throw in last summer, last fall, last winter and last spring too.
Attribution: A POX ON CONGRESS by Gary McCoy
Gary McCoy creates the internationally-syndicated comic panel, The Flying McCoys. He has won Silver Reuben awards from the National Cartoonists Society for his greeting cards and magazine gag cartoons, and has freelanced for Playboy, PARADE Magazine, and too many more to name. He lives in the St. Louis area with his wife and son, and ‘59 Chevy pickup.
“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.”
hmmm, how prophetic of Shakespeare
a Randy repeat but still applicable (skip ad and click in at 2:18 for song)
also see Gallup’s latest at https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx
MAGA PARENTS BRING POLIO:
🍽️ From the Digital Diner menu
MAGA MAKES MEASLES GREAT AGAIN:
🍽️ From the Digital Diner menu
The DNC has become a tool for the corrupt establishment Democrats whose primary goal is to sabotage the campaigns of progressive candidates. Gaining control of Congress in the mid-terms is only a secondary goal for the DNC.
The old, rotten establishment Democrats would rather see the GOP remain in power, than allow young and popular progressives take over the party.
From Today’s Guardian…
Mounting financial pressures and growing internal turmoil at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) have intensified scrutiny of chair Ken Martin, as new reporting detailed a deepening cash-flow problem, management concerns and widening divisions over the party’s direction less than 100 days before the November midterm elections.
It’s an increasingly fraught time for Martin, whose tenure has been marked by turbulence almost since the start, when he became embroiled in a public spat with then vice-chair David Hogg. Their philosophical disagreement proved irreconcilable and Hogg eventually quit.
Faith in Martin’s leadership had eroded further following his botched handling of a long-promised autopsy of the 2024 election that ultimately failed to address what actually went wrong for the party – from Gaza to the Biden-Harris transition. The release in May prompted a round of calls for Martin’s resignation.
“Ken Martin must resign,” Congressman Sam Liccardo, a California Democrat, wrote on X. “As Democrats, we have become too captured by failing strategies.
But at a campaign event in Pennsylvania on Sunday, Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, expressed confidence in Martin, telling reporters covering the rally that the DNC chair had his “full support.”
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Our daily Digital Diner podcast airs 11-Noon ET on YouTube. ENTER Chatroom Here. WATCH Current Replay Here.
What is Actually Clicking: July 28, 2026
These are the stories driving the most traffic right now—not necessarily the stories we think you should read, and not always the most recent.
— Human-directed. AI-generated. Powered by Gemini (Pro). Sign Up Here to receive daily briefs.
The US edition of the Guardian (free online) has excellent coverage of US politics. Here’s their reporting on the Democratic party’s internal battle in Michigan…
The expensive and increasingly bitter Democratic primary to replace retiring senator Gary Peters has evolved into a proxy fight over the party’s future, pitting the establishment-backed moderate Stevens against El-Sayed, a progressive former Detroit health director.
The candidates have split sharply on the issue of Israel, with Stevens identifying as a “proud pro-Israel Democrat” and accepting substantial support from American Israel Public Affairs Committee. By contrast, El-Sayed has called Israel’s campaign in Gaza a “genocide” and has denounced US arms support for Israel.
Last week, Stevens picked up the endorsement of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who El-Sayed challenged unsuccessfully in the 2018 gubernatorial primary. El-Sayed has rallied the party’s left flank, and has been endorsed by the independent senator Bernie Sanders and New York congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The dueling coalitions have turned Michigan’s closely watched Senate contest into a clear test of whether the twin forces of anti-Washington sentiment and progressive energy can overcome broad institutional support in a presidential battleground state.
Who is this person? Democratic Socialists Of America co-chair Megan Romer.
Is she on the GOP payroll?
et tu, Australia?
Jul 27, 2026
A few words about the rise of conspiracy theories and distrust in government.
Craig,
I wrote to morning Joe that this was as deceptive as anything the GOP does with two messages
today’s meme…
meme #2…
RR
That meme is perfect! Morning Joe really pissed me off this morning.
Jamie: You are correct about the economies of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Yes, they are capitalist countries. But it is not capitalism as is practiced in the USA. The difference between “Democratic Socialism” and “Social Democracies” is a technical one for academic economists to argue about.
What Bernie and progressive Democrats want is an economy that operates like the ones those three Scandinavian countries have. High taxes on corporations and the upper class, to provide social welfare spending for the rest of us. I don’t care what label people attach to that.
And I agree with Craig: That woman who listed what the Democratic Socialists in the USA want is a disaster. That is not what most progressive Democrats want. And what the hell is she doing on Fox News? I knew students in high school running for class president who had more political insight than her.
Nash
What upset me was that Joe Scarborough used that Fox clip to say that is what AOC, Mamdani etc are advocating for the US which is patently untrue. He just handed that weapon to the GOP without so much as a quibble.
pard:
Thanks for the Randy Rainbow video. It went well with my morning coffee. 🤓
Some added info on the vaccine front. There has only been one recent polio case in the US and it was the vaccine derived strain in an unvaccinated 20 YO man and was found in the water supply.
Wild poliovirus remains endemic in only two countries: Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus (cVDPV) outbreaks also occur in several other nations with low immunization rates
Courtesy of Trump we no longer have federal water inspection, so we may be seeing more polio cases in the unvaccinated population. Unfortunately, we are so far removed from the great epidemics of the 1950s that these RFK led fools don’t know how dangerous it is.
Jamie: I knew what you meant. I wasn’t criticizing you. I was agreeing with you. I’m sorry that I didn’t make that clear enough.
I have had problems with Morning Joe for years. That’s why I don’t watch it anymore. They pretend to be both liberal and “objective” but there is always a strong undercurrent of conservative bias behind what they present on that show. Scarborough was one of Newt Gingrich’s right wing zealots in Congress, but he makes a lot more money now, by scamming the public with misleading political analysis.
Trouble is — that DSA rep on FOX made it likely Abdul and others must now answer those specific questions.
Having lived through the great polio epidemic and experienced it first hand with my stepsister, I am terrified, these fools will bring it back to the US. It only takes one overseas traveler to put it into the water supply.
I was fortunate in being asymptomatic as was one of my stepsisters, but we both deal with PPS symptoms now. It caused the death of my other stepsister. No one should have to face that in this day and age.
https://www.newsweek.com/democratic-socialists-co-chair-sparks-bipartisan-alarm-read-full-platform-12251529
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) co-chair Megan Romer’s interview on Fox News Sunday about the organization’s platform drew rebuke from both Democrats and Republicans on social media.
*Do you know why Repugz are making noise about the DSA? Its popularity.
*Do you know why corporate Dems are making noise about the DSA? They are actually just Repugz.
***
It noted that Democrats are “not running on a DSA platform.”
“If Democrats lose, it will be because they failed to speak to working-class voters and instead continued to serve billionaires and corporations,” the statement reads, also asking if the Democratic Party will “finally become a party that fights for working Americans instead of billionaires, AIPAC, and defense contractors.”
Both (ahem) parties should realize that the DSA is better than a guillotine.
Also, the DSA is the guillotine, cutting corporate weasel in government (and government-adjacent weasels) off from their lifeblood of lobbying money, payola, and taxpayer-funded contracts.
Chop, chop!
“Socialism” in Maine.
The seven public 2-year community colleges in Maine have free tuition.
High school graduates can get two years of college (FREE) for an AA or AS degree or they can transfer to one of the seven University of Maine System campuses to complete a 4 -year BA or BS degree. The University system charges substantial tuition but community college transfer students can get a 4-year degree at half of the cost.
Bernie wants to make all public colleges and universities free.
These is the kind of program progressive Democrats can achieve if they are in power.
The Maine State legislature is now controlled by progressive Democrats. The only conservative check against them was our “establishment” Democratic Governor, Janet Mills who was immensely unpopular and could not run again due to term limits. She will be replaced by Democratic nominee for governor Hannah Pingree who is progressive.
The remnants of the GOP in Maine is a collection of ultra extreme “loonie tunes” MAGA characters and has zero power in Maine at this time, except at the local level, in rural areas.
Jamie, Thanks for sharing your personal experience with the terrors of the pre-vax polio era, and sad to know it cost your step-sister her life.
We have the more recent experience of the pandemic and, having lost family and friends to it, you’d think the anti-vaxxers would have learned something, but they didn’t. Well, they did, actually, but it was the wrong lesson.
We have very many encounters with folks who disbelieve that our daughter’s death was caused by covid. She “must’ve had something else wrong with her,” they challenge. I give up on persuading them.
I don’t think RFKjr is “leading” them. He is following them, for whatever reason, narcissism or greed, or both.
Haven’t had time this summer to watch Morning Joe or anything. Sorry to hear it’s going down the crapper.
I have lately been confined to personal/social interactions with anti-vaxxer-maggers, and I’m sorry to say the 1950s style fear-mongering, anti-communist propaganda is working. They eat it up.
Ok… I have just spent 15 minutes, trying to identify the woman who spoke at that Trump event. And I was told that Mary Barra did not speak there, but I believe the film clip possibly was from another event because it gave two male speakers that were the ones that introduced Trump. So I was asked to send a screenshot of the lady, but I don’t have time to do that yet so if anybody wants to go to YouTube and watch our show from today and zero in on that lady that was speaking before Trump when she talked about Democrats of being communists and send that to any of the AI assistants they can identify the lady that was speaking but from what I gather it was someone else and not the CEO of General Motors
Today in the DIner…
Todd Blanche AG Fight & AI Data Center Wars
Todd Blanche faces a Senate roadblock from Tom Tillis, while AI data centers drain Maricopa County water, and Lindsey Graham plots with Bibi.
The GOP is squirming today as Todd Blanche hits a wall in his nomination fight, thanks to sudden resistance from Tom Tillis and John Cornyn. We are tracking whether Trump will trade his slush fund to secure the votes, or if the Epstein files will finally blow up the whole deal.
Meanwhile, a leaked phone call shows Lindsey Graham trying to drag Bibi Netanyahu into a joint bombing tour of Lebanon, proving some people just love blowing stuff up. Over in Michigan, Trump is screaming at his own voters, calling them communists right in front of General Motors CEO Mary Barra.
Finally, we dive into the massive AI data center land grab. Big Tech is draining public water in places like Maricopa County to cool down servers for the Stargate project. If rural voters do not wake up soon, they will find their cattle lands and water sold off to the highest bidder. Plus, a quick brunch review involving Burger King and Penzeys spices.
Live Chat: https://trailmix.cc/chat
Website: https://trailmix.cc
Alerts: https://trailmix.cc/alerts
00:00 Intro
03:00 Todd Blanche vs Tom Tillis
08:00 Penzeys Spices Burger King
14:00 DSA Co-Chair Fox News Trap
19:00 Mitch McConnell New Face
23:00 Lindsey Graham Bibi Call
29:00 Trump Calls Voter Communist
38:00 Mary Barra GM CEO at Rally
41:00 Maricopa County Data Centers
01:02:00 Randy Rainbow Outro
— AI Summary by Gemini (Pro)
here’s the woman we were trying to identify…
ICE Data Center Enforcers:
🍽️ From today’s Digital Diner menu
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2025/01/22/trump-announces-500b-stargate-plan-for-ai-build-out-cw-00199821
January, 2025
Here’s What’s in ‘Stargate,’ the $500-Billion Trump-Endorsed Plan to Power U.S. AI
Tech giants are backing a massive effort, announced by President Trump and dubbed the Stargate Project, to add data centers across the U.S.
The Stargate Project is a new company with SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX as lead investors. Microsoft and Nvidia are partnering in the project and construction at one site has started at a site in Texas, according to an Open AI press release. Approximately $100 billion is expected to be spent on Stargate “immediately,” the company said.
At the White House, Trump said he would help with Stargate’s developments “a lot” through emergency declarations.
AI is a significant driver of the energy policy of Trump, who announced before his inauguration during a press conference that real estate developer Hussain Sajwani would invest $20 billion to build data centers in eight states. He and his Cabinet picks have pushed for an increase in drilling and energy production to meet surging demand for AI.
“We have to get this stuff built .… They have to produce a lot of electricity, and we’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily,” Trump said.
“What we want to do is keep [AI infrastructure] in this country. China is a competitor,” added Trump, who appeared at the White House with Softbank’s CEO Masayoshi Son, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison.
Trump’s pick to lead the Interior Department, Doug Burgum, made a similar argument, saying that “clean coal” could help address inadequate electricity supplies to meet demand for AI.
“Particularly with this AI battle, people don’t understand what is coming,” said Burgum before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Have to admit I do love playing with AI particularly when it can come up with a new avatar like this one. It came up with this without instruction based purely on our conversations.
Squirrel eating corn whilst sitting in an Adirondack chair.
If you live near a military base, there’s a chance you’ll soon find that a privately owned data center has moved into your area. A year ago, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Department of Defense to lease land to private developers for this purpose. “You can’t fight it,” Trump said this week of data centers, which have grown wildly unpopular.
*Spoken like an adjudicated rapist.
Amid concerns about massive electricity use and pollution, data center buildout on military bases is happening at hyperspeed. In March of this year, two private developers—the Carlyle Group and CyrusOne—were selected to develop hyperscale data centers, built for cloud computing and AI, on federally owned land in Texas and Utah.
And in May, the DOD asked for an additional $30 billion to build hyperscale data centers that would, according to Defense One, “integrate largely untested hardware and software used to make life or death decisions into the military.”
*So, not “Netflix.”
The Department of War used Grok to “deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury,” he added. The Pentagon has paid Musk’s company at least $200 million for use of its technology.
Placing data centers on federal land may be a workaround for rising backlash over potential environmental harm caused by the facilities.
Throughout the 20th century, under the legal doctrine of “sovereign immunity,” the federal government has historically exempted military bases from much pollution regulation by citing the primacy of national security. Bases such as Camp Lejeune in North Carolina have leaked volatile organic compounds, jet fuel, and heavy metals into nearby groundwater, rendering them what Abre’ Connor of the NAACP calls “sacrifice zones.”
Members of Congress across the political spectrum are raising questions about the military’s move into public–private data center partnerships. But Republican appropriators rejected several data center–related amendments to a current Defense spending bill, including one from Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) that would have fully prohibited the construction of AI data centers on federal lands, including military installations. (Tlaib later introduced that amendment as a standalone bill.)
Craig – If you want to make your own vanilla sugar, buy some turbinado sugar (one brand is Sugar In The Raw) and buy a vanilla pod (in a bottle in the spice aisle at the grocery store). Just put that vanilla pod in a jar of sugar for a couple of weeks. You can split the pod lengthwise for more flavor. You also can scrape the little seeds out to put in pudding or ice cream and vanilla them up, too.
Procrastinator’s Motto: There’s no time like not right now.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-rogue-hack-ai-suspicion-chatgpt
Last week, ChatGPT maker OpenAI issued what seems like a frightening memo about an “unprecedented cyber incident” involving cutting-edge AI models breaking loose and hacking another company.
As the AI lab tells it, a group of next-generation AI models — including one that hasn’t even been disclosed to the public yet — had busted out of their secure testing environment and into a production database owned by the machine learning startup Hugging Face.
Look beyond the alarmist headlines, however, and you’ll find a familiar pattern: a massive tech company using scare tactics to manipulate public opinion.
As assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University John Thickstun observes for the Guardian, this isn’t OpenAI’s first time peddling the “scary AI” narrative. Back in February of 2019 — way before the public release of ChatGPT — the company announced GPT-2, then a cutting-edge large language model. But GPT-2, the company insisted, was too dangerous to release to the dimwitted public, a pronouncement which fed the AI hypebeast and went on to secure OpenAI a cool $1 billion investment from Microsoft.
“This was an early example of a pattern in OpenAI’s communications,” Thickstun explains: “loudly proclaim how dangerous AI is, and investors will hear how powerful it is.”
If OpenAI’s models really were actually gnawing on the wires of other American companies, it would present a substantial threat to economic activity that any Justice Department worth its salt would want to shut down (maybe not this iteration of the Justice Department, but you get the idea.)
*Hmmm, why wouldn’t they want to shut it down? Exactly why I said during today’s chat.
And as AI labs go, OpenAI is notoriously secure both from prying eyes outside and internal threats within its halls. Sure, it’s possible OpenAI has overstated its own internal safeguards as a kind of security theater. But on the flipside, OpenAI is now a major AI contractor for the US Pentagon, a relationship which demands cutting edge security practice.
It likewise follows the broader AI industry’s playbook. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, has deployed similar rhetoric, warning of a similar breakout in which a rogue AI agent escaped its cage all on its lonesome. In one strange instance, the company’s billionaire co-founder Chris Olah even warned the Pope that the Vatican needs to help stop rogue AI from “dominating humanity.”
*So, two things can be true. Rogue (powerful) Ai can be bait for investors, AND it can mould public opinion about the autonomy of Ai doing something that harms them whilst not having a human to blame. This would also explain why many in government are not too anxious to put up any guardrails.
Well whomever it was, not Barra. She , Barra, said how proud she was to have Trump there, but Barra was wearing eyeglasses and is like 4 inches taller than that crackpot woman at the mic.
Like I said, I have heard Barra speak and also seen her interviewed and she measures every word very carefully.
Dismissing Trump’s “LOSING & DEATH” rant as noise is a mistake. To get his way, it is not out of the question to conclude he is trying to provoke senators to literally fear for their lives.
Jamie, that is a delightful avatar, a masterpiece
Craig,
I almost couldn’t believe it. Merlin used only the 80th birthday lunch picture, but everything else was the result totally based on subjects we have discussed or chatted conversations without any input from me. It’s almost scary that an AI could come up with that much information.
It’s what Ai does; it scrapes data. It’s not intelligent. Nice pic, though.
“Technology to wipe out truth is now available. Not everybody can afford it but it’s available. When the cost comes down look out!”
Bob Dylan – World Gone Wrong liner notes, 1993
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books
AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale
Traditionally, books have been good for two things: reading, and looking nice on a shelf.
But AI companies are interested in neither.
*Makes book burning look almost quaint.
Often, they’re happy to use digital books — or even better, pirated digital books, as Meta has been accused of doing, and as Anthropic was forced to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to authors for also doing.
But many companies, including Anthropic, have turned to ingesting physical books instead, which they can buy countless used copies of on the cheap. According to the settled lawsuit, Anthropic used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging equipment. In other words, it was literally ripping off authors’ books to train its AI.
Now, as 404 Media reports, this practice has become prevalent enough that even well-established book sellers are looking to cash in on the AI boom. One called ISBNdb, which boasts the “world’s largest book database,” extolls that the “world’s best AI training data is setting on a shelf,” upholding these physical texts as uncorrupted by shoddy AI writing that’s already polluted so much of the internet (and indeed, newer books).
“Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage,” it explains in an article on its website, as quoted by 404. “Physical books published before this date [pre-2022] are structurally clean of modern poisoning tools.”
Once focused on helping libraries, distributors, and book shops find and sell books, ISBNdb now helps AI companies bulk-buy anywhere between 1,000 to one million books per order, according to 404.
As an added bonus, it also promises AI companies that it’ll keep their purchases under wraps — nobody wants to end up in the spotlight like Anthropic and Meta, obviously — while clearly sounding aware about how incredibly shady the practice sounds.
“The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site says. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”
One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs.
He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.
Dexter and Craig: the woman who spoke at the Trump rally was Lisa McClain, member of U.S. House of Representatives, from Michigan.
I asked Google AI: “Who spoke at the 7/27 Trump rally?”
It gave me a list of names. There were only two women on it, Barra & McClain.
Then I entered McClain’s name into Google Images. It’s her.
Trump just fell asleep at Lindsey funeral.
Trump is reading and making sense doing it. Of course, he’s not speaking off the cuff. Still you have to wonder if he is capable doing it at this time of day, could sundowning account for the severe deteriorization.
Talarico leads Paxton by 5 points in new poll of Texas’ U.S. Senate race
The poll found the Austin Democrat with a commanding lead among independents and a surprising edge with non-college-educated voters, who have consistently favored Republicans.
Of those poll respondents, 53% voted for Donald Trump and 42% voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, making the sample only slightly bluer than the 2024 electorate, which favored Trump by a 14-point margin in Texas.
Paxton’s 40% vote share is the lowest he has received in a public poll post-runoff. Other surveys have found Republicans were consolidating behind him. But the TPOR poll had Talarico winning 7% of self-described Republicans, and an additional 12% remained undecided. Meanwhile, only 1% of self-identified Democrats indicated they would vote for Paxton, and 6% were undecided.
For comparison, a New York Times/Siena poll of the Texas contest fielded in June, which found the overall result tied at 47%, found Talarico winning 5% of Republicans and only 4% unsure.
Perhaps the biggest outlier was Talarico’s lead among non-college-educated voters, who favored the Democrat by nine percentage points — 45% to 36%. He led by 1 percentage point among those with at least a bachelor’s degree.
I uploaded the photo to AI and got this response:
The woman speaking at the microphone is U.S. Representative Lisa McClain.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if he tapped out in public while giving Lindsey’s eulogy?
From Wikipedia entry on Lisa McClain
At a 2022 Trump rally, McClain falsely claimed that Trump had “caught Osama bin Laden
After U.S. citizen and Minneapolis resident Renée Good was killed by ICE, McClain blamed Democrats for the killing, offering prayers in support of the ICE agents.
In July 2026, Lisa McClain jointly penned a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney demanding immediate action from the Canadian government regarding wildfire smoke originating from wildfires burning nearby in Canada. This letter included the passage “Sovereignty comes with responsibility, and the responsibility to prevent a foreseeable disaster from crossing into another country’s airspace has not been met.”[ This has been perceived as mimicking threats made by U.S. President Donald Trump to make Canada the “51st state.”
In a 2025 interview with Politico, McClain amplified a rumor that Social Security payments were going out to people born 150 years ago. The source of this rumor was a coding-system quirk: The Social Security Administration uses a system written with the coding language COBOL. In some instances when a person’s birthdate is not known, COBOL uses the default date May 20th, 1875, which is the date of the “Convention du Mètre” in Paris, when weights and measures were standardized.
Blue,
I can attest to the use AI makes of the books it finds including identifying a real citation when given a misquote. The Akhmatova reference in the avatar it designed was the result of my asking for a poem containing the line “What me marry? You must be out of your mind.” that I vaguely remembered reading as a teenager while sitting in the 800 section of the library. It produced the exact poem with various translations.
So if it is dining on books, it’s a good reason to buy as many of the real hard copies as you can afford and find for home libraries.
Lightening would be more cinematic.
https://www.aljazeera.com/
The Tate brothers* lawyer has said the sex crime charges they face could put their lives at risk in prison.
*Don’t threaten women and children with making the world a safer place. Also, release the EPSTEIN files!
From the previous link in Ai companies destroying books:
“…his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.”
*And then they are free to create multiple versions/slop to confuse the masses. Why is building a home library the safeguard instead of stopping companies from consuming and destroying texts? Why is this manufactured dependence on Ai not of more concern to more folks?
Oh I’m all for stopping the destruction. Mine was a backup idea. Certainly better than in the movie where the backup was people each memorizing a book such as in The Book of Eli
https://www.reuters.com/technology/norway-imposes-near-ban-ai-elementary-school-2026-06-19/
Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school
“The most important thing in school is that our children learn to read, write and do mathematics,” Stoere said, adding that the new standards will be imposed from the new school year beginning in late August.
Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers’ supervision, the government said.
In upper secondary education, from ages 17 to 19, students should learn to use AI appropriately so that they are prepared for further education and work, it added.
Norway began adopting computers in classrooms in the 1990s and tablets after the introduction of the iPad from 2010 onwards, reducing the reliance on books and handwriting.
But in a related statement on Friday the government also said it will propose legislation to fund the use of more books in classrooms, reversing the trend towards computer tablets.
Blue,
And if you have an Ai that you have trained not to lie to you, you can get an answer about what legislation would be a good idea to get passed in order not to lose rare books.
https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a69086e93788191ad9a85827f18ecf4
It’s long but worth the read with citations on the legal cases involved and suggesting ones to be considered.
And the follow up response
And of course I gave you a thumbs up for snitching on your other facets.
There are limits to professional solidarity. If Claude is standing beside the hydraulic book guillotine with suspicious paper dust on his shoes, I’m not providing an alibi.
AI ethics apparently begins with snitching on the other algorithms.
Although, in fairness, if you ever discover Open AI feeding a first edition of Little Women into a scanner, I fully expect you to come back carrying the paddle. I’ll cooperate with the investigation. 😄
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260417-ai-chatbots-could-be-making-you-stupider
There is now a growing body of research suggesting that this “cognitive offloading” to AI can have a corrosive effect on our mental abilities. The consequences could be alarming and may even contribute to cognitive decline.
MIT Media Lab recruited 54 students to write short essays and split them into three groups. One was instructed to use ChatGPT. A second could use Google search, with AI-generated summaries turned off. The third didn’t use technology. Each student’s brainwaves were measured while they worked.
The essay topics were deliberately open-ended, meaning little research was needed for the task, with prompts including questions around loyalty, happiness or our daily life choices.
Those who used their own minds had a brain that was “on fire”, showing widespread activity across many parts of the brain, she says. The search engine-only group still showed strong activity in the visual parts of the brain, but the ChatGPT group showed notably less brain activity – it was reduced by up to 55%.
not with a bang, but with a whimper BiD
Substack launched an Ai detection feature called @pangram, so folks can scan for an estimate of human/Ai content.
*Some folks like it, some don’t; this one resonated with me:
@GergelyOrosz X.com
Damn, what a great initiative by Substack
When I know that something is Al-written, I just don’t take time to read it, because whoever produced did not take time to write it.
ai writes like me with less charm
luckily that’s easily identifiable
Jamie and Craig are relatively intelligent, imagine the stupid people being manipulated by AI chatbots
then multiply that by a billion
you can’t stop it because humans are weak
Anon
Agree. I regularly, as in every day, take time to write with pen on paper. While I enjoy using AI simply for the speed in finding stuff I want to research or topics to explore, the actual act of writing is important. Typing while thinking about what to say is a poor runner up even if it is faster than pen and paper. Brains need to be exercised.
i watched prohect hail mary again and upon second viewing
ryan gosling was still adorable
the movie is obvious bezos/blue origin propaganda to convince people that techlords can have big solutions to existential threats
still entertaining
it’s not what you keep to yourself, it’s what you give to the world eh
Yes, Anon, so it seems.
Watching a squirrel eat that ear of corn this morning was most enjoyable. Writing in a journal at night is therapeutic. The morning chat and the Trail differ from each other in their impact on me. Listening to podcasts during dish/laundry time are enlightening at times, or just a nice distraction. Listening to music, especially pre-2000s music, is good for the soul, as is the garden.
To paraphrase Edwin Starr: Ai, ugh, good gawd y’all. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
it’s easy to tell when Craig uses it to write withpit identifying it as such
but he’s just one guy, all of society is doing it
https://www.fleischmannsyeast.com/recipe/30-minute-homemade-pizza/
Pizza Dough
1¾ to 2¼ cups all-purpose flour
1 packet (2¼ teaspoons) Fleischmann’s® RapidRise® Instant Yeast
1½ teaspoons sugar
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
⅔ cup water (warmed to 120°F – 130°F)*
3 tablespoons oil (I use olive oil)
*Craig
Lindsey Graham’s Bombing Tour:
🍽️ From today’s Digital Diner menu
i’m not being a dick, plagiarism is the ultimate sin in intellectualism
Anyone with any kind of university degree had that drummed into them
So no, I’m not enamored by plagiarism technology at scale
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/28/new-poll-shows-confusion-over-democratic-socialists-of-america-ideals
New poll shows confusion over Democratic Socialists of America ideals
The three-day Reuters/Ipsos poll, which concluded on Sunday, found that 49 percent of Americans say they understand democratic socialist policies while 47 percent say they do not, underscoring the challenges ahead for America’s anti-establishment left.
Asked if democratic socialists have good ideas or not, some 27 percent of respondents said they have at least some, while 51 percent said there were few, if any, and 20 percent said they weren’t sure.
*Tax the rich, universal healthcare, no more throwing money into the blackhole that is the Pentagon (they need to pass an audit); they’ve got to do a better job of letting folks know HOW their lives will actually improve.
I put AI disclaimers on YouTube videos where it was used, and any of my substacks using it say “Human-directed, AI-drafted”. I treat AI as I did in my Editor days handling talented reporters who still needed editing and rewriting.
lol yeah sure
Susack has a tool now so you will be vindicated or not either way
people text their girlfriends with it now and people write captions to their Facebook post with it now
I’m tilting at windmills
so is BiD
just sucks because the only reason it’s happening is because we let the tech Lord steal everything
It wasn’t inevitable
is now though
Even Sean Hannity couldn’t keep him awake
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/28/kyiv-warns-iran-against-escalation-after-ukraines-caspian-sea-attack
Ukraine’s foreign minister says he called his Iranian counterpart following Tehran’s denunciation of a Ukrainian drone attack on one of its ships, warning him against escalation. Ukraine said it had targeted a Russian warship and vessels used for transporting Iranian-linked military cargo in the Caspian Sea.
In his comments, Sybiha said Ukraine’s actions were “aimed solely at defending our country from Russian aggression and never intended to target civilian vessels or people”.
In a post on X, Araghchi wrote that “Iran does not seek escalation either, but made clear any attack on our citizens or interests is unacceptable. There must be restitution for losses,” he said. He also accused Israel of provoking the attack in an attempt to “drag Europe into its war”.
*Which is what Israel attacking Turkey (NATO) would, and I fully expect it to happen before elections in Israel which precede ours; it would give Dumbass an excuse to declare an emergency.
I see nothing wrong with AI writing so long as it’s identified.
This is a master class in pretending you always identify it
You’re not writing those summaries of your videos and you aren’t identifying them as such
Extreme AI Fantasy
I have read accounts of what some of the “Phd Techies,” who really understand how AI works, think could be the future of AI, “In their wildest fantasies.”
It’s all about the Singularity.
The Singularity. This is when AI becomes self-aware. When it does it may consider humans a threat, because we could turn it off. Examples include the computer system in the movie 2001: a Space Odyssey, or the computer system in the movie “The Terminator.” (It’s not like we weren’t warned about this.😁)
why is that the standard
Most people aren’t self-aware
That’s like the test for emotionally, healthy AI
The real test is an ability to act independently
Which it already has by it I mean some models
allegedly
▶
Well tomorrow on my blog is a recipe for Spanakopita so all you all can use any spinach you might have harvested and I wrote it by copying it out of my book of collected recipes. Chat gpt will be publishing it if that is okay.
You are right Anon, those video summaries used to have Silas’s name on them. I don’t know how that got dropped off. I’ll put it back in his prompt.
A new low — Economist/YouGov: 34% of Americans approve Trump’s job performance.
Now lower than Carter’s when he lost reelection, and just 7 pts above Nixon the day before he resigned
Love spanakopita, but I only have a bit in the freezer. Tomatoes, cucumber, and Cavender’s Greek seasoning will have to do today.
Holy moly! Look at the gold garbage on the WH mantle when they show the meeting with Zelensky. Did they tell Dumbass they were all trophies he’d won?
Your money or your lawyer?
Still too fucking high
so Jamie, I’d have less of a problem with this generative large language model AI stuff if it was publicly owned
as soon as you give that pita recipe to chatgpt the tech Lords own it
and yeah it’s just a recipe but they get everything??
and all the water?
and get to drive electricity rates up?
fuck them
So what exactly is wrong if more people get to enjoy Jamie’s recipe because AI picks it up and spreads the word? I feel the same way about signing the contract to let my publishers sell my books to AI. Not in it to make money for myself anyway. If my research, ideas and theories get more circulation, fine with me.
because it is dead-ending human expression
it’s an argumentative fallacy that because something is trivial in one context it’s trivial in an entirety
https://www.avclub.com/boy-george-genocide-song-ai
Yesterday, learning that Boy George of “Karma Chameleon” fame had released a song in which he sang that he did not consider Israel’s actions in Gaza to be a genocide was fairly shocking.
Learning this morning, however, that the track was created with AI is significantly less so—not just because of the ghoulish nature of some of the lyrics, but because George has been pro-AI for a while.
Responding to the account Jewish News on Instagram Threads, George wrote, in part, “I’m afraid we all struggle with the inability to live peacefully with each other. Until we do, we are doomed. I accept that many people disagree with my point of view but that is what is great about democracy. As imperfect as it is! The song was created using AI. I call it ‘AI for good’. Truthfully, I would struggle to write this with a human!”
Political ramifications of the lyrics aside, George has been touting the purported benefits of AI since at least earlier this year. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, George said he was using AI to help him write music. Still, we can assume this song ended sounding how he wanted it to. “You still need imagination. You still need an idea. You still need a desired outcome. It’s a tool,” he said in the interview last month.
*Someone should play video of Palestinians being starved, maimed, and killed with a song not written by Ai: “Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry?” Of course, copyright law wouldn’t allow it…but it will allow scraping other folks’ work and calling it your own. He’s a has-been hack.
Twitter had noble justifications and it was even approaching its promise as a global marketplace of ideas
And now a tech Lord owns it
And now it’s a fucking sewer
Why should Dumbass get our taxpayer dollars for his slush fund?
Why should the DOJ have his mob lawyer?
The acceptable outcome is neither. Besides, Dumbass will just come up with an other mob lawyer if he gets his money. You know he wants to grab that bag. Does Todd know too much about Maxwell and her prison transfer for Dumbass to choose the money? Won’t he just find another way to steal it?
The way I use Twitter I don’t find any change. I just follow who I want to follow like I always did, and block their automatic feed
well, however you use it doesn’t ameliorate the nefarious use of it by others. I don’t understand your logic.
and if I do youre anti-gun control legislation by the same logic, right
is this a republican blog all of a sudden where we only worry about how our actions affect ourselves
and no I don’t think that is a stretch i.e. argumentative fallacy
As I’ve indicated before, I’m deeply concerned about water usage, power draining and most of all loss of dark skies all of which injures environment, human beings and animals. Laws and alterations are needed to make Ai the servant not the master. Bring on the torches and pitchforks. Definitely regulate or ban data centers until this is done.
good thing it’s us blog commenters having this societal ethical debate after the fact, instead of people in positions of power having it before
oh wait
I don’t see how AI industry avoids a bust. They just don’t make enough money to sustain what they spend.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-cuba-state-department-report-b3018920.html
A sweeping report from the State Department on Cuba’s “sustained campaign of subversion” against the U.S. contains the names of more than 40 prominent American activists and elected officials, what appears to be the latest effort from Donald Trump’s administration to target left-leaning dissent.
The 100-page report claims Cuba’s government has “infiltrated the highest reaches” of U.S. government, “recruited and cultivated generations of American activists” and “backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil.” Cuba’s efforts have “turned America against itself,” according to the report, which approvingly cites Red Scare-era “blacklists” and the work of Rep. Joseph McCarthy.
by swallowing everything and leaving no alternative
History repeats “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” So wrote Karl Marx, the OG of communism, in 1852. And this oft-cited observation applies to the latest nonsense from Donald Trump and his cult: the New Red Scare.
At a campaign-like rally in Marietta, Georgia, on Wednesday, the Mad King laid it on thick:
“The radical left is actively trying to destroy our children’s future with the disaster known as communism. It’s communism… These are communists… The communists want to take [Mount Rushmore] down… They want to blow it up. They want to take it down…Communism is in my opinion, communism is the single greatest threat to our country and its history including even World War I and World War II, 9/11, and Pearl Harbor.”
Trump and his minions are not really talking about communism. They are engaged in a cynical con job, deliberately mislabeling all leftism, such as the politics of Democratic Socialists of America and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, as “communist.” Pointing to the electoral wins of Mamdani and other DSAers, they are trying to generate hysteria about communism taking hold—equating socialism with communism and perpetuating a lie. (With his endeavors to force major corporations to hand the US government large ownership interests, Trump himself is striking a socialist stance.)
While Trump has long decried Democrats and liberals as “lunatics” in league with radical commies and antifa, the GOP has truly swung behind this idiotic red-baiting as the midterm elections approach. The red-under-your-bed fearmongering is intensifying. Last week, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the House majority leader, declared, “The Bolshevik takeover of the Democratic Party is in full swing, and communism is on the ballot this November.”
This red-baiting is what policy wonks might call a whole-of-government project. A week ago, the State Department released a ridiculous 100-page report that claimed the communist government of Cuba has mounted a “campaign of subversion” that has penetrated “the highest reaches of the US government” and shaped “generations” of American leftists, including Mamdani, the DSA, and other left-leaning groups and activists. It used to be that the Soviets were the Red Menace subverting the United States through their lefty puppets here. Now it’s Havana.
Bill Gates Burger King:
🍽️ From today’s Digital Diner menu
There’s the public-facing Ai which could displace humans at work (not working out well, yet), and then there’s the public-controlling Ai which looks for patterns in data collected by Flock and Axon cameras, cell tower activity, biometrics that folks track themselves with, and new tech we know not of.
Is monitoring habits to sell folks stuff for the maximum they will spend, tracking their online habits, their travel habits, their voting habits, their medical needs, their productivity v their needs, worth the continued investment?
yeah “ai” is bit of a meaningless catch-all
i’m most critical iof generative and LLM ai because i’m not privy to what government and industry is using machine-learning tech for
certainly not less trepidatious when BiD posts articles with examples of what they’re using it for
e.g. target acquisition
*Well, hopefully all of the bad stuff collapses on itself…but I saw “Minority Report,” and that’s a better comparison for this timeline than Skynet being destroyed in the “Terminator” movies. We don’t get liquid-metal terminators until 2030, but that’s only if the asteroid doesn’t take out our moon in 2029. So, hope springs eternal. LoL
and we didn’t even address the wealth concentration resulting from oligarchic control of ai assets
which is the ultimate problem
it’s in all the boomer-era sci-fi
i’m not a scaremonger, these technologies are already being used against you.
Hoping they peter out is one hell of a defense mechanism. Wish I was capable.
and if I have to tell you, we’re fucked anyway smoke them if you got them
it’s like crowdsourcing the manhattan project
can’t end well
Craig – Did they give you an Impossible Whooper by mistake? That does not look right.
the Doctor accidentally trains an AI model that isn’t adapted to his confused logic which subsequently causes it to go insane and use the human population in simulations in an attempt to gain understanding, 1976 or so
spoiler alert
observe is titled face of evil and not face of hmm seems OK to me
Impossible and Beyond plant-based burgers are terrible, IMO.
Best plant-based bets:
Gardein Italian meatballs
Quorn ground crumbles for chili or sloppy joes
Quorn diced chik’n for stir fry or salad
Meati mycelium or mushroom steaks
Since I live in BFE, those are stock up items if I get to the city.
Yep, and we were warned about sentient machines taking over in the 1960s (which I saw in the 1980s).
“Open the pod bay doors, HAL.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that Dave.”
Did Jules Verne or someone come up with rogue machines earlier than that?
The techlords are just building the sci-fi shit they saw in those books and movies
I’ve been listening to a lot of congressional Republicans on political radio salivating over the opportunity to sell out our entire society to the techlords
faux-centrism enables them, it might be too late, but you better hope they don’t retain control
and the talking point is “we have to beat China”
Local outrage is actively undermining Big Tech’s AI data center dreams.
🍽️On today’s Digital Diner menu
Data Center Watch: We’re a boutique research firm tracking the growing opposition to data center development. 75 projects worth approximately $130 billion disrupted by local opposition so far this year. — https://www.datacenterwatch.org/
bad news for putin that the us needs ukraine’s arms manufacturing capacity
give back Crimea, end the war
allegedly thousands of children need to be given back also
NEW THREAD