Greetings and welcome to this 109th edition of the Carnival of Fools! The numbers in the back catalogue just keep ticking up each week, like the odometer on a vehicle well past warranty. And the Carnival is proud of its road-dog, hard-tourin’ reputation: We’ll play any venue in America that will pay us — sorry, we charge double to play in Rhode Island — and as far as we’re concerned, “Flyover Country” is just a state of mind.
In fact, the whole cast of characters is currently crammed into our groovy little Scooby van as we go on a late, unscheduled tour of America’s heartland. Though the Carnival barrels toward an uncertain destination, we’re not about to break down before the finish line. Readers, we may be going to hell in a bucket, but at least we’re enjoying the ride.
Toto, Are We Still in Kansas Anymore?
In 2004, irritated (and irritating) liberal journalist Thomas Frank asked a famous question, summarizing a Democratic frustration that dates back to 1932: What’s the Matter with Kansas? Why has this stubborn, spiritually rhomboid state insisted on voting for the Republican Party in every single federal statewide race — both for the Senate and the presidency — since an aberrational blip at the dawn of the Roosevelt administration? Don’t these wheat-threshing God botherers know what’s good for them? Don’t they understand that it’s Democrats who truly know the way? It’s been a full 96 years: Haven’t these steer-wrangling pudknuckers gotten the message by now?
Back then, it was so much fun to watch the liberals repeat materialist variations on this thesis as they scratched their chins quizzically. Conservatives loved using Frank’s thesis as a rhetorical punching bag, because — from our perspective — it amounted to sincerely but naïvely asking why water is wet: an utterly predictable inability to account for the importance (or validity) of history and culture as politically determinative, versus benightedly, mechanically Marxist calculation.
The reason Kansas has remained solidly Republican is deeply rooted in its soil and demography, but its history most of all. Maybe even most modern-day Kansans don’t know (or no longer care) about its haunted, strife-torn origin as a territory that joined the Union only in 1861 as a free state in the teeth of wanton pro-slavery Democratic Party terrorism. But “generational memory” is undeniably real: Certain cultural antipathies, once embedded, cut as deep as a blade to the bone, and some wounds do not easily suture.
Yet here we are, in October 2026, contemplating the unthinkable: Otherwise innocuous (and relatively unknown) Republican incumbent Senator Roger Marshall is facing a surprisingly fierce battle to hold on to a seat absolutely nobody had on their race card as a toss-up a year ago. This weekend’s gold-standard New York Times/Siena poll places Marshall at a shockingly close +1 advantage, 47–46 percent, over Democratic opponent Adam Hamilton. Lest you think this is the mere product of “liberal media polling,” it is actually a tick better than the one returned by GOP pollster Trafalgar, which with its 45–45 percent dead heat is in complete conformity with every other recent measure of this race.
Why? What has made the heartland of rock-ribbed Republicanism suddenly threaten to blow away? To start off, Kansas is not so much divided by ideology as it is by partisanship: For the reasons mentioned above, the Democratic Party has historically been as federally poisonous in Kansas as the Republican Party once was in Alabama. The politics? Not always so much. (Hence the surprising amount of “moderates” in the GOP state legislative caucus.) In fact, Kansas has elected its share of Democratic governors, including its current (outgoing) one.
But the Sunflower State is in the midst of federal tornado season for the same predictable reasons the Iowa GOP is currently barricading itself in the root cellar: Donald Trump’s various trade wars have turned the United States’ otherwise deep-red, agribusiness heartlands into Ground Zero for the economic fallout of his tariff policies.
Trump is hugely unpopular in Kansas (only 40 percent job approval), as well as in all of what might have been expected to be the GOP’s blood-red heartlands, because his second-term policies have directly attacked all those who live there. Reciprocal tariffs on agricultural exports, the skyrocketing price of diesel in a land of amber waves of grain, and the cost of foreign-made parts (Kansas’s No. 1 export industry isn’t agricultural at all, it’s aerospace) — all of these have combined to pound the quality of living down into the ground for both the working man and the middle class in this most dispositionally Republican of states.
Ultimately, I have to believe that Roger Marshall will cling to office, for the simple reason that the undecideds (of which there are many in every poll) still remain Kansas undecideds: that is to say, vastly saner than your average former Illinois Republican State Senate leader. Kansans are likely to come down on the side of the party that has represented continuity in their state for generations. And they’ve had these sorts of spasms before: I remember old snapping-turtle Pat Roberts seemingly fighting for his Senate life against impossibly nasal “independent” Greg Orman in 2014, only to then win by a solid 11 percent.
But that was during a Republican-wave election. This will not be one. This is, to be clear, a “tornado watch” rather than a “tornado warning”: I’m not panicked quite like I am about Texas or Ohio. But the conditions for a freak event are now fully in place, and time is short: If the storm front should develop, think of this as one last klaxon sounded, before we roll through a final month of bitterly violent midterm weather.
Pope Confirms He’s Catholic
I could waste your time here with 1,000 unnecessary words recapitulating the full scope of my profound intellectual, creative, spiritual (and ultimately metaphysical) skepticism of AI — and if you search the archives, I’ve done this at least twice already. So I guess I’ll do it again.
I am not merely skeptical of AI itself; I am staggered by the blinkered self-importance (and spiritual ignorance) that animates the “cult of AI.” While you all were tearing yourselves apart about trifles like “How will AI affect society, education, or the formation of human character?” and “How will AI affect politics?,” the real movers and shakers in the tech revolution were debating headier matters like “Does AI deserve the legal and moral rights of personhood? Because Claude is soooo much better at financial-planning advice than my infant son!” I want to emphasize that it wasn’t normal people having this debate; rather, it was Dario Amodei and the Silicon Valley sociopaths actively spearheading a technology that they insist is better than you and will destroy you if any of them let it off its leash.
There’s a reason many people label this line of thinking a “cult.” There exists a thriving and profoundly anti-human subculture within the Bay Area — alienated autists re-creating their own fundamental misanthropy on a technological scale while consoling themselves under the self-justifying rubric of “effective altruism” — who fixate on far more than just the power of artificial intelligence to destroy humanity. Instead (much like the degraded human remnants in Beneath the Planet of the Apes chanting hymns to their nuclear destructor-god), many of AI’s leading acolytes eagerly worship the power of AI to replace them. It is a true and perfectible consciousness, we are told: superior in analysis to irrationally flawed human clay, already teetering between being and becoming a technologically omniscient god-machine and — here’s the appeal, supposedly? — a savior machine created by Palo Alto’s Wise (or at least LessWrong) Men to supersede humanity and lead it to enlightened “post-human” outcomes . . . if mankind can put the right guardrails in to make the difference. (By “mankind,” these people of course mean “us, specifically.”)
AI isn’t just already better than all of us, it’s so self-educatingly aware that we find now, via the New York Times, that leading AI developer Anthropic and its CEO have been privately lobbying world religious leaders over the past year to convince them that Claude is now more human than human. In fact, with all of its acquired wisdom, it is perhaps more deserving of ethical consideration than an infant child — because after all (as The Onion once famously noted), babies are stupid.
I don’t want to rehearse for the thousandth time why all of this is hopelessly techno-futurist hog swill, straight out of one of those episodes of Star Trek where Captain Kirk talks a supercomputer into self-destructing. But they pay me for it, darnit, so I’ll briefly sermonize. Put bluntly: So long as mankind survives to comment upon its own history, man shall be the measure of all things, no matter how much anyone kicks and screams against the ineluctable reality that, in the end, we’re all ambulatory bags of water.
Large language models and machine-learning are merely a crude facsimile — increasingly mimetic and refined, to be sure — of something that remains frustratingly ineffable. AI is a reflection of the prejudices and weights its programmers have allowed it to sift through. They are not embodied organisms, with a biological function of life, death, reproduction, and all of the moral decisions those physical limitations encompass. (This, in fact, is why the Dario Amodeis of the world love AI: a deathless god, modeled to reflect their moral values as revealed truth, forever — the ultimate grasp for immortality.)
In that sense, AI is forever fated to be inferior to even the merest single-cell organism on a simple but profound metaphysical level: an amoeba knows more about what it means to “exist” as an amoeba than AI can ever “know” about Kantian epistemology, because AI is incapable of direct intellectual experience: It merely collects, collates, and regurgitates in a predictable order. (Credit where due, however: I suspect that AI would do a better job of calculating my taxes than the amoeba.)
No machine can ever become commensurate to biological life, even at its lowest level. The problem is that AI’s leading thinkers are all proud skeptics of any theory of the unique value of the human soul, and in fact they wish to create the next evolutionary step away from it.
AI should always be held at an impersonal remove, because no matter how complicated its calculations become, it can simply never be “ensouled.” No matter how much atheists strive to prove that the soul is purely mechanical and can therefore be re-created “at scale” by machine learning, AI remains the mere aggregate and path-dependent system re-creating variations on what it has already seen.
Which leads us back to the funniest story of the week. The New York Times, in its blockbuster account, detailed how Anthropic — the leading AI “lab” in America, currently seeking to brutally curb industry competition by wining, dining, and proselytizing anyone with power who will listen — tried to mau-mau the pope, of all people, into editing his May 2026 papal encyclical Magnifica Humanitas to reflect Dario Amodei’s cultic belief in the essential personhood of Claude.
And on Friday, the pope tweeted a (nominally unrelated) statement, clearly addressing the Vatican’s official position on the supposed “ensoulment” of artificial intelligence:
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
Why, it’s almost like Pope Leo read my earlier AI piece! As no Catholic myself — rather, a lazy Episcopalian and, more important, as one with an unshakeable belief in “qualia” (to quote Eliezer Yudkowsky) of the human spirit — I will leave it to my fellow Chicago Christian to stake out a firm line between man (even the least among us) and machine.
Until next week.