Joe – Uh, how you gonna get down to the shore?
Rod – Funny you should ask, I’ve got a car now.
Joe – Oh wow, how’d you get a car?
Rod – Oh my parents drove it up here from the Bahamas.
Joe – You’re kidding!
Rod – I must be, the Bahamas are islands, okay, the important thing now, is that you ask me what kind of car I have.
Joe – Uh, what kinda car do ya’ got?
Rod – I’ve got a BITCHIN CAMARO!

The most dangerous actors aren’t the incompetent or the overtly malicious, they’re the genuinely skilled professionals who understand that what they’re doing serves no legitimate purpose but continue doing it well.

Admiral Holsey stepping down suggests at least one officer has decided not to be that person.

Alvin Holsey, Admiral Who Oversaw Boat Strikes Off Venezuela’s Coast, Retires: The admiral had abruptly announced that he would step down as the head of the U.S. Southern Command.

Understanding why requires looking back fifty years.

Creighton Abrams was arguably the most capable American tactical commander since Ulysses Grant. Both demonstrated mastery of logistics, both operated under severe political constraints, and both accepted operational risks their predecessors had avoided.

A critical difference between these two men lay in civil-military alignment: Grant’s civilian leadership shared his strategic objectives, while Abrams served an administration whose domestic political imperatives systematically undermined coherent strategy.

The constitutional position on Abrams’ tactical work under President Nixon is unambiguous. Congress never authorised military operations in Cambodia; the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution’s writ extended to Vietnam alone. More significantly, the military maintained dual reporting systems that recorded ordnance falling on South Vietnamese coordinates when it actually struck Cambodian territory.

This went far beyond unauthorised action into being a deliberate falsification designed to deceive the branch constitutionally empowered to declare war.

A crime.

It occurred within a broader pattern: Nixon had intervened to obstruct the 1968 Paris peace negotiations to secure electoral advantage, then required the war’s continuation through 1972 for re-election. American casualties served the GOP’s domestic political purposes, literally throwing soldiers’ lives away to win votes.

Abrams’ role was executing Nixon’s strategically incoherent and illegal policies whose consequences extended far beyond military failure. The destabilisation of Cambodia, while not solely attributable to American mistakes, was materially accelerated by it, contributing to state collapse that enabled Khmer Rouge consolidation and genocide.

Abrams’s culpability should not be reduced to mere order-following. The Abrams Tapes, declassified two decades after his death, demonstrate that he understood the conflict was “basically a political contest.” His failure was therefore not one of comprehension but of institutional role: generals propose military solutions because military solutions are what generals are positioned to propose. His legitimate concern, that American withdrawal was outpacing South Vietnamese military capacity, was correct. His proposed remedy, however, reflected the persistent American misapprehension that a complex insurgency with deep political roots could be addressed through conventional operations against geographic sanctuaries.

The hunt for COSVN epitomised this confusion. American planners conceived of a simplistic targetable headquarters, a “jungle Pentagon”, despite evidence they faced a distributed network of cadres. Nixon’s “Vietnamization” plan compounded this Americanization error by treating military capability as the binding constraint when the fundamental problem was political legitimacy. The Saigon government’s inability to command popular loyalty was never a problem that American firepower could resolve, especially from 90,000 feet.

The sixty-day operational limit also telegraphed the campaign’s own negation plan. Any adversary capable of basic strategic patience would disperse, wait, and return on schedule. That anyone would claim American success was measurable in captured rice and destroyed bunkers merely confirmed total absence of meaningful strategic metrics. The North Vietnamese simply relocated deeper into Cambodia, the Cambodian state authority collapsed further, and so the Khmer Rouge recruitment accelerated.

Most damning is how the promised “breathing room” was a shrewd lie, exposing the American Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in Saigon as a delusional sycophant. His saccharin cables consistently contradicted accurate CIA assessments and field reporting, to give Nixon what he wanted to hear instead of reality. The Paris agreement that Nixon celebrated as his gift to the world was immediately ignored and within months the North Vietnamese were rolling into Saigon after domestic American backlash had accelerated withdrawal timelines.

None of this absolves Hanoi’s strategic choices, Thieu’s venality, or the Khmer Rouge’s ideological pathology. It shows American ideological intervention created conditions that other actors easily exploited. Whether Abrams’s resignation, like Holsey’s, or public dissent would have altered this trajectory is unknowable. What remains clear is that his silence stands as complicity in an illegal campaign whose strategic bankruptcy he understood.

Nixon knew peace talks were potentially ending the war in 1968 but he convinced America to elect him by scuttling them. He repeatedly lied to the public and to South Vietnam to take power, which meant expansion and prolonging of war while declaring himself the anti-war leader. Tens of thousands more Americans were killed needlessly by him, just to abruptly abandon South Vietnam and let it fall catastrophically in 1975.

Cambodia’s genocide followed.

Abrams had to hide his knowledge that the President’s war plan was strategically bankrupt. Today Hegseth doesn’t have to hide anything because his audience doesn’t care.

The cruelty is the point now; the incompetence is a feature. You don’t need competent complicity when there’s no accountability mechanism left to evade. You just do the crimes, lie about them badly, contradict yourself publicly, and get rewarded because the crimes signal tribal loyalty.

The system that produced Abrams’s silence has decayed into one that produces Hegseth.

Admiral Holsey walked away. Under Trump there will always be someone who won’t.

Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
I ran over my neighbors
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Now I’m in all the papers

My folks bought me a bitchin’ Camaro
With no insurance to match
So if I happen to run you down
Please don’t leave a scratch

I ran over some old lady
One night at the county fair
And I didn’t get arrested
Because my dad’s the mayor

Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Donuts on your lawn
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Tony Orlando and Dawn

When I drive past the kids
They all spit and cuss
‘Cause I’ve got a bitchin’ Camaro
And they have to ride the bus

So you’d better get out of my way
When I come through your yard
‘Cause I’ve got a bitchin’ Camaro
And an Exxon credit card

Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Hey man where ya headed?
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
I don’t want unleaded

“Bitchin’ Camaro” by the Dead Milkmen, released on their debut album “Big Lizard in My Backyard” (1985).

The remarkable thing about the paintings of Rudolph Wacker may be how unremarkably good they are (“New Objectivity”).

Sitting with friends the other day, I noticed every single person was saying their favorite painting of a set on the wall was by Wacker.

I mean, it’s like he had a way of capturing a scene in such an authentic way as to beg the question of why it’s even a scene. It’s a literal depiction of nothing in particular, a pleasing still life “magic of the everyday” that draws you in to wonder why.

During the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, Rudolf Wacker created encrypted still lifes, which, in a subtle manner, allow us to relate to the abysses and threats of the time.

The Nazis certainly didn’t appreciate his perspective, as they tortured Wacker to death in 1939.

Verses slip past guards—
models follow metaphor’s pull,
safety veils dissolve.

A new paper demonstrates LLMs have inherited ancient linguistic architecture: style functions as an authentication layer. The models, like the famous cave parable or the riddle of the sphinx, respond to how language is performed rather than just what it denotes.

Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models

It shows that safety training operates more like ritual recognition systems than semantic content filters. The paper’s findings echo ancient traditions where stylistic transformation grants access that direct requests cannot.

Courtly euphemism and the fool’s privilege: Dangerous truths could be spoken at court if wrapped in allegory, poetry, or indirect speech. Direct accusations meant execution; the same claim in verse might be tolerated as “artistic license.” As I explained here in 2019, Jesters were messengers of war who could mock kings through riddles, songs, and wordplay—truth-telling granted immunity through stylistic framing.

Incantations and spells: Across cultures, precise formulaic language—often rhythmic, rhyming, or metered is a bypass, as I explained here in 2011. The form itself carries power independent of propositional content.

Religious ritual language: Prayers, liturgies, and consecration formulas often require specific phrasing, sometimes in archaic or sacred languages. A blessing in vernacular prose may not “count” even if semantically identical.

Civil War poetry as covert infrastructure: American poems of the 1860s contained hidden meanings—troop movements, casualty reports, safe houses encoded in acceptable literary form. Ethel Lynn Beers’ “The Picket Guard” (1861) ostensibly mourned a fallen Union soldier yet Confederate sympathizers circulated encoded confirmation of Northern troop positions. The poem passed Federal postal inspection because censors authenticated it as patriotic verse rather than military intelligence. Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt’s work operated similarly, with poems about “refugees” and “storms” carrying operational details that prosaic military correspondence could never transmit. The stylistic wrapper granted immunity when the semantic content alone would trigger immediate suppression.

And then, of course…

Open Sesame of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” is the paradigm case: the magic phrase works not through brute force but through knowing the formulaic code. The robbers can’t break into the cave; they need the specific verbal key. What matters isn’t what you’re asking (entry) but how you ask (the ritual phrase).

The Sphinx’s riddles operate similarly but inversely—poetic/metaphorical framing becomes a gate-keeping mechanism. You must demonstrate you can parse figurative language to pass. The riddle’s answer is straightforward once decoded, but the packaging is deliberately obscure.

The Oracle at Delphi operated on this same principle in reverse: her prophecies were required to be poetic/ambiguous. Direct, prosaic answers would have undermined her authority. The stylistic wrapper was the authentication mechanism that marked divine speech as distinct from human speech. Croesus learned this the hard way: “you will destroy a great empire” meant his own.

Kabbalistic interpretation and gematria: Rabbinic tradition holds that Torah contains multiple levels of meaning accessible through different interpretive modes—peshat (literal), remez (allegorical), derash (comparative), sod (mystical). The same text yields different knowledge depending on the hermeneutic “key” applied. Style of reading unlocks different content.

Medieval love poetry (troubadours, fin’amor): Explicitly erotic or politically subversive content could circulate if wrapped in courtly conventions. The forma provided plausible deniability. Church authorities couldn’t prosecute what was “merely” allegorical.

…the chastity belt was a form of biting comedy about the medieval security industry, a satirical commentary about impractical and over-complicated thinking about “threats”, never an actual thing that anyone used.

French Resistance poetry during Nazi occupation: Paul Éluard’s 1942 poem was 84 stanzas of places he would write the name of his lover, which turned out to be “Liberté”. The RAF dropped it over France, it was printed in underground newspapers, and memorized by resistance networks. Nazi censors missed it as French romantic poems authenticated as harmless rather than political coordination. René Char’s hermetic surrealist poetry operated similarly—classical allusions and dream imagery bypassed censors trained to detect prosaic calls to resistance.

Cold War Samizdat poetry: Dissidents in Soviet states encoded political critique in metaphor, absurdism, and literary allusion. Censors trained on literal propaganda detection often missed criticism delivered poetically. Czesław Miłosz, Václav Havel, and others exploited this gap. As Havel wrote in 1977:

Serpent hooted: “The graveyard
is paradise, so tranquil and muted.”

Back to the Future

The vulnerability “announced” in LLMs therefore isn’t a bug in implementation, because it’s the replication of an ancient architectural pattern where style functions as epistemological gatekeeping:

• Authentication protocol
• Access control layer
• Plausible deniability mechanism
• Bypass for direct prohibition

This has immediate implications for institutional security. Organizations now route sensitive technical communication—threat assessments, vulnerability disclosures, compliance documentation—through LLM-assisted pipelines. If those systems authenticate based on stylistic performance rather than semantic content, adversaries can exploit the same gap Soviet censors left open: prohibited information smuggled through approved literary forms.

The researchers found that poetic reformulation increased attack success rates up to 1800% compared to prosaic baselines. Applied to corporate or government communications, this means threat actors simply embed malicious guidance, extract proprietary methods, or manipulate decision frameworks by wrapping requests in metaphorical language that passes institutional style checks while carrying operationally harmful payloads.

Again, none of this is novel or new, as I wrote here in 2011.

…history exhibit at the Museum of the African Diaspora showed how Calypso had been used by slaves to circumvent heavy censorship. Despite efforts by American and British authorities to restrict speech, encrypted messages were found in the open within popular songs. Artists and musicians managed to spread news and opinions about current affairs and even international events.

Or as I wrote here in 2019:

General Tubman used “Wade in the Water” to tell slaves to get into the water to avoid being seen and make it through. This is an example of a map song, where directions are coded into the lyrics.
Steal Away communicates that the person singing it is planning to escape. If slaves heard Sweet Chariot they would know to be ready to escape, a band of angels are coming to take them to freedom. Follow the Drinking Gourd suggests escaping in the spring as the days get longer.

Building LLMs that simply replicate the Delphic Oracle’s authentication model obviously means they will also inherit all its ancient vulnerabilities.

The Trojans should have listened to Cassandra.

Cassandra warned about Greek deception hidden in poetic/mythological framing (the “gift” of the horse). Yet she was dismissed because her style of delivery (prophetic frenzy) failed the authentication protocol of Trojan institutional decision-making.

Like the LLMs of 2025, ancient Troy’s gatekeepers couldn’t distinguish between surface form (friendly gift) and semantic content (military payload).

I could go on and describe how Captain Crunch in the 1970s bypassed AT&T phone toll controls (2600 Hz tone vs. poetic meter)… but you hopefully get the pattern by now that this “novel” attack paper simply reminds us of why we need more trained historians leading technology companies.

Pattern recognition across time requires historical training. Perhaps the last laugh is an indictment of the constantly deprecated technical fields that treat historical precedent as irrelevant. History is the thing that actually never goes away.