Full Nazi

What happens when yout train your AI on 4chan and your worst users and then turn of any guardrails. It seems the Hitler dial goes up to 11!

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI has deleted “inappropriate” posts on X after the company’s chatbot, Grok, began praising Adolf Hitler, referring to itself as MechaHitler and making antisemitic comments in response to user queries.

Is Journalism On

According to google news, the FEMA director has been mentioned just once by name in a month, in a NYT story. One mention near the bottom of the story:

Cameron Hamilton, FEMA’s former acting head, was pushed out of the agency in May after he testified before Congress that he did not believe the agency should be eliminated. David Richardson, his replacement, has no background in disaster response and told employees last month that he did not realize the country had a hurricane season. It was not clear if Mr. Richardson was joking.

FEMA director isn't always newsworthy, but at the moment...

Morning

Wacky Wednesday.

Evening

All yours

The Mamdani Times

A throwback to the old silly internet.

Captain Planet Wasn't A Woke Environmentalist When I Was A Child

Please make a superhero movie that has little except Nazi punching so they can get mad about that, too.

They Know What They're Doing

A big criticism of the New York Times during Trump I especially - but also since - was that they would do important work, put it on page 17, and never mention it again. You can contrast this with the effort to keep the "Mamdani pretended he was black to try to get into a college he didn't even get into" story going over multiple days.

These are choices.

Lunch

eat

The New York Times On A Rampage

Everybody at the New York Times who feels entitled to speak about this will deny it, which means they are liars, which means you should treat them as such and their newspaper as a production by liars. 

For one thing, it came to the Times due to a widespread hack into Columbia’s databases, transmitted to the paper through an intermediary who was given anonymity by the paper. That source turns out to be Jordan Lasker, who – as the Guardian has reported – is a well-known and much criticized “eugenicist”, AKA white supremacist.

Traditional journalism ethics suggests that when news organizations base a story on hacked or stolen information, there should be an extra high bar of newsworthiness to justify publication. Much of Big Journalism, for example, turned their noses up at insider documents offered to them about JD Vance during last year’s presidential campaign, in part because the source was Iranian hackers; in some cases, they wrote about the hack but not the documents.

The Mamdani story, however, fell far short of the newsworthiness bar.

A ranking Times editor, Patrick Healy, responded to criticism of the story in a thread on X, justifying it as part of the paper’s mission “to help readers better know and understand top candidates for major offices”.

Soledad O’Brien, the prominent media entrepreneur and journalist, called that explanation “a joke”. The publication of the Mamdani story is “an absolute embarrassment” for the Times, charged O’Brien, who herself is of mixed-race ancestry and identifies as Black.

Can't shame people who can't feel shame, can't correct people who think they are are infallible.

Good Luck Everybody

I won't say everything they are doing was clearly promised in the campaign - and you can certainly forgive people for not knowing even those things because our glorious newspapers were busy running interference for most of it - but "destroy FEMA" was a common theme.

Now a month later, while not a hurricane, the first big natural disaster since Noem tightened her grip has struck–and it shows.

“We would have hundreds of people on scene in FEMA jackets registering people for assistance, regional coordination center fully activated, national at least partly activated,” a current FEMA employee whose identity is being protected for fear of reprisal told The Handbasket. “Setting up disaster recovery centers with federal partners, we’d have our search and rescue there already. We would have mission assigned other agencies like USACE (US Army Corp of Engineers) to clear debris and establish power.”

I'm not sure what precise combination of ideology and incompetence this is, but you don't have to choose one over the other!

I never quite figured out why they hate FEMA so much - seems like the smarter play from some grifters would be to see it as an extraordinary grift opportunity with a small side in handling aid - but I'm sure there are some nonsensical reasons.

Framing

I know one can go too far in obsessively examining the nuance of NYT headlines and ledes, but here is a pretty good example of how they almost always frame things in the Trump era.

Instead of putting the critics and criticism first - as in "Democrats blame Trump cuts for flood response" or similar - they put the response first, making it sound as if Trump is on offense and the Dems are on defense.

It's a small thing but it's extremely common, and it's a choice.  A series of choices.

Morning

Once again.

Monday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

A bit late. Got busy with some things.

Another Fine Elon Product

He does like things that explode.

In its first year on the road, the Cybertruck ended up being tied to five fire fatalities through Jan. 1, a concerning trend that makes the rate of such fatalities higher than that of the notorious Ford Pinto, which was in production from 1970–80.

Baby Steps

Slotkin finding some of that Alpha Energy.

The debate is no longer progressive vs. moderate; that is very 2017.

The debate is how do you answer one question: Is the second Trump administration an existential threat to democracy or is it bad but survivable?

I believe it is an existential threat. https://t.co/0AT2AUjMqo

— Elissa Slotkin (@ElissaSlotkin) July 6, 2025

Lunch

eat

Sure, Jan

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: President Trump's Justice Department and FBI have concluded they have no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed powerful figures, kept a "client list” or was murdered, according to a memo detailing the findings obtained by Axios.https://t.co/Dyt4ycKRuV

— Axios (@axios) July 7, 2025

An official Trump White House account posted this 5 months ago btw https://t.co/3TxT72LAcb

— Democrats (@TheDemocrats) July 7, 2025

Agendas

It's always clear when the NYT has an agenda, but they do the "I know you are but what I am I" thing when you point out the obvious.  The critics of the Times are always "activists" who expect the newspaper to depart from its Vulcan objectivity and impartiality to push an agenda, while they are the platonic ideal of journalistm, merely pursuing truth wherever it may lead.

Death Cult

I don't really want to get into specifics of whether a particular budget cut was the issue or whether the floods were a result of climate change, because arguing over the specifics can obscure the larger undeniable truth:  It is the case that Republicans are actively hostile to dealing with climate change and even inexpensive measures to ameliorate its consequences.  It is also the case that climate change and its effects are real whether or not you can pin any specific weather event on it.

Texas braces for more rain as death toll mounts to at least 82 with dozens missing