Today's News: Choose Your Own Apocalypse!

Hunting down posts about the coming AI financials implosion helps take my mind off the tariff chaos/human rights tragedies/natural disasters/utter chaos everywhere else. It's like a Choose Your Own Apocalypse version of current events.

— Kristine Smith (@ksmithsf.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 8:31 AM

From newsrooms across the world, we are hearing "Oh, I give up!!!" 

As the United States descends into masked authoritarianism and people all over the world are dying from war, heatwaves, floods and hurricanes, I think the media have thrown their hands up into the air and decided just to cover silly stuff instead. 

Like this: 

Tyler Dawson / National Post

Mark Carney is on holidays. The government won't say where
While the secrecy around Carney's vacation plans isn't unusual in Canada, other nations' leaders regularly inform the public where they are Prime Minister Mark Carney is retreating this week for vacation, but the federal government isn’t saying where.
All that has been revealed is that Carney is staying somewhere in the National Capital Region.
“As he does so, he will remain in close coordination with his team and officials on several priorities, including ongoing negotiations on the economic and security relationship between Canada and the United States,” Carney’s spokespeople told reporters in an email...

..

Let's summarize this week's news: Carney winks sometimes, he's on holiday at some private island, & he can't flip pancakes.
Obviously he has worn out his welcome with Canadians...

— Cathie from Canada 🇨🇦 ✍🏻😷🏳️‍🌈 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@CathieCanada) July 9, 2025

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Meanwhile, the New York Times is promoting a multi-day "expose" SCOOP! abour how Zoltran, at the age of 17, applied to get into Columbia University. He told the truth on the application form, and he didn't get admitted. That's their big scandal and they're sticking to it.

Ryan Cooper / The American Prospect 

What We Learned From The New York Times’ Anti-Zohran Crusade 

The most powerful newspaper in America doesn’t care about American democracy.

...The incident is revealing not only of the profound institutional rot at the Times—not to mention its deep racist streak—but also of the general crisis of American democracy. At a time when the Trump administration is setting up a police state and network of concentration camps, the most important newspaper in the country is working hand in glove with a gutter racist, along with numerous wealthy interests and billionaire Trump donors, to smear a democratic socialist mayoral candidate. One must conclude that they view one threat as greater than the other... 

Meanwhile, Zohran just carries on:

the singular message of this ad is "zohran loves new york city" and it is incredibly effective

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) July 7, 2025 at 8:33 PM

And getting back to discussing the latest AI idiocy - which is where this post began -- here is Defector's summary of what happened to Grok at X yesterday:

Albert Burneko / Defector 

Elon Musk’s Idiot Chatbot Turns Into An Explicit Nazi 

 ...Grok's sudden pivot into genocidal raving—it began referring to itself as "MechaHitler" at one point—could reflect explicit hard-coded instructions, or it could reflect the choice to "train" the chatbot on far-right texts, like the contents of the Stormfront website, which would skew its predictions of what a normal response to a conversational prompt would look like. Neither of those possibilities exonerate the human beings behind Grok; there is no remotely plausible scenario in which Grok's behavior on Tuesday doesn't reflect an actual person's affirmative choice to make the chatbot more fascist.... 

I think the abyss is looking at us now.