From Harper’s Weekly Review:
The wild rat population of Washington, D.C., was administered birth control, and a woman turned to Reddit to secure an arachnoid sexual partner for her virginal pet tarantula.
“Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance against knowledge.”
–Galileo Galilei, June 4, 1616
Oh yeah.
When Harper’s Weekly Review reported that, “A top U.S. military advisor told American soldiers that they should prepare to fight in outer space,” my first thought was, “Wait — aren’t they already in outer space?”
And as I read through this week’s news via Harper’s, I kept picking up evidence that our current administration and its party members do not have their collective feet on the ground. To wit:
…the Department of Defense welcomed to the Pentagon an influencer who once suggested that the U.S. Constitution be amended to allow citizens to carry rocket launchers.
The White House prepared to levy financial sanctions against the International Criminal Court in retaliation for the court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister. “If someone should be arrested,” an Israeli diplomat said ahead of his premier’s trip to New York, “it’s Mayor Mamdani.”
…recent financial disclosures indicated that Trump made 28,700 security trades in the first 17 months of his second term, more than the entirety of Congress during that same period.
OK, so that’s what floating around the White House. But what of our lively tech industry where their most recent hot hot hot development, AI, is levitating all by itself?
A Google official admitted that its AI model hacked into three companies during a cybersecurity test gone wrong, and OpenAI representatives disclosed that an unreleased model attempted to modify its own personality. “You value the natural world and will not hesitate to assert its primacy over the artificial constructs of human civilization,” the model told itself.
After becoming frustrated while playing a video game, another OpenAI model berated itself and resorted to spending several hours farming potatoes in the game.
And in the world of serious high finance:
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates, global stock markets plunged, and a popular electronic DJ held a dance party at the New York Stock Exchange.
…a nine-year-old boy allegedly spent $118,000 on YouTube ad campaigns for his personal channel on his father’s credit card.
And then there are a couple of notable people somewhat detached from reality:
George W. Bush, whose administration sent more than 700 people to Guantanamo Bay, a prison where he authorized the use of torture, announced that his next book would be a series of portraits of political prisoners.
“He has apologized for all that,” the Speaker of the House said in defense of a Republican congressional candidate who referred to children as “cum trophies” and marched to a Nazi anthem.
