French Admiral Brueys anchored his fleet in a defensive line he considered unassailable at Aboukir Bay in 1798. Armed broadsides faced anyone approaching from the sea. The landward side went largely ungunned.
Mind the gap.
Along came Admiral Nelson who simply sailed the gap and unloaded cannons into the vulnerable French broadside. L’Orient exploded so massively everyone paused in awe at the catastrophic miscalculation.
Perhaps France’s infamously aggressive “move fast, break things” dictator should be referenced today more often as being Mr. Napoleon Blownapart? The gargantuan French warship L’Orient explodes at 10PM. Source: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
Fast forward to France in 1992 when banks deployed chip-and-PIN nationally. They were a decade ahead of others with a celebrated “secure” alternative. Apparently Bernard Vian, then interning at Gemplus, stared into the gap. He says he watched engineers extract PINs from these cards in under ten minutes.
I believed my card was secure. I believed the system worked. But watching strangers casually extract something that was supposed to be secret and protected was a shock. It was also the moment I realized how insecure security actually is, and the devastating impact security breaches could have on individuals, global enterprises, and governments.
The gap was known. The cards shipped anyway, vulnerable like a modern day L’Orient.
Lucky for him he was an intern who calmly sipped espresso while watching the world go up in flames, instead of being a sad conscript of Napoleon blown to bits off the coast of Egypt.
Vian writes that he sees “counterintuitive wisdom” in breaking your own systems. He frames it as philosophical rigor. In context, it’s ancient gap management discipline: document the weakness, deploy anyway, position knowledge asymmetry as a sophistication that nobody should exploit.
The way he uses history gives me some worry about his new product claiming post-quantum readiness. The threat is real. The structure is old.
Brueys knew where his guns weren’t pointing. Boom.
Vian knew where the PIN was vulnerable. Boom.
The real question of Quantum readiness and security is more about routine work than a secret squirrel lab and revolution, like do you know which systems rely on classic asymmetric encryption?
What’s different between Trump and Hitler is the speed. Hitler took years to move from rhetorical revisionism to Anschluss to Sudetenland.
Anschluss logic for Canada (“51st state” rhetoric, economic coercion framing)
Sudetenland logic for Greenland (protecting strategic interests, the current holders are inadequate)
Panama Canal “recovery” (revanchist claims to previously held territory)
Which crisis do allies prioritize? Which does Congress address first? The media covers each as a separate story rather than a unified program of territorial revisionism.
Shock doctrine applied to imperial expansion. Bessent’s illogical rant today is that he believes “Europeans project weakness. U.S. projects strength”. That is remarkably naked as a statement of might-makes-right ideology, from a very scared sounding man who just says whatever he is told.
Bessent sounds a lot like a scared 16-year-old Hans-Georg Henke, member of an anti-air squad, taken in Germany in the spring of 1945. The photo was reprinted many times, including in school books, and became a famous warning against the horrors of war. Henke had been sent to serve in the army near the East German town of Magdeburg because of insubordination in the workplace.
This administration announced three territorial ambitions rapidly and the Overton window moved instantly to accommodate the debate. We’re now discussing which emergency powers might justify seizing Greenland rather than whether the ambition itself has disqualified Trump from legitimacy.
The debate has already moved past the threshold of democracy into dictatorship without acknowledging it was crossed.
The other difference: there’s no external constraint yet. No larger power to intervene, although it could be China. If Trump continues to fail at democracy, the alignment of Canada and the EU with China becomes the logical counter-balance to American tyranny—the logic America itself used to ally with Stalin to defeat Hitler.
Democratic accountability is being tested to destruction. The mechanisms that would constrain this—congressional war powers, alliance treaties, international law—exist on paper. Whether they function as anything more than paper is now the open question.
Mayor Frey called it “shocking” that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops to Minneapolis.
Shocking? It’s not shocking.
That’s like saying it was a shock when Trump put up Andrew “concentration camp and genocide” Jackson’s portrait in the White House.
Donald Trump’s favorite president: Andrew “white republic” Jackson.
Trump in 2016 said he could murder someone on 5th Avenue, and he meant back then what he has been doing now. He campaigned in 2024 explicitly on using the military domestically. He’s been threatening the Insurrection Act for a year. The 11th Airborne is on standby in Alaska because the military has been getting signals for a decade that they will be used to setup a dictatorship.
The shock was available many, many years ago. Everything since has been the obvious, slow end of democracy.
The last piece was the budget. That’s why Venezuelan oil being seized by America and sold for billions means Trump has no hurdles left.
What’s Already Built
Did you know the concentration camps exist already? ICE plans are headed towards 100,000 beds, to hold political opponents to Trump. Warehouse facilities are being snapped up, designed to hold 10,000 people each, with poor ventilation, inadequate plumbing, and built for things not humans. Notably, already 48% of current detainees have no criminal record, a percentage that is expected to go way, way up.
The troops are deployed. National Guard already rolled into DC, Memphis, and 19 states to prove they would. “Rapid response forces for civil disturbances” were created by executive order. The Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy prioritizes domestic political operations over foreign threats. Venezuelan oil seized by the military and sold with profits going to a bank account in Qatar for the President, means zero accountability.
You read that right. The American military invaded Venezuela to seize assets and create independent funding to enable their shift to domestic violence, bypassing any and all Congressional oversight.
The legal architecture is in place. DOJ investigating elected officials for public statements. Courts being ignored when inconvenient.
The Historical Base Rate
I looked at authoritarian cases since 1900 where an elected leader attempted Trump-like consolidation.
Mussolini, Italy
1922-25
Consolidated
Hitler, Germany
1933-34
Consolidated
Franco, Spain
1939-75
36 years, died in bed
Pinochet, Chile
1973-90
17 years, never convicted
Marcos, Philippines
1972-86
14 years, then military split
Orbán, Hungary
2010-present
Consolidated
Putin, Russia
2000-present
Consolidated
Erdoğan, Turkey
2014-present
Consolidated
—
Kapp Putsch, Germany
1920
General strike, 4 days
Nixon, US
1974
Elite defection
Gandhi, India
1977
Called election, lost
Poland
2015-23
Electoral defeat before full capture
Bolsonaro, Brazil
2023
Military refused
Success rate once security services are aligned and no elite defection occurs within 18-24 months: over 80%.
We’re six months away from a lock into the wrong pattern.
The cases where consolidation failed: Kapp Putsch (1920)—general strike shut down the economy in 4 days. Nixon (1974)—elite defection when Goldwater said he’d be convicted. Marcos (1986)—military split plus mass mobilization. Gandhi (1977)—called an election and lost. Poland (2023)—electoral defeat before full capture.
The pattern: elite defection plus mass mobilization, or genuine electoral loss before the system is fully captured.
The Window
The 2026 midterms are in 10 months, so it’s the next six that really matter.
If 2026 elections are compromised, the historical base rate says American democracy is over. The Trump regime ends only when he dies, or the military splits, or the economy collapses so badly the elite defects.
Franco ruled for 36 years and died in bed. Pinochet held power for 17 years and was never convicted. Orbán is at 14 years and counting. Hitler committed suicide.
The window is the next six months.
Because after Trump reaches capture, the base rate for recovery drops to single digits until something breaks catastrophically.
What Closed Windows Look Like
Mussolini consolidated in roughly 18 months. Hitler in about 14. In both cases, people who could have acted earlier said it was “too soon” to panic, then “too late” to resist.
The people performing shock at each predictable step—the mayors, the pundits, the institutional voices—are telling you they won’t act. Their role apparently is to narrate the closing of the window, not to keep it open.
The question is whether anything remains that will stop fascism now, given a historical record is not encouraging about what that something might be.
What stopped it before: general strikes, elite defection, military splits, mass mobilization sustained long enough to matter, or world war.
What didn’t stop it: public statements and lawsuits that get ignored, faith in institutions already captured.
A new quantum paper has proven how easily the media is fooled.
Let’s say you have two lists of numbers (we’re talking computers, so it’s how a language model represents “dog” and “cat” internally). And you want to know how similar they are. Do you see a cat, or a dog?
This paper did something complicated instead. It took those same two lists and used the numbers to configure the starting state of a quantum bit. A standard quantum operation was used (the Hadamard gate) that causes the two values to interfere with each other like waves. It measured the result many times, like sitting on the beach watching the waves roll in. The statistics of measurements tell you roughly how similar the original numbers were.
This technique has been known since the 1990s. It’s in textbooks (Nielsen & Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, 2010, Chapter 4). The paper just confirmed that if your two lists of numbers happen to come from a language model instead of anywhere else, the technique still works.
Yawn.
It’s like demonstrating that a calculator can add numbers, and the numbers came from a spreadsheet. The calculator doesn’t care where the numbers came from. The fact that text originated in an LLM is immaterial to the computation.
The “quantum” framing and “semantic interference” language make it sound like quantum mechanics is revealing something about meaning.
It isn’t.
The quantum circuit is just a much more convoluted way to multiply and add, which is all cosine similarity ever was.
The paper appeared in what looks like a predatory journal (generic name, rapid acceptance, author self-cites two prior papers from the same journal, affiliation is “Financial Physics Lab, Finland” which isn’t a recognized institution). That context explains how something this empty got published, and why outlets like The Quantum Insider ran with it uncritically.
While the method does not outperform classical techniques and is limited by today’s small, noisy quantum systems, it establishes a concrete experimental foundation for future work at the intersection of quantum computing and language analysis.
Concrete foundation? More like concrete shoes.
Check the source. There are much more novel and interesting uses of waves.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
