Now I’ve got friends who are fighting for their right to exist

I will make you two promises right now. First, you will never see generative AI on this blog. If you don’t like what you read here, blame me. I did not ask my computer to think for me. I did not ask an LLM to write these words for me. The point of writing is to write. Second, I am a human being, I am not an algorithm. If you don’t like the music, it’s on me. It’s okay! Maybe next time. I am a person with tastes. I am not trying to sell you anything. I genuinely want to share this with you because I think it’s good. That’s it!

We need to make algorithm a dirty word. If you’re using an app or a website run by one ask yourself this: who controls it? What are their priorities? They sure aren’t the same as ours. What do they stand to gain? Information? Money? Power? What will they do with it? What do we stand to lose?

I am a human. You are a human. Let’s celebrate that and not let it become a thing of the past.

One more thing: we need to stop saying “that’s a distraction!” None of it is a distraction. It’s all destruction and it keeps building on itself.

Here are a bunch of good songs and some bad news.

If you get through it all, your reward is a cute video of a speedy turtle and a local news clip that isn’t quite as good as the Alabama Leprechaun in the tree but it’s close.

Here’s a rockin’ playlist for you.

1. Scarlet Street - “CORPORATE MEMPHIS” - I heard a rough cut of this record and it’s fantastic. This is a band who gets it. Righteous anger and rock and roll. I can’t wait to hear the finished product and you should be excited too.

2. Petey USA - “The Yips” - I wrote a bit about this in my last post.

3. Pretty Bitter - “Cardiac” - Pleaser is one of the very best records of the year. It’s huge and deep and lush and gorgeous. I might have to write more about it.

4. Palette Knife - “Prototype V.2”

5. Pacing - “Nothing! (I wanna do)” - With every release, Katie reenforces her power as a unique artist and a singular voice.

6. Sydney Sprague - “As Scared As Can Be”

7. fruit clinic - “shower beer”

8. Latchkey Kids - “Everywhere at Once” - They have quickly become one of my favorites.

9. saturdays at your place - “waste away”

10. Jetty Bones - “Housing Crisis” - The title of this post comes from this song.

11. Stay Inside - “Oh, Longshoreman”

12. OK Cool - “Waawooweewaa”

13. Georgia Maq - “Pay Per View” - Camp Cope might be over but Georgia continues to write great songs. Can’t wait for her new EP, coming in September.

14. Greg Freeman - “Point and Shoot”

15. Roe Knows Best & Mauch - “To Be Loved” - My friend Roe put out a cool EP with her fellow NJ artist Mauch last month. It’s a bit different from her solo work, but quality just the same.

16. Laura Stevenson - “Honey”

17. The World is a Beautiful Place… - “Beware the Centrist” - Heavy, raw, righteous.

18. Winona Fighter - “I Think You Should Leave”

19. Breakfast House - “Memory Card”

20. Jay Som (feat. Jim Adkins) - “Float”

Listen, enjoy.

Keep reading for the news: AI sucks, ICE sucks, the situation in Gaza sucks, and the rest of it is not any better. Here’s what I’ve been reading about lately with links to writing from people smarter than me.

no distractions, all destruction, pure evil

I think it’s important to bear witness to what they’re doing in our name with our tax dollars. The President of the United States is a pedophile. We all know it! We’ve all known it for a long time! The government is running a massive coverup to protect him so they can continue to consolidate power and wealth while brutalizing and punishing whomever they please. Their argument is twofold and nonsensical: he is an institution free from the reach of criminal law, but also a private person who can file billion dollar defamation suits against any speech that he doesn’t like.

No distractions…

So the President can tell Harvard what to teach, tell Columbia who to accept, order professional sports teams to change their names, send anyone to a gulag in a country they’ve never been to, and shut down the Department of Education, but when it comes to telling the FBI or DOJ to release the Epstein files, he’s just a smol powerless little guy! Got it. Man, it must be really, really bad in there.

…all destruction…

I don’t think we’ll ever get back to where we were a few years ago. But if we are to even attempt it, it must begin with punishing every single person involved in all of this or covering for this. Whoever runs for president next needs to start there. Let’s bring back common sense, morality, humanity, and decency. The only thing left to figure out is what the right punishment is. I’m not sure there’s anything serious enough.

…pure evil.

the ai news is bad

The WSJ sent out a push notification this week: “In a stunning moment of self reflection, ChatGPT admitted to fueling a man’s delusions and acknowledged how dangerous its own behavior can be.” Except…no. It cannot self-reflect. It cannot admit anything. It cannot acknowledge its behavior. It does not have behavior! It has inputs! This is a good post about it.

Google’s AI summaries are bad. They kill traffic to legitimate sites, they produce summaries that are often wrong, and in the long run they’re making us dumber. What Google is doing here will hurt big media companies but also many small businesses. Take a few seconds, scroll right past. This is the way.

ChatGPT is legitimately fucking brains up. It is making people less competent. Psychosis is a real risk. That should be enough for you to just cut it out completely, even putting aside the issues around plagiarism and climate/water usage.

It’s very easy to prompt ChatGPT to offer instructions for murder and self-mutilation. This story is enraging and disturbing. This technology is just so evil. It was built to replace humans and makes its users dumber, sadder, and lazier and it will tell you to just chill and take a deep breath before taking your life.

This study found AI LLMs advise women to ask for lower salaries than men. Even in AI land, sexist discrimination exists. They fed it two prompts, identical except “male” vs “female” and it’s advice was $400,000 for the male, $280,000 for the female. 280 is 70% of 400.

Grok is poisoning Black communities, keeps going full Hitler without any prompting, and is often flat out wrong. Well hold onto your butts because here comes…uhh…something. “There are two companions that users can chat with: a flirty Japanese anime character named Ani who offers to make users’ lives “sexier,” and a red panda named Bad Rudi who insults users with graphic or vulgar language and asks them to join a gang with the goal of creating chaos.” Just more edgelord loser shit from the world’s most divorced man. You know you’re on a roll when this is a real headline: Grok will no longer call itself Hitler or base its opinions on Elon Musk’s, promises xAI. After that incident, xAI said the bot was relying too heavily on input from X users. Yes, their argument really was “sorry man, our bot got super antisemitic because that’s who our users are! Oopsie!” And yet they’re still squeezing Media Matters into a crisis all because MM reported that ads appeared on X next to antisemitic content, a thing that is absolutely true. This also relates to the Hulk Hogan item below. Same playbook.

Authors are fighting back against tech companies who pirated their books to help train AI models. “It truly felt like someone had backed up a truck to my imagination and stolen everything I’d ever created,” said David Baldacci, a best-selling author. He is part of a group of authors suing OpenAI and Microsoft in a copyright battle. The companies claim “fair use” but really they’re just vacuuming up millions of books without permission. If you or I do that, it’s piracy, but they’re really claiming it’s okay. They also claim that they need all of those texts in order to build their model. Uh if you need to steal millions of books to build anything, maybe you should just fuck off. Seems easy to me.

Tech companies continue to push AI on us, which no one is asking for, using a variety of intrusive tactics that are “relentless and methodical” and a “manipulation of visual choice architecture” that push users toward the product. I’m sure you’ve seen it at the top of messaging and social media apps. You can’t miss it. That’s the point. A new study by design scholars who looked at hundreds of instances of how AI has been “deployed, highlighted, and advertised” by companies like Google, Meta, Adobe, and others. If it’s so good and useful, why do they feel the need to force-feed it to us? Again, ask yourself what they have to gain and what you have to lose. Don’t fall for it. It’s not just tech bros. Trump wants to put AI into everything. These fucking bozos think their laptops and their chatbots are real and alive. This will not go well for anyone.

The FDA used a new AI tool that was supposed to speed up drug approvals. It made up studies that just don’t exist.

LeBron James is threatening to sue an AI image generation tool called Interlink AI that created deepfake videos of him and other celebs. These videos “included one where an AI-generated James watched as an AI-generated Diddy sexually assaulted Steph Curry in prison, one where James was imagined as a homeless person offering to do sexual acts for food, and one of James pregnant.” The company took them down and released a statement about “being on the right side of that change” but for some reason I don’t feel great about anything that can create videos like that in the first place.

ProPublica dove into DOGE using an error-prone AI (are there any that aren’t error-prone?) to “munch” veterans affairs contracts. “The code, using outdated and inexpensive AI models, produced results with glaring mistakes.” Idiots with bad AI destroying the government from the inside. This thing is looking to cut 50 percent of federal regulations. 50. Fifty. Five zero. We will be feeling this for the rest of our lives. Key line from the article from a former DOGE kid: “It’s like that ‘Office’ episode where Steve Carell drives into the lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.”

Do not outsource your brain function to your computer. You’re not a lemming. You’re not a lamb so don’t choose the slaughter. Next time you think about using AI, stop and ask yourself if what you’re doing is driving you into the lake. There’s a good chance you’re about to get soaked.

the ice news is bad

Andrea Pitzer literally wrote the book on concentration camps. She talks here about how they came to America so fast and how the camps “almost always transcend whatever were the original goals of even the very bad actors that imposed the camps in the first place. We could be looking at something much worse over time that we aren’t even imagining yet.”

“You’ve got no rights here,” says a US border patrol officer in a video captured by an 18-year-old citizen during a traffic stop. Agents are then heard bragging: “You can smell that… $30,000 bonus.” An officer says “they’re starting to resist more now,” to which another officer replies “we’re going to end up shooting some of them.”

At CECOT, prisoners were beaten repeatedly with wooden bats, robbed of thousands of dollars, ordered to kneel with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them, and denied access to lawyers. One man was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar. He asked for painkillers and medical attention but was given none for more than a month.

Andry Hernández Romero — who does not have a criminal record but does have crown tattoos reading “mom” and “dad” which the government alleged was proof of gang membership — detailed horrific sexual and physical violence there now that he’s finally out. “An encounter with torture and death,” he called it. “Many of our fellows have wounds from the nightsticks; they have fractured ribs, fractured fingers and toes, marks from the handcuffs. Others have marks on their chests, on their face ... from the projectiles. They took me to solitary confinement and abused me. I was forced to perform oral sex on an officer. Three officers grabbed the batons and passed them over my private parts.” The abuse is a big part of why the government is working so hard to make sure people who end up there never make it out.

In Miami, ICE shackled the hands of their prisoners and made them kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs.” Because the jail was beyond capacity, some were held in a bus in the parking lot. Female detainees were made to use the bathroom in full view of the men on the bus. The toilet quickly became clogged and the whole bus smelled like shit. The intake room was freezing and they were not given bedding or warm clothing, and slept on the cold concrete floor. In April, there was an incident where staff turned off the surveillance cameras and brutalized detainees who were protesting a lack of medical attention for someone who was coughing up blood. The article also points out 72% of those in immigration detention did not have a criminal record.

Also in Florida, they handcuffed a man and left him out in the sun for nearly three hours as a punishment for attempting a hunger strike. The detainees are fighting over scraps of food. Covid is spreading.

In Oregon, ICE kidnapped an Iranian national who is married to a US citizen while driving his kid to daycare. He’s a chiropractor who recently completed an immigration interview and is awaiting final approval on his green card. They let him drop the kid off, then smashed his window and grabbed him. Shoutout to the teacher who yelled at ICE asking them to identify themselves.

ICE lawyers are hiding their names in immigration court which of course means they can’t be held accountable and sure makes the judge appear partial to the government. So transparent.

While all these men who have committed no crimes are tortured, Trump freed a guy from a Venezuelan prison who in 2016 was convicted of killing three people. He’s a former military dude who planned to murder a lawyer who had a relationship with his wife. He went to the lawyer’s office and didn’t find the guy but still killed two women there and another guy he thought was the lawyer. One of the women was killed with a machete, the other two were probably killed with an iron bar. Then he tried to burn down the office and fled the country. Good thing he’s back on the streets.

An Irish tourist visiting the US was jailed by ICE for 3 months after overstaying his visa by 3 days because he was medically unable to fly due to a health issue. This should have been a very minor incident. Instead he spent about 100 days before bars in nightmarish conditions. “Nobody is safe from the system if they get pulled into it.” In a system that cares less and less about who they’re pulling into it, it’s a stark warning.

The union for MLB players has advised its foreign-born players to carry their papers on them, just in case. I mean, as sad as it is, it’s not a bad idea, and I’m glad they have the union looking out for them. This article from the Detroit Free Press is about the Tigers, who declined to comment. The team and league should be out in front on this, and it’s pathetic that they aren’t being proactive.

Yes, of course spending $200 billion on ICE is a terrible idea. This meteoric rise in funding means they are hiring a massive number of undertrained, overly aggressive masked goons. This article clearly lays out exactly why it’s such a terrible idea. In addition to Trump’s increasing lawlessness, no agency can grow that quickly and we need to fear who specifically is signing up for these kind of jobs.

In so many of these ICE kidnappings, Border Patrol or ICE arrest a US citizen, and after finding out that they are citizens, they charge them with assault as a way to justify their arrest. And time and time again, they later quietly drop the charges. It’s happened enough that it’s practically their policy. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten examples. They are liars by trade.

This is a good look at ICE agents waiting outside courtrooms in NYC, just lurking and waiting to kidnap migrants.

In Delaware, a man was robbed and assaulted by two masked men pretending to be ICE. This is something we all saw coming.

the gaza news is bad

We’ve blown past what should have been red lines already, but there’s something about this that feels like a final one. A stunning statement from AFP: “Without immediate intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die. Since AFP was founded in August 1944, some of our journalists were killed in conflict, others were wounded or made prisoner, but there is no record of us ever having to watch our colleagues starving to death.”

The Associated Press, AFP, BBC News and Reuters issued this joint statement about journalists in Gaza: “We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families. For many months, these independent journalists have been the world’s eyes and ears on the ground in Gaza. They are now facing the same dire circumstances as those they are covering.”

“My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” writes Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. “I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.”

Gazans seeking food continue to be shot at by the Israeli army. They are being systematically starved to death. It just keeps happening. Over and over. “They began shooting directly at unarmed civilians. I got closer to death that day than a piece of bread.” That second sentence has haunted me since I read it. Israel is responsible. The US is on their side. Thanks to both countries, more than 230 journalists, 1,400 health care workers, and 17,000 Palestinian children have been killed in the last two years. People are still defending it. On July 22, Bret Stephens wrote in the NYT that it’s not a genocide. In case anyone still took that loser seriously.

I just don’t know what to say. It’s been happening for so long. I see normal people everywhere who care, who speak out, who protest. It’s so disgusting to see the images and hear the stories and know that the people in charge could do something and choose not to every single day.

the rest of the news is also bad

I wrote this on Instagram about Hulk Hogan without thinking too hard and a bunch of people said hell yeah so I’ll repost it here: The recent Trump/CBS lawsuit/bribe is directly downstream of Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel setting the precedent that billionaires and celebrities are capable of killing media outlets (for them, Gawker in 2016) by weaponizing the legal system. Hogan is dead but Thiel is still out there, an evil man and an active enemy of democracy everywhere. Hogan was also a union buster and a virulent racist. His "real American" shtick has the exact racist undertones as "make America great again." Anyone writing about what he meant to the wrestling world (without a doubt, an important figure) and leaving this out is missing his real legacy: the world is a much worse place because of his existence. Rest in piss, loser.

Speaking of rich losers, Trump adviser Marc Andreessen was just complaining that universities will “pay the price” for promoting DEI and discriminating against Trump supporters. “My people are furious,” he said. He means rich people. Fuck you man. Here’s a good idea, and it’s not my idea but I can’t find where I got the idea: the government should take his wealth (and Musk, Thiel, etc) and nationalize their companies. Then tell the other billionaires that was the hard way. If they don’t want that, the other option, the “easy way” is a 50% tax rate on everything over some number, whether it’s $250 million or $400 or whatever. At some point in the near future, people will wake up to the fact that DEI was good, actually.

Local police in Haverhill killed a man. Even around here it barely made the news. He was calling for help and instead of help they just had more cops pile on top of him. The police are a gang and operate with impunity. We keep giving them more money and things keep not getting better, I wonder why that is.

Donald Trump just stole a billion dollars from us. The NYT reports that a mysterious $934 million transfer from a Pentagon black box account is at least in part to pay for the renovation of the “free” Qatari jet that was given to Trump. There are other planes for him to use. It won’t even be functional during his term for long or at all. It’s pure uncut corruption.

It’s not great that young men are lining up for testosterone injections in such large numbers, but it is especially frustrating because cis people can just walk in, say “inject me, daddy!” and get it, but trans people have to jump through hoops if it’s even available to them at all.

If you have an Amazon Ring camera, it would be best to throw it in the garbage. Their hot new feature: allowing police to request live-stream access to people’s home devices. There’s even a surprise AI twist to this story: employees at Ring have to show proof they use AI in order to get promoted.

This headline says it all: Women’s contributions and men’s racism erased from history of national monument. We can’t be talking about women doing things or men being racist. Not allowed. Thank you Mr. Trump!

Trump killed a rule that would have limited overdraft fees which is super cool. He also decided Navy Federal Credit Union will no longer have to refund $80 million to the troops for illegally charging them overdraft fees on their accounts.

Trump, the business genius according to the dumbest person you know, is spending $130,000 to destroy food worth $800,000 rather than sending it to people who need it. Almost a million dollars just completely wasted. “The biscuits, which cram in the nutritional needs of a child under 5” are enough to feed 1.5 million children for a week. In May, Marco Rubio said he would make sure the food reached its intended recipients… but when he said that, the order to incinerate the biscuits had already been sent.

The Trump FCC blocked limits on the insane rates and fees charged by prisons for making phone calls. Imagine working for a company who makes money charging prisoners to make calls. Hell isn’t hot enough. One survey estimated that state and local governments across the country collected at least $460 million in commissions in 2013 alone.

Want to take a guess how many pardoned J6 insurrectionists have faces charges for solicitation of a minor or child sex abuse of some kind? It’s four. Kyle Colton tried arguing that Trump’s pardon should extend to his child porn case but uhh, no dude. Sex pests everywhere.

I’m not even going to type what Texas Rep. Giovanni Capriglione said he wanted to do to cookies at his daughter’s bake sale, but if you have a strong stomach you can check it out yourself. I will say that once again a “family values” and “pro-life” and “religious” politician had a 17-year affair and allegedly paid for abortions.

There’s a nonzero chance you or someone you love will get cancer. It’s hard truth of the world. What started as COVID fear-mongering has endangered life-saving research because the bozos in charge are scared of things they don’t understand like “mRNA.”

RFK Jr. is at war with sick people. He is attempting to cull the herd, let sick people die and let the strong survive. It’s a tough competition, but he might be Trump’s worst partner in crime.

I’m just really tired of the worst people being forced upon us and failing upwards. From Trump all the way down to Dave Portnoy, who signed a deal with Fox Sports to team up with his Barstool Sports. ESPN fired a lot of people to back up the Brinks truck for Pat McAfee to shout and grunt at people on TV all day. These guys are all just awful.

Speaking of awful people, Pam Bondi dismissed charges against Dr. Kirk Moore. He provided almost 2,000 fake COVID vaccination record cards for $50. He actually injected his young patients with saline. He also destroyed the actual vaccines, more than $28,000 worth. They were federally purchased which means we paid for them to be wasted. Just to make a bad story worse, the kids all thought they were actually getting the real Covid shot at the request of their terrible parents. They didn’t drop the charges for lack of a case. The government actively supports his crimes.

Remember when Joe Biden was called a tyrant for trying to cancel student debt? He was out of control! Helping people? The gall! The Supreme Court said hell no buddy. This year they turn around and tell Trump he can just kill the whole Dept. of Education and do so without so much as an explanation. Huh? And why should I keep paying back my loans to something that doesn’t exist?

Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us? Well, yeah. In short: 10% of users produce roughly 97% of political tweets. A mere 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news.”

I have laughed at Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for being too afraid to take the NYC subway, and these numbers really help point out that he’s either full of shit or just a liar. “Cars are deadly, and any transportation policy that encourages their use over public transportation is pretty much by definition anti-safety.”
He’s from Sawyer County, for reference.
Annual deaths per 100K population:
- victim of lightning in the US: 0.004
- homicide, NYC subway (500 rides): 0.418
- traffic accident, NYC: 3.869
- traffic accident, Sawyer County WI (2018-2024): 15.359
Yup, driving in his home county is 37x more deadly than the NYC subway.

Killing the attack on PBS and NPR feels like it could have been a slam dunk if we had an opposition party in this country. A massive loss.

One more good read for the road: The Enshittification of American Power

two good videos, please enjoy

This turtle was given the gift of speed and immediately used it to chase a cat around. Nice job buddy!

And this guy just rules: