the power to see!

It's log!

It's big, it's heavy, it's wood!

Woe to the cartoonist who dares to satirize a black person.

I'm reading "VA Dems Are Getting Desperate: Powhatan County Dems Post Blatantly Racist Cartoon of Winsome Earle-Sears" (Twitchy).

Blatantly racist????

How is it even racist at all?

When a particular person is drawn — as an individual and not as a stereotype — it is not racist. It's important to be able to continue the art of cartooning and to treat black public figures the same way as other public figures. We need to be able to keep making fun of power-seekers and power-holders, whatever race they happen to be. The charge of racism here is wrong and dangerous. 

Funky-looking and tentacular.

I'm fascinated by the mysteries of sportswriting, and these 2 sentences jumped out at me:

Even the way he plays, all funky-looking forehands and tentacular court coverage, is far from conventional, and at times polarizing. Away from forehands and backhands, he has always been a master of the dark arts, knowing how and when to work a crowd to his advantage, and being more than willing to turn a match into a circus if he thinks it will give him an edge.

That's written by Charlie Eccleshare, at the NYT, in "Daniil Medvedev, tennis’ walking Rorschach test, asks the U.S. Open what it sees."

"Tentacular" — a word I'd never noticed before. I see that H.G. Wells used it in "The War of the Worlds" (1898), to refer to the Martians with “long, tentacular appendages.” The use to describe the tennis player is close enough to the literal meaning. Apparently Medvedev was octopuslike.

But the word has appeared with a more attenuated connection to creatures with tentacles. Grok tells me that the philosopher Donna Haraway writes about "tentacular thinking" in the book "Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene" (2016). There's some notion of "multispecies, interconnected, and responsive" thought to be distinguished from "human-centered, linear, or hierarchical" thought. I'm told there's something called "tentacular empathy" and "tentacular relatings of kinship." Strangulating, and yet I get the sense we're supposed to love it.

Of course, the octopus is a mainstay of political cartoons. Here's one from 1877 that has some present-day resonance:

Lots more here, at "The Octopus in Political Cartoons/Russia, Germany and the United States have all been depicted as octopuses by their nemeses.

"My children do not have phones; they are not allowed on social media. It does not matter. There was an afternoon, a few weeks back..."

"... when the six-year-old came home and sketched all these characters on a piece of paper: the ballerina with a coffee cup for a head, the shark in trainers, the bomber-jet crocodile. I thought he had a tremendous imagination. But he was just like a caveman after a hunt, drawing what he had seen. It is as Bob Dylan said to mothers and fathers across the land: 'Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.' You don’t even know what they are saying. There was a moment, a year ago, when all they wanted to hear was the Eighties anthem Everybody Wants to Rule the World. 'Why are our children into Tears for Fears?' I asked at the time...."

Writes Will Pavia, in "Do not read this article if you are over six. You won’t get it/Meet Ballerina Cappucina, Bombardino Crocodilo and Tung Tung Tung Sahur — the little monsters of TikTok whose express purpose is to rot your child’s brain" (London Times).

Kamala is back, and she's teaching the wisdom of the elephants.

"Who saw that video from a couple of weeks ago? The one of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo. Te earthquake.... Here those elephants were and as soon as they felt the earth shaking beneath their feet, they got in a circle and stood next to each other to protect the most vulnerable.... What a powerful metaphor! Because we know those who try to incite fear are most effective when they divide and conquer, when they separate the herd, when they try to make everyone think they are alone. But, in the face of crisis, the lesson is: Don't scatter. The instinct has to be to immediately find and connect with each other and to know that the circle will be strong."

Said Kamala Harris, in her re-emergence speech yesterday.

And here are those elephants:

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Why is the elephant the symbol of the Republican Party?"

"Since I was born with no legs, it wasn’t long before news crews, national telethons and even the talk show host Maury Povich arrived to capture me in action..."

"... always portraying my simplest activities as inspirational. The short film... 'View From the Floor,' captures my journey navigating tropes, exploitation and the question of whether I’m talented or typecast, superstar or supercrip (a person with a disability who is seen as a superhero for doing everyday things)."

Writes Mindie Lind, about an excellent 5-minute animation, which you can watch at this free-access link to the NYT. 

If you got to that link, the headline is "Applaud My Talent, Not My Disability," but the teaser on the front page is "I’m an Artist, Not 'Inspiration Porn.'" I was interested in the term "Inspiration Porn," but it doesn't even appear on the article page, where the text is by the person who has the disability. Oddly enough, she uses the term "supercrip."

I clicked the link on "supercrip," and, helpfully, I got to an article that used the term "inspiration porn." It's a 2022 article Ben Mattlin, "I Am Not Your Supercrip": "Supercrip stories are a subset of 'inspiration porn.' That term, coined by the late Australian comedian and journalist Stella Young, a wheelchair-user with dwarfism, refers to portrayals of disabled people that treat them as inspirations (rather than as individuals) in ways that effectively say disabled people only exist, or are only worth photographing and writing about, to inspire or motivate nondisabled people."

The President as King.

A cartoon from 1832:

 

AND: There's also this, from 1904:

"There’s almost nothing I like more than a laughing fit. It is a non-brain response, like an orgasm or a sneeze."

"I wish I could say that only the comedies of Aristophanes make me laugh, but then my pants would catch on fire. I have cracked up at bons mots, but also at dirty jokes, dumb pets, and all sorts of things I 'shouldn’t' laugh at. Someone recently told me a joke that involved the pun 'a frayed knot,' and I laughed like a lunatic. I don’t know why, and I don’t care. Laughing is laughing."

Writes Roz Chast in "Roz Chast on George Booth’s Cartoons/Every object is lovingly drawn, in a way that only Booth could draw them. Every detail enhances the scene" (The New Yorker).

That reminds me, I recently laughed hysterically — way way too much — at the tiniest little non-joke on the old TV show that Meade puts on sometimes, "Leave It to Beaver." Somehow, the father (Ward) saw fit to ask his wife (June), "What is it, mattress-turning day?" It is a non-brain response, like an orgasm....

"Whereas the prince you married could not be forgiven for his traditionalist entitlement/The man on the rock in the fog might be kind."

I'm reading a long cartoon in the NYT by Liana Finck, "I Quit the Patriarchy and Rescued My Marriage."

Today's the first day of the month, so I got a new infusion of gift links to hand out. That's the first one, an interesting read with charming drawings. You probably already know the things Finck seems to have realized, but she's under 40 and you're old, aren't you?