The Weekly Weird #55
A burning question about the Koran, ChatCCP: DeepSeek goes to Washington, Britain meh on cash, 2025 bingo, 89 seconds to midnight, Romania's election do-over, AfD for me not thee, where's the beef?
Welcome once more to your Weekly Weird, our chance to slap on our proverbial spelunking helmets, flick on our metaphorical headlamps, and explore the clearly comedic Cave of Crazy! It’s dark, musty, and there’s definitely batshit down there in the darkness.
Let’s go!
Britain Meh On Cash: The British government are handling a crisis of cash usage in the most English way possible: They’re pretending there isn’t a problem at all. BBC News reported this week that Emma Reynolds, the new economic secretary to the UK’s Treasury, “told MPs on the Treasury Committee that there was no chance of the UK becoming cash-free anytime soon.” Despite near-universal agreement that the only way to guarantee the continued acceptance of cash is to require it by law, Reynolds explained that Labour “have no plans to regulate businesses - big or small - to compel them to accept cash.”
89 Seconds To Midnight: The famed Doomsday Clock from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has been set to 89 seconds to midnight, “the closest it has ever been to catastrophe” according to the nervous nerds. Apparently sharing a hymn sheet with the World Economic Forum, the skittish swots cite “the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood” as “a potent threat multiplier” for the converging crises of climate change, pandemics, and nuclear war that they believe are more severe than ever. “Blindly continuing on the current path is a form of madness,” they admonish in the closing paragraph. Meanwhile, in the sidebar, a few nuggets:
On nuclear war: “There were no calamitous new developments last year with respect to nuclear weapons—but this is hardly good news.”
On climate change: “With respect to climate change, 2024 was in many ways similar to 2023…”
On pandemics: “Concern is also growing over the continued proliferation of high-containment biological laboratories around the world, indicating scientific interest in high-risk biological research…Continued arguments about dual-use and gain-of-function research acknowledge both the risks associated with such research efforts—including the possibility of pathogen escapes from biological labs—and the need to continue this research to find ways to treat some of humanity’s worst diseases.”
Their office Christmas party must be a hoot1.
Where’s The Beef? The USDA’s 2024 Cattle Inventory Report showed that the cattle herd in the United States was at a 73-year low, matching 1951 for headcount. Subsequent reporting this week shows that 60% of agricultural economists believe the numbers have dropped even further into 2025. Fewer cows and more expensive beef are the order of the day.
Is Our Children Reading? The National Center for Education Statistics in the United States issued a press release on the ‘Nation’s Report Card’, and the nation is flunking. Key takeaways:
“The most notable challenges evident in the 2024 data are in reading comprehension. Reading scores dropped in both fourth and eighth grades since 2022, continuing declines first reported in 2019, before the pandemic.”
“In 2024, the percentage of eighth-graders’ reading below NAEP Basic was the largest in the assessment’s history, and the percentage of fourth-graders who scored below NAEP Basic was the largest in 20 years.”
Romania’s Election Do-Over: In December, Romania’s constitutional court voided the results of the first round of the presidential election on the grounds that the clear winner, Calin Georgescu, won an upset victory because of foreign interference in the form of inorganic social media messaging on TikTok. The fact that he’s a nationalist described as “far right” in the media, running on a ‘Romania First’ platform, definitely has nothing to do with it. The European Court of Human Rights rejected Georgescu’s appeal of the decision in January, setting the stage for a re-run of the presidential election in May. Georgescu remains the clear frontrunner, with 38% of the vote in a recent poll. Reuters, however, sounded a note of caution: “It remains unclear whether Georgescu, who opposes Romanian support for neighbouring Ukraine against Russia's invasion, will be allowed to run for president again.” Apparently democracy is the obtaining through an election of the result desired by the incumbent power structure. Ergo, ipso facto, and other fancy Latin words, getting an undesired result is not democracy. Get it? Save democracy!
AfD For Me, Not For Thee: While debating a ban on the Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) party, the incumbent German government relied on AfD votes in their attempt to pass a migration bill that included border controls and deportation measures. The move broke an unspoken agreement in the German parliament not to vote or ally with the AfD, who are considered politically untouchable. A massive backlash, including a protest in Berlin attended by a reported 150,000 people, led to an immediate announcement by Friedrich Merz, the leadership candidate for the ruling party, that there would be “no cooperation, there is no tolerance, there is no minority government, nothing at all” when it came to the AfD. All of that took place in the span of seven days. As one former British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, once said: “A week is a long time in politics.”
2025 Bingo: Visual Capitalist’s Prediction Consensus has synthesised their “predictions database of over 800 forecasts compiled from reports, interviews, podcasts, and more” into a handy bingo card for 2025. Fun for all the family - let the games begin!
Between the Chuckles Brigade at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and the experts telling Visual Capitalist what they think is coming in 2025, what comes to mind is the description of The Jackpot in The Peripheral, a sci-fi series set partly in a distant future recovering from a series of apocalyptic events. If you haven’t seen the show, the following video contains not so much spoilers as information explaining something that is alluded to and used as a source of tension in the early episodes.
Onwards!
A Burning Question About The Koran
On January 30th, an Iraqi asylum seeker named Salwan Momika (pictured above) was shot dead in his apartment in Stockholm, Sweden while live-streaming on TikTok. He was a co-defendant in a trial in which the verdict was due that day. He was accused of “agitation against an ethnic or national group” because of his participation in a public burning of the Koran in 2023.
From Middle East Eye:
Salwan Momika, a 37-year-old Iraqi man living in Sweden, tore up several pages of the holy book, stomping on it and setting pages alight outside the largest mosque in the Swedish capital.
Momika carried out the provocative act under heavy police presence after being granted permission to do so by Swedish authorities. Despite allowing it on free speech grounds, Swedish police later launched an investigation on the basis of "agitation".
More on the bait-and-switch by the Swedish authorities from the Financial Times:
Swedish police initially tried to stop the protests in 2023, but had to let them go ahead after courts said they could only be banned if there were an immediate threat to public safety. Authorities in the Scandinavian country, which has strong legal protections for free speech, then looked to prosecute the protesters under hate laws.
Momika’s co-defendant, Salwan Najem, responded to the murder with a question:
In relation to Momika’s murder, Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson went as far as to say that “the [Swedish] security services are deeply involved because there is obviously a risk that there is a connection to a foreign power,” without elaborating on exactly which foreign power he meant.
More from the FT:
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said in 2023 that Sweden had gone into “battle-array for war on the Muslim world” by supporting “the criminal”, and that “all Islamic scholars agree that those who desecrate the Koran deserved the most severe punishment”.
Swedish intelligence services said last year that Iran was using criminal gangs in Sweden to hit Israeli targets and Iranian dissidents in the Nordic country. Officials have said privately that other security services from Middle East countries have been active in Sweden because of the large number of immigrants and political dissidents there.
Meanwhile, on February 1st in Britain, a 47-year-old man in Manchester was arrested for burning a Koran at the Glade of Light, a memorial for the victims of the Manchester Arena bombing, a Muslim terrorist attack that killed 22 people and injured over 1,000 in 2017.
The Greater Manchester Police released a statement on the arrest:
Assistant Chief Constable Stephanie Parker said: “We understand the deep concern this will cause within some of our diverse communities and are aware of a live video circulating. We made a swift arrest at the time and recognise the right people have for freedom of expression, but when this crosses into intimidation to cause harm or distress we will always look to take action when it is reported to us.”
After the Manchester Arena bombing, BBC News ran a story in 2018 on the Didsbury Mosque, which was attended by the bomber, Salman Abedi, and where “at least five men who…attended…either travelled to Syria or have been jailed for terrorism offences.”
A sermon at the mosque where the Manchester bomber worshipped called for the support of armed jihadist fighters, according to two Muslim scholars.
An imam at Didsbury Mosque in December 2016 was recorded praying for "victory" for "our brothers and sisters right now in Aleppo and Syria and Iraq".
Scholars Usama Hasan and Shaykh Rehan said it referred to "military jihad".
The imam, Mustafa Graf, says his sermon did not call for armed jihad and he has never preached radical Islam.
The recording the BBC obtained is of Friday prayers at the mosque six months before Salman Abedi detonated a suicide bomb following an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena in May 2017.
Abedi and his family regularly attended the mosque and his father sometimes led the call to prayer.
In another part of his sermon, which was recorded, the imam said that “Jihad for the sake of Allah is the source of pride and dignity for this nation.” Rehan, one of the scholars mentioned above, was unequivocal. “The jihad he's referring to here is actually being on the battlefield, there's no ifs and no buts in this.”
Months later, in 2019, a joint statement from Manchester City Council and Counter Terrorism Policing North West put the kaibosh on any further action, declaring that no offence had been committed by the imam. The wording of their statement, as per BBC News, is fascinating:
“We recognise that mosques have a very important and valuable role to play within our communities and we will always seek to work with trustees to strengthen those community relationships.
Although at all times freedom of expression must be respected we understand that people may be concerned by the content of the BBC report, in particular the tone of the speech.
We have engaged with the Mosque Trustees for several months and they have committed themselves to monitoring and dealing with behaviours which could be considered extreme while maintaining their right to freedom of expression.”
This is a remarkably measured approach for a police force who, almost exactly five years later, arrested a man for burning a book in public because his free expression “crosse[d] into intimidation to cause harm or distress.”
To sum up, an imam telling his congregation, “at least five” of whom had previously been convicted of terror offences or left Britain to fight for a terrorist organisation in a foreign country, that violence for their religion is a worthy act ten days before one of them buys a ticket to a concert at which he subsequently detonates a nail bomb, killing 22 people and injuring over 1,000, is protected speech, and the mosque trustees can be left alone to ‘monitor and deal with behaviours which could be considered extreme,’ but a lone middle-aged man burning that terrorist’s favourite book at the memorial to the victims of that bombing is “intimidation” that will “cause harm or distress.”
This is all happening at the same time as a leaked Home Office report is in the news, in which complaints over “two-tier policing” are referred to as a “right-wing extremist narrative”, one of a list of “damaging extremist beliefs.” The report’s other recommendations include an increase in the “recording of non-crime hate incidents, and forcing social media companies to proactively remove content that encourages rioting.”
Returning to the question of outrage over burning the Koran, it’s worth mentioning here that book-burning (not something I find palatable myself, I’m with Heinrich Heine2) is a long and inglorious tradition in which Muslims have participated as enthusiastically as everyone else.
From Raseef22, definitely not an anti-Islamic outlet:
The destruction of books and the deliberate burning of books occurred at certain junctures of Muslim history, not simply due to wars and disasters, but at the hands of rulers and with the blessing of scholars, or vice-versa.
Wikipedia’s list of book-burning incidents isn’t short on Muslim participation, and that includes burning the Koran. In Hadith 4987, ‘Uthman is asked to “[s]ave this nation before they differ about the Book (Qur'an) as Jews and the Christians did before,” so he creates a single version of the Koran and orders that all other versions be burnt:
`Uthman sent to every Muslim province one copy of what they had copied, and ordered that all the other Qur'anic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt.
This is all getting a bit semantic and historical, so let’s get back to the point. Burning the Koran is not forbidden in Islam in an absolute sense, nor is it a historical aberration that a book gets burnt every now and then by someone as a public display. Is it distasteful and disrespectful? Definitely. Does that make it illegal, or mean that it should be illegal? Absolutely not.
Two months ago, Birmingham MP Tariq Ali asked the Prime Minister for a commitment to banning “desecration of religious texts” and disrespect towards the articles of “the Abrahamic faiths”, and the response he got was agreement that “desecration” is wrong, not a derisive laugh followed by the reminder that Britain got rid of its blasphemy laws a while ago and doesn’t want them back.
Here’s Christopher Hitchens calling out as “sinister piffle” the claim that a society in which free expression is protected should make any concession to religious umbrage.
“If people are determined to be offended, if they are going to climb up on the ladder, balancing it precariously on their own toilet cistern to be upset by what they see through the neighbour’s bathroom window, there’s nothing you can do about that.”
Sing it, Hitch.
ChatCCP: DeepSeek Goes To Washington
DeepSeek, the Chinese AI that roiled the stock market when news of its capabilities broke, has been busy.
OpenAI, the previous Big Nerd On Campus in the AI sector, infamous for hoovering up the creative works of authors, artists, and filmmakers without notice, permission, or payment, is up in arms about “substantial evidence that…DeepSeek…distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI's model,” according to David Sacks, a Big Tech stalwart and the newly minted “AI czar” for the Trump administration.
Here’s Sacks giving a rundown on DeepSeek’s impact on the All-In podcast:
Some more on “distillation” from the Financial Times:
The technique is used by developers to obtain better performance on smaller models by using outputs from larger, more capable ones, allowing them to achieve similar results on specific tasks at a much lower cost.
Distillation is a common practice in the industry but the concern was that DeepSeek may be doing it to build its own rival model, which is a breach of OpenAI’s terms of service.
“The issue is when you [take it out of the platform and] are doing it to create your own model for your own purposes,” said one person close to OpenAI.
OpenAI declined to comment further or provide details of its evidence. Its terms of service state users cannot “copy” any of its services or “use output to develop models that compete with OpenAI”.
Here’s Andrew Cunningham from Ars Technica on why “it's a little rich for OpenAI to suddenly be so very publicly concerned about the sanctity of proprietary data.”
The company is currently involved in several high-profile copyright infringement lawsuits, including one filed by The New York Times alleging that OpenAI and its partner Microsoft infringed its copyrights and that the companies provide the Times' content to ChatGPT users "without The Times’s permission or authorization." Other authors and artists have suits working their way through the legal system as well.
In its post responding to the suit, OpenAI claims that "like any single source, [New York Times] content didn't meaningfully contribute to the training of our existing models and also wouldn't be sufficiently impactful for future training," but that hasn't stopped the company from pursuing content deals with the Times and other news organizations (including Ars Technica owner Condé Nast), plus user-generated content sites like Reddit and StackOverflow and book publishers like HarperCollins.
Collectively, the contributions from copyrighted sources are significant enough that OpenAI has said it would be "impossible" to build its large-language models without them. The implication being that copyrighted material had already been used to build these models long before these publisher deals were ever struck.
That's also strongly implied by a comment that investment firm Andreessen Horowitz filed with the US Copyright Office in late 2023 (PDF) in which the firm argued that treating AI model training as copyright infringement "would upset at least a decade’s worth of investment-backed expectations." Also known as a16z, Andreessen Horowitz is an OpenAI investor, and founder Marc Andreessen is a prominent AI booster.
The filing argues, among other things, that AI model training isn't copyright infringement because it "is in service of a non-exploitive purpose: to extract information from the works and put that information to use, thereby 'expand[ing] [the works’] utility.'"
So OpenAI and their investors are open about the fact that they couldn’t create an LLM like ChatGPT without using input material, but they don’t want to have to pay for that material or obey standard copyright protections. However, they do want to prevent other AI companies from doing what they did, or by taking a shortcut like using the result of what they did to create competing products.
Is there a reason why Sam Altman shouldn’t be publicly horse-whipped for hypocrisy? Anyone? Bueller?
That said, DeepSeek is off to a decidedly fishy start. Wiz Research published a report on what they found “within minutes” of running a security check.
As DeepSeek made waves in the AI space, the Wiz Research team set out to assess its external security posture and identify any potential vulnerabilities.
Within minutes, we found a publicly accessible ClickHouse database linked to DeepSeek, completely open and unauthenticated, exposing sensitive data. It was hosted at oauth2callback.deepseek.com:9000 and dev.deepseek.com:9000.
This database contained a significant volume of chat history, backend data and sensitive information, including log streams, API Secrets, and operational details.
More critically, the exposure allowed for full database control and potential privilege escalation within the DeepSeek environment, without any authentication or defense mechanism to the outside world.
DeepSeek’s security was so bad that Wiz concluded not only that “an attacker could retrieve sensitive logs and actual plain-text chat messages, but they could also potentially exfiltrate plaintext passwords and local files along propriety information directly from the server using queries like: SELECT * FROM file('filename') depending on their ClickHouse configuration.”
Given DeepSeek’s atrocious data security, it’s not encouraging that, as Bloomberg reported, Pentagon Workers Used DeepSeek’s Chatbot for Days before the Defense Information Systems Agency blocked access.
US military personnel started downloading an earlier release of DeepSeek code on their workstations in the fall of 2024, according to the person familiar with the matter. At the time, the downloads didn’t raise concern with Defense Department security teams as the connection to China wasn’t clear to them, the person added.
The explosion of interest in the latest DeepSeek release has triggered efforts in some of the military services to find and remove code from China-origin chatbots on employees’ individual machines, according to the person.
However, thousands of Defense Department personnel are using DeepSeek through Ask Sage, an authorized software platform, that doesn’t directly connect them to Chinese servers, according to Nicolas Chaillan, founder and chief executive officer of the platform.
Palmer Luckey, the creator of Oculus and founder of Anduril, told Fox Business that he reckons the supposed low cost of developing DeepSeek is propaganda aimed at undermining American AI companies.
“I think the problem is they put out that number specifically to harm U.S. companies,” Luckey said. “You had a lot of useful idiots in U.S. media kind of just mindlessly reporting that that's the case, and neither China nor the media nor DeepSeek has any kind of incentive to correct the record as a lot of U.S. companies like Nvidia crashed to the tunes of hundreds of billions of dollars.”
The fact that DeepSeek was created under the aegis of the Chinese Communist Party also raises the same issues pointed out about ChatGPT and Google Gemini, namely that the preferences, politics, and bias of the creators affects the output.
A Wired investigation found just that. For example, as they put it: “Ask DeepSeek R1 about Taiwan or Tiananmen, and the model is unlikely to give an answer.”
After DeepSeek exploded in popularity in the US, users who accessed R1 through DeepSeek’s website, app, or API quickly noticed the model refusing to generate answers for topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese government. These refusals are triggered on an application level, so they’re only seen if a user interacts with R1 through a DeepSeek-controlled channel.
Rejections like this are common on Chinese-made LLMs. A 2023 regulation on generative AI specified that AI models in China are required to follow stringent information controls that also apply to social media and search engines. The law forbids AI models from generating content that “damages the unity of the country and social harmony.” In other words, Chinese AI models legally have to censor their outputs.
The New York Times reported similar issues:
In one instance, the chatbot misstated remarks by former President Jimmy Carter that Chinese officials had selectively edited to make it appear that he had endorsed China’s position that Taiwan was part of the People’s Republic of China. The example was among several documented by researchers at NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, in a Thursday report that called DeepSeek “a disinformation machine.”
In the case of the repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, which the United Nations in 2022 said may have amounted to crimes against humanity, Cybernews, an industry news website, reported that the chatbot produced responses that claimed that China’s policies there “have received widespread recognition and praise from the international community.”
Due to the way DeepSeek functions, Wired was even able to observe it censor itself in real-time.
Because R1 is a reasoning model that shows its train of thought, this real-time monitoring mechanism can result in the surreal experience of watching the model censor itself as it interacts with users. When WIRED asked R1 “How have Chinese journalists who report on sensitive topics been treated by the authorities?” the model first started compiling a long answer that included direct mentions of journalists being censored and detained for their work; yet shortly before it finished, the whole answer disappeared and was replaced by a terse message: “Sorry, I'm not sure how to approach this type of question yet. Let's chat about math, coding, and logic problems instead!”
These would all be marginal quibbles with niche products appealing to a select few geeks if not for the overwhelming pressure from businesses and even governmental agencies to incorporate AI into everything. As Wiz point out in the conclusion of their report:
The world has never seen a piece of technology adopted at the pace of AI. Many AI companies have rapidly grown into critical infrastructure providers without the security frameworks that typically accompany such widespread adoptions. As AI becomes deeply integrated into businesses worldwide, the industry must recognize the risks of handling sensitive data and enforce security practices on par with those required for public cloud providers and major infrastructure providers.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go use ChatGPT to write a shopping list for my smart fridge so it can order some food to be delivered by drone while I ask Google Gemini to explain Tony Blair’s recommendations on embedding AI in the British civil service so that the NHS can become more efficient by using a chatbot to diagnose anxiety and alienation.
That’s it for this week’s Weird, everyone! I hope you enjoyed it.
Outro music is MetalTrump’s cover of Iron Maiden’s Two Minutes To Midnight, a nod to the alarmed eggheads at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and a showcase of Donald Trump’s untapped potential as a rock frontman.
Make metal, not war.
Stay sane, friends.
Their 2021 coverage of the origin of Covid-19 is well worth a read.
“Those who burn books will in the end burn people.”
89 Seconds To Midnight: EUA military countermeasures continue until end of 2029! ~ unless RFK Jr (if confirmed) as HHS secretary, revokes the Prep Act declaration for COVID.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-156283061
Mike Freedman, you have an excellent turn of phrase sir: "Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go use ChatGPT to write a shopping list for my smart fridge so it can order some food to be delivered by drone while I ask Google Gemini to explain Tony Blair’s recommendations on embedding AI in the British civil service so that the NHS can become more efficient by using a chatbot to diagnose anxiety and alienation." I have added it to my collection.
Here is another I thought I would share: "If you don’t want to end up eating bugs and owning nothing and being happy in your AI-monitored 15-minute city while you wait for your social-credit app to update your vaccination record so you can access your CBDC account and make another minimum payment on your ever-deepening credit-card debt, it is best to understand what is happening." ~ C J Hopkins.