The Weekly Weird #60

The unreal internet, cooking is bad now, Australia's hate crisis that wasn't, AI makes a murderer, lab leak-a-go-go, killing them softly, copy-wrong, is we dumber?

Well if it isn’t that time of the week again, when we warm ourselves in front of the five-alarm dumpster fire known as modern society!

“What’s been going on?” I hear you cry from your hiding place behind the couch. “Is it over?”

“A lot” is my answer. And “No, it never ends.”

Let’s get Weird!

• Cooking Is Bad Now: In a move that definitely won’t become a partisan football and cause ridiculous hot takes to be bandied about all over the place, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States have published a study claiming that “the potent and often pungent volatile organic compounds (VOCs) given off from cooking food are now responsible for over a quarter of the ozone production from VOCs generated by human activity in the LA basin,” a quantity “roughly equal to the amount of ozone produced by VOCs from on-road and off-road motor vehicles.” That’s right - cooking is pollution, and the eggheads at NOAA believe that “more research will be needed to get a better grasp on whether cooking odors affect ozone pollution in other cities.” Anyone know a bookie that might give odds on Angelenos needing a “cooking license” by 2030? To paraphrase Pastor Niemoller, first they came for the gas stoves, and I did not speak up, because I was not a gas stove…

• AI Makes A Murderer: Ars Technica reports that a Norwegian man, on succumbing to curiosity and asking ChatGPT about himself, was “shocked when ChatGPT responded with outputs falsely claiming that he was sentenced to 21 years in prison as "a convicted criminal who murdered two of his children and attempted to murder his third son".” Arve Hjalmar Holmen has filed a complaint against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, for a violation of his rights under Europe’s stringent GDPR legislation, claiming that their product “allegedly violated "data accuracy" requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), because Holmen allegedly could not easily correct the information, as the GDPR requires.” The outcome of the case may leave OpenAI with a serious headache across the EU because “if ChatGPT feeds user data like the false child murderer claim "back into the system for training purposes," then there may be "no way for the individual to be absolutely sure [that problematic outputs] can be completely erased... unless the entire AI model is retrained."” For some added throwback nightmare fuel, check out this 2022 X thread about “Loab”, a haunting hallucinatory figure that kept cropping up in generative AI images at the time.

• Killing Them Softly: In 1946, the legislation that founded Britain’s National Health Service was crafted and passed. Since then, for all its foibles and fumbles, the NHS has been a rare and precious thing in global healthcare - a state system dedicated to care, free at the point of use, for all who need it, regardless of their means or the reasons for their illness. It has weathered questions of whether or not smokers or the obese should be treated (they should), whether cosmetic surgeries should be covered (some are), and whether “gender affirming care” is scientifically sound (according to the Cass Review, it isn’t). Underneath it all is the foundational principle of the NHS itself, embodied by the responsibility of the Secretary of State for the well-being of the public.

  

  Now, an amendment to that principle has been proposed in order to accommodate “voluntary assisted dying”.

  

  The new clause “imposes a duty on the Secretary of State” to provide “voluntary assisted dying services in England.” Previously responsible for promoting and improving “the physical and mental health of the people of England,” under the amended principle the Secretary of State will instead be responsible for informing the public of their options for shuffling off this mortal coil and promoting the provision of services to bump them off. A fundamental change in the purpose and aim of the NHS appears to be on the horizon - whether it will prove to be merely semantic, or deeper and more philosophical, remains to be seen.

• The Unreal Internet: In a piece out now on Pirate Wires called Slop World, Mike Solana decries the slop overtaking the internet and asks whether there is anything “real” left on the internet. It’s worth a read - here’s an extended quote for flavour:

  • “Today, our internet is a fragmented media ecosystem occupied by relatively honest information brokers totally at odds with one other, battling openly for the “truth,” while information ops are successfully run by every American rival, native terrorist, and probably our government — with multiple actors within our government potentially fighting one another. Content is slopified for maximum spread. AI is employed to run bots by the thousands, amplifying slopified content. Worse, the algorithms that govern AI also govern our accounts, which means any human sufficiently engaged online is gradually trained to behave like slop — is slowly transformed into slop. The result is our present, miserable chaos, a daily slop war, to which we are also addicted.”

• Copy-wrong: NBC News have reported that “[a] federal appeals court ruled that art created autonomously by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted, saying that at least initial human authorship is required for a copyright.” A computer scientist named Stephen Thaler, represented by the attorney Ryan Abbott, has been trying to get the U.S. Copyright Office to recognise the copyright of an artwork he claims was created by his AI, named the Creativity Machine, “on its own”. Thaler’s claim that the artwork was “created autonomously by machine” led the Copyright Office to deny a grant of copyright. Thaler’s subsequent appeals have led to the recent verdict, which his attorney claims “creates a huge shadow on the creative community”. Chalk one up for the humans…for now.

• More Dang Robots: This week, Boston Dynamics put up a new video of their Atlas robot frolicking, so here you go.

  Nvidia’s leather-clad CEO Jensen Huang, looking like a recently divorced dad showing up at the local high school on his new Harley to regain his kid’s love, announced a partnership with Disney and Google DeepMind to produce an AI-powered robot named Blue, a beep-booping mashup of Wall-E and Short Circuit’s Johnny Five with sounds straight out of R2D2:

• Take A Chill Pill, Hill: Hillary Clinton, the pantsuit-clad portrait-of-Dorian-Grey of Martha Stewart, went to the World Forum in Berlin to talk up the horrors of a polluted information space. She raised a gnarled claw to emphasise the importance of information in the battle for hearts and minds: “Information determines how we think,” she opined in a moment of hilariously stating the bleeding obvious on par with the Zoolander line “Moisture is the essence of wetness.” Then she went on (from 3:54 in the video below):

  • “Where there are no facts, there cannot be truth, and where there is no truth, there cannot be trust, and where there is no trust, there cannot be democracy and peace.”

    As a chaser for that particular shot, here’s a short video by Matt Orfalea featuring Hillary Clinton’s commitment to “facts” and “trust”:

Australia’s Hate Crisis That Wasn’t

In February, Australia passed new hate speech legislation that created “new offences targeting those who advocate or threaten violence against groups (defined by race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, intersex status, disability, nationality, national or ethnic origin, or political opinion) or a place of worship,” and “criminalises actions that might lead to violence,” according to Australia’s Law Society Journal.

The state government of New South Wales has also proposed its own further measures:

• Intentional Incitement: up to 2 years in jail for intentionally inciting racial hatred.

• Nazi Symbols Near Synagogues: increased penalties (up to 2 years) and clarification that graffiti is a “public act.”

• Blocking/Harassing at Places of Worship: up to 2 years in prison.

• Expanded Hate Crime Definitions: more crimes will be considered hate motivated.

The discovery of “a caravan packed with explosives” on the outskirts of Sydney in January contributed to the fear that a “mass casualty event” was being planned against the city’s Jewish community, drove media discussion of the necessity of cracking down on ‘hateful’ speech, and gave further credence to the government’s claims that specific and additional restrictions on speech were necessary to keep people safe.

The premier of New South Wales, Chris Minns, helped push through new restrictions specifically because of the elevated sense of threat.

From The Guardian:

The most controversial changes were the government’s push to criminalise people making racist remarks in public and giving police broad powers to restrict protests near places of worship. Both offences carry a maximum penalty of two years in jail.

Last week, the Australian federal police’s deputy commissioner Krissy Barrett confirmed that the explosives-laden caravan was actually “a fabricated terrorist plot, essentially a … con job.”

Barrett told The Guardian:

“Put simply, the plan was the following: organise for someone to buy a caravan, place it with explosives and written material of antisemitic nature, leave it in a specific location and then, once that happened, inform law enforcement about an impending terror attack against Jewish Australians.

“We believe the person pulling the strings wanted changes to their criminal status but maintained a distance from their scheme and hired alleged local criminals to carry out parts of their plan.”

The revelation that a high-profile terror plot was actually a cynical ploy by an organised crime figure to obtain favour from authorities has led to calls for an inquiry and a repeal of the problematic new laws.

The NSW Council for Civil Liberties, with backing from the NSW Greens, called on Thursday for a legislative inquiry into whether the parliament and public were misled before the hate speech and places of worship bills were passed. Alternatively, they want the legislation repealed.

“The premier used highly politicised language such as ‘terrorism’ that knowingly strikes fear in the hearts of our community, especially the Jewish community. This fear was used as a basis for taking away essential democratic rights to protest,” the president of the council, Timothy Roberts, said.

Hot on the heels of the news that signature legislation may have been rammed through under false pretence, Minns said “g’day” to a backlash after comments he made on camera about the efforts to roll back Australia’s new hate speech legislation went viral:

I recognise and I fully said from the beginning, we don’t have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the United States, and the reason for that is that we want to hold together a multicultural community and have people live in peace.

To “hold together a multicultural community” there have to be restrictions of speech? People can only “live in peace” if their words are policed heavily by authorities? What’s going on with Aussie politics?

I’ll give the final word to the independent senator from Western Australia, Fatima Payman. In her now-famous “brainrot” speech from a few months ago, Payman decided to “get down with the kidz” and splash around some hip lingo to reach the Aussie Gen Z massive. The result is as funny as it is painful, and it really makes you wonder what they put in the water down there.

“Skibidi.”

Lab Leak-A-Go-Go

Remember when “everyone” knew that Covid came from a wet market in Wuhan and that only cuckoo-crazy conspiracy nuts thought it was “made in a lab”? While Joe Rogan was being mocked for using ivermectin, The New York Times and British Medical Journal were calling the “lab leak hypothesis” a “debunked conspiracy theory” and rolling their eyes at the stubborn mouth-breathers stuck on “gain of function” research instead of the zoonotic origin favoured by Fauci, who had been elevated to near-saintly status.

Exhibit A:

Well, funny story. Both the German spy agency BND and a team led by the former head of MI6 in the UK have now publicly admitted that, as early as March 2020, they were delivering confirmed intelligence reports to their respective governments and scientific advisors that the virus was “an engineered escapee from the Wuhan Institute,” only for the information to be ignored, denied, and sat upon out of deference to China and a commitment to Fauci’s “proximal origins” brainchild.

These admissions come right on the heels of the CIA’s announcement in January that US intelligence was also on Team Lab Leak more or less from the start.

From the BBC (replete with rhetorical backflips to find ways to keep mentioning that “there is no consensus on the cause of the Covid pandemic”):

According to Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, the BND met in Berlin in 2020 to look into the origin of coronavirus in an operation called Project Saaremaa.

It assessed the lab theory as "likely", although it did not have definitive proof.

The BND also found indications that several violations of safety regulations had occurred at the lab.

The assessment was commissioned by the office of Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor at the time, but was never publicly known of until now.

Also from the BBC:

China's foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said in response: “We believe that tracing the origin of Covid-19 is a scientific issue that should be determined by scientists with a scientific approach.”

If you’re counting, that’s three ‘science’ words in one sentence, which is rarely a sign of good faith argumentation. Of course the Chinese Communist Party’s rebuttal is presented by the BBC as if it has equal weight. Why would the government responsible for releasing the worst pandemic in a century want to lie about it? It’s not like the CCP routinely lies about things like the plight of the Uyghurs, the state of Tibet, and the Tiananmen Square massacre, surely we can count on them to be on the up and up about Covid, right?

Ba dum tss.

In the UK, a profile in The Telegraph on Gwythian Prins and John Constable provides some insight into a ‘top secret’ report delivered to Boris Johnson’s government by their team, led by the former head of MI6 Richard Dearlove, in which they presented “the conclusion that SARS‑CoV‑2 was engineered during “gain of function” experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” How could something like that get buried? We all know the British are big on understatement, so maybe the March 2020 report didn’t make the conclusion clear enough?

Here’s the first sentence from the cover page of the report:

“It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Oh, okay. That’s actually pretty clear. So what happened?

From The Mail:

The file, marked 'Secret – Recipient's Eyes Only' argued that Beijing was pushing a fake narrative that the virus had originated in an animal market. The dossier, compiled by a group of eminent academics and intelligence experts and seen by The Mail on Sunday, said China even retrospectively manipulated viral samples to give credence to the deception.

But the argument is said to have been dismissed by Patrick Vallance, who was a familiar face during the pandemic as he flanked Mr Johnson at No 10 news conferences.

In today's MoS, Sir Richard writes of his dossier: 'Boris himself was persuaded by its argument. But the weight of the Government's scientific establishment, already signed up to the Chinese narrative, prevailed.'

In another article, the Mail summarises the view taken by Dr Robert Redfield, then-head of the CDC in the United States:

Dr Redfield fears security services secretly 'pulled a lot of the strings' to protect their agents inside China's military-linked laboratories and that exposing the leak would also bring too much scrutiny on the lab and potentially expose active operatives.

He believes that Anthony Fauci, former presidential adviser and influential US doctor, worked with the heads of US and UK research funding bodies to push the theory of natural transmission from animals on sale in a Wuhan market to humans.

The purpose, he claims, was to cover up their support for controversial 'gain of function' research, which is when organisms are genetically altered to help predict emerging infectious diseases.

The third sentence on the cover of the secret UK briefing document reads as follows: “The PRC is now engaged in an information & influence operation to deflect responsibility.”

So Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser during the pandemic, played ball with a Chinese “information & influence operation” to cover for the moody research that had been going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology by lying to the public and misleading the prime minister, thereby contributing to what is arguably the nadir of public trust in modern British history. His punishment? Now he’s Lord Vallance, the Minister of State for Science in the Labour government.

If he’d handed the nuclear launch codes to the Russians or shared his password with the North Koreans, they might have made him Prime Minister.

Here’s a ‘greatest hits’ from the Mail, quoting “a source close to Mr Johnson” about what went on at 10 Downing Street as the first lockdown was declared:

Boris repeatedly asked the [intelligence] agencies to do more work on the origins of Covid. It struck him as simply too much of a coincidence that a mutant Covid virus appeared in a city that just happened to possess one of the only labs in the world that engineered mutant Covid viruses.

He was very struck by the refusal of the scientists, especially Patrick Vallance, even to contemplate this possibility. He asked again after getting the Dearlove briefing and again the agencies came back with the same answer and specifically rubbished Dearlove. Looking back, he now wonders why the scientists and the agencies were so emphatic.

[…]

Boris thinks it is possible that the scientists disliked the lab leak theory because they are wary about public hostility to science. They didn't want stories about Frankenstein viruses that would mean a threat to research funding. He also thinks they were nervous of causing offence to their international partners.

Clearly the lab-leak theory was deeply embarrassing and painful to China. It meant that the incompetence of someone in Wuhan had caused millions of deaths and $16 trillion of damage worldwide.

But they really didn't want to say this. Beijing is ruthless in punishing anyone who says anything hostile or disrespectful to China. The scientists were clearly nervous about triggering cuts to the huge Chinese investments in academic research of all kinds.

[…]

The truth is that the Covid-19 virus was not just Chinese but also partly American. It was a Chimerican chimera. So Vallance and the others clung to the wet market/bat/pangolin theory long after it had begun to look ridiculous.

They did so because they were instinctively kow-towing to China and sensitive to anti-science feeling in the wider public.

The agencies didn't really have any good sources for their work other than the scientists who had an interest in this. Which is absurd when you consider that we must properly understand the origins of Covid to prevent another outbreak.

Saying any of that in 2020 or 2021 would have got you shadow-banned on social media, censored, kicked off of shows, bullied off of platforms, scoffed at in the newspapers, “fact checked” in the British Medical Journal and the Lancet, mocked by the right-thinking arbiters of truth, and defenestrated by friends and family for being a conspiracy loon. Now we find out that while all that screaming about “the science” was going on, the intelligence services had all reported it to the relevant authorities and then watched them circle the wagons for China, Fauci, and the WHO.

Even the notorious fish-wrap The Sun dropped a documentary about the lab leak this month, which is worth watching for Redfield’s interview, and especially his eerily strong conviction that another pandemic with a higher mortality rate is coming¹.

Is We Dumber?

Have humans passed peak brain power? asks John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times this week.

According to Burn-Murdoch, “across a range of tests, the average person’s ability to reason and solve novel problems appears to have peaked in the early 2010s and has been declining ever since.”

Given its importance, there has been remarkably little consistent long-running research on human attention or mental capacity. But there is a rare exception: every year since the 1980s, the Monitoring the Future study has been asking 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid-2010s.

The dumbening isn’t just because people don’t read words good anymore² - numeracy has also taken a nosedive.

In one particularly eye-opening statistic, the share of adults who are unable to “use mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements” has climbed to 25 per cent on average in high-income countries, and 35 per cent in the US.

So we appear to be looking less at the decline of reading per se, and more at a broader erosion in human capacity for mental focus and application.

Even Harvard University, the Boston³ bastion of bonce-heavy brilliance, has had to “pilot a new introductory course aimed at rectifying a lack of foundational algebra skills among students,” according to the Harvard Crimson.

What’s next, an actual Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good?

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That’s it for this week’s Weird, everyone. Thanks as always for reading.

Outro music is Noga Erez with Dumb “Against The Machine”.

Dumb people never think they dumb.

Stay sane, friends.

1. Spoiler: He says it will be bird flu.

2. “The decline of reading is certainly real — in 2022 the share of Americans who reported reading a book in the past year fell below half.”

3. Yes, I know it’s actually Cambridge, but I wanted the alliteration.