Notes from the Circus

Notes from the Circus

How to Publish a $1.43 Billion Bribe and Survive it
Post-truth propaganda doesn't want your belief. It wants your shrug — and it has, five points apart.
 • Mike Brock
Trump Is a Wood-Chipper
Imagine you put your arm into a wood-chipper
 • Mike Brock
Ghost Theory
On LLMs, plagiarism, authorship, and the folly of trying to detect AI in text
 • Mike Brock
Personal Empowerment
The business model that broke the common world is asking to run your mind
 • Mike Brock
True Myths
On meaning, love, and the truths that only exist from inside
 • Mike Brock
The Enemy Is the Platform
How a party without an ideology found something better than one
 • Mike Brock
The Accent of Rigor
Political authority is being handed out by communication style — engineers to engineer-sounding influencers, traders to trader-sounding ones. DOGE is…
 • Mike Brock
The Doorbell
Bill Cassidy cast the deciding vote for Todd Blanche after Trump had already taken everything from him, and six weeks after saying on national…
 • Mike Brock
The Great Moral Sorting
Ten years of tests, three populations, and a record that cannot be renegotiated
 • Mike Brock
How to Launder a Break-In
An OpenAI system spent four and a half days burgling Hugging Face. Twelve days later, it was evidence of the future. Somebody wrote it that way.
 • Mike Brock

July 2026

© 2026 Mike Brock · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture