The Weekly Weird #62
Meta's week of pain, toddler hate crime, CCP eyeballs Taiwan, no more Suk, flying taxis, the Biden infirmity, chatbot data-hoovering, the UK's Muslim Hate Fund
Well, hello there! Welcome back to your Weekly Weird, where we wield the Shield of Sarcasm to protect ourselves from the Deluge of Dystopia!
In a week that saw America’s famed breastaurant Hooters go bust1, what other storm clouds have gathered on the horizon?
China’s Flying Taxis: China has taken another step towards the future with the granting of licenses to two companies operating “autonomous passenger drones”, or, to the lay-person, flying taxis. The CCP is betting that “low-altitude tourism” will kickstart a new industry in the world’s second most populous country, with one report predicting that the market for the “eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft” needed to ferry gawking tourists around in clouds of smog could be worth as much as $15.82 billion within the year.
The South China Morning Post reports:
“The low-altitude economy is a new growth driver, and it will be an important engine to push the high-speed development of China’s economy,” said Cheng Bolin, vice-president of the low-altitude unit at the China Information Association, at an industry conference on March 28.
Toddler Hate Crime: In the UK, during the 2022/3 academic year, a toddler (aged either three or four) was suspended from school for “abuse against sexual orientation and gender identity”, meaning either an act of homophobia or transphobia. The reporting by outlets like The Telegraph and The Independent has drawn online criticism of hysteria and hyperbole, including the suggestion that the alleged offence is being exaggerated and isn’t present in the Department for Education’s guidance on pupil exclusion. However, the government sets out the reasons for excluding a child from a state school in Annex B of their “pupil exclusion statistics methodology”; the reporting code for the offence is ‘LG’.
Helen Joyce of Sex Matters was quoted in the media as saying: “Teachers and school leaders involved in this insanity should be ashamed of themselves for projecting adult concepts and beliefs on to such young children.”
Toby Young of the UK’s Free Speech Union gave the following quote: “It beggars belief that schools are suspending children as young as five for breaching their ‘transphobia’ policy. I would have thought that if your ideology is so rigid it justifies you punishing toddlers for not complying with it, that’s a powerful argument for discarding it in favour of something less dogmatic.”
The Mail also reported that, in 2022, a Church of England school warned the parents of a six year-old boy that his reaction to a fellow pupil wearing a dress could be '‘transphobic’.
“Sally and Nigel Rowe, whose sons attended a Church of England school, said they received a letter from the headteacher and chair of governors which declared pupils could be designated the term if they showed 'an inability to believe a transgender person is actually a ''real'' female or male.' They claimed the letter also added that refusing to use a transgender pupil's adopted name or gender appropriate pronouns would be considered 'transphobic behaviour'.”
Shall we take a moment to absorb the designation of “an inability to believe” as an offence, or are you already curled into a foetal position in the corner, rocking back and forth?
Mile Why?: In Colorado, the state legislature granted preliminary approval to a bill that will “label deadnaming and misgendering as discriminatory acts under the state’s anti-discrimination law” and “consider as a form of coercive control actions like deadnaming — using a transgender person’s previous name before transitioning in order to reject their identity — and misgendering in child custody decisions.” Parents who are not ‘gender-affirming’ will therefore be at a disadvantage in custody disputes, and potentially be open to legal sanction as well. The bill will also prevent schools from “adopt[ing] a gender-based dress code.” For some reason, the sitcom Community’s gag about “the ethnically-neutral mascot - the Greendale Human Being” comes to mind.
Here’s a proposal for a new unisex (or would it be unigender?) school uniform:
The Biden Infirmity: The Hill reported this week on excerpts from a new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, which covers the extent to which Biden’s cognitive decline and infirmity were known to White House staffers and Democratic Party insiders, with one source referring to the former president as “an old man who, at best, had long since lost his fastball.”
Some incidents mentioned in the book, as per The Hill:
[Rep. Eric] Swalwell had not been invited to the White House often, like most members of Congress, but when Biden and Swalwell came face to face, Biden didn’t immediately recognize the congressman, according to the book. Swalwell needed to note personal details to remind Biden of who he is.
To cover up the physical signs of Biden’s aging, a makeup artist met with him in the morning when he traveled. The artist also covered up aging signs before Zoom calls with his aides.
Biden consistently made these makeup appointments, but he sometimes canceled the briefings that were to follow.
After the debate with Trump, Biden needed fluorescent tape to guide him through a fundraiser at New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s (D) house and needed a teleprompter to speak to just a small group of people. But he still frequently trailed off during his remarks.
Another forthcoming book with the mouthful title of Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, will come out in the U.S. on May 20. Their thesis is simple: “Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify trying to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years.”
From the publisher Penguin’s press release about the book:
“What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless — a desperate bet that went bust — and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents.”
“The irony is biting: In the name of defeating what they called an existential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle ensured it, tossing aside his implicit promise to serve for only one term, denying the existence of health issues the nation had been watching for years, dooming the Democrats to defeat,” the publisher stated in the promotional material for the book. “The decision to run again, the Original Sin of this president, led to a campaign of denial and gaslighting, leading directly to Donald Trump’s return to power and all that has happened as a consequence.”
Blaming Biden, his family, and his close advisers for creating a bubble around him that perpetuated his candidacy and assured Trump’s victory seems weighted in favour of the numerous media commentators and politicians who held forth at length about how Biden in 2024 was “the best Biden”, as Joe Scarborough infamously said on the air, placing him alongside Jim Cramer2 as a perfect inverse indicator of reality. There was a team effort to run “a campaign of denial and gaslighting” far beyond Biden, his wife and kids, and the aides who probably did most of the signing of his paperwork while he was eating pudding in his pyjamas.
Whatever the motives, the dam appears to have broken on the wall of denunciation that surrounded Biden during his presidency and declared any observations about his decline conspiratorial, mean-spirited, and wrong. While we wait for the books to come out, here’s a reminder of the wagon-circling that went on while he was in office:
No More Suk: South Korea has said goodbye to Suk. The Associated Press report that “South Korea’s Constitutional Court unanimously removed Yoon Suk Yeol from office Friday, ending his tumultuous presidency and setting up a new election, four months after he threw the nation into turmoil with an ill-fated declaration of martial law.” Anti-Suk protestors “erupted into tears and danced when the verdict was announced” while supporters of the disgraced president “cried, screamed and yelled at journalists when they saw the news of the verdict on a giant TV screen.” Suk is the first South Korean president to be arrested or indicted while in office. He has been “indicted on charges of rebellion in connection with his decree, a charge that carries the death penalty or a life sentence if convicted,” and his removal from the presidency strips him of his immunity. Election season over there should be interesting…
CCP Eyeballs Taiwan: This week, China “launched military exercises pressing in on Taiwan” as “a warning to the island democracy’s president, Lai Ching-te, after he called China a “foreign hostile force,”” according to the New York Times. The exercise to “close in on Taiwan Island from multiple directions” included “joint seizure of comprehensive superiority, assault on maritime and ground targets, and blockade of key areas and sea lanes,” as per Xinhua, a Chinese state-run news outlet.
The Commander of US STRATCOM, General Anthony Cotton, said weeks ago during a speech that the Chinese military has been ordered to “be prepared” for an incursion into Taiwan “by 2027”, and the Epoch Times (ET) has reported that “Lin Xiangyang, commander of the Eastern Theater Command, was arrested on March 24 for leaking a “so-called Taiwan Strait battle plan.”” Citing a potential purge of President Xi Jinping’s allies as a destabilising factor in Chinese politics, ET also quote Cai Shenkun, a Chinese commentator, as saying during a recent livestream that “if the Chinese leader’s position was under great threat, he could start a war in the Taiwan Strait to change the status quo.”
Other countries in the region are watching carefully as well - here’s an interview from Philippines TV on the rising tensions and the broader implications of Chinese aggression:
Chatbot Data-Hoovering: Surfshark have “analyzed the data collection practices of the top 10 AI chatbots available on the Apple Store, from Google Gemini to DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and more” to see how much and what kind of data AI chatbots gather on users. The results are a stunning revelation to precisely nobody:
“All analyzed AI chatbot apps collect some form of user data. The average number of collected types of data is 11 out of a possible 35 for the analyzed apps. 40% of the apps collect users' locations. Additionally, 30% of these apps track user data. Tracking refers to linking user or device data collected from the app with third-party data for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes or sharing it with a data broker.”
The TL;DR is, as they put it, “Don’t let your guard down”:
“According to The Hacker News, DeepSeek has already experienced a breach where more than 1 million records of chat history, API keys, and other information were leaked.”
Overall, Google Gemini is the worst offender when it comes to data harvesting:
“Google Gemini collects the most information, gathering 22 out of 35 possible data types. This includes precise location data, which only Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity collect. Gemini also collects a significant amount of data across various other categories, such as contact info (name, email address, phone number, etc.), user content, contacts (such as a list of contacts in the user’s phone), search history, browsing history, and several other types of data. This extensive data collection may be seen as excessive and intrusive by those concerned about data privacy and security.”
Visual Capitalist has produced a handy infographic summarising the findings:
The UK’s Muslim Hate Fund
The Starmer government has announced a “new fund to provide a comprehensive service to monitor anti-Muslim hate and support victims”. This comes right on the heels of another announcement that Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner will be convening a 16-strong working group to formally define Islamophobia.
“Up to £650,000 funding will be made available in the 2025/26 financial year, and up to £1 million per year financial year for 2026/27 and 2027/28,” according to the government’s press release. The fund will be “open to applications from a single organisation, or a group of organisations to work together to deliver an accurate record of hate incidents across England.”
The Office of National Statistics and the nation’s police forces already record and report these incidents - is the government suggesting that the figures are inaccurate? Is there a tsunami of Islamophobia going unreported or undereported?
From the government’s official statistics for hate crimes up to the end of March 2024:
There was a 25% increase in police recorded religious hate crime over the last year, up from 8,370 to 10,484 offences. This is the highest annual count in these offences since the hate crime collection began in the year ending March 2012. The increase in offences was driven by a sharp rise in religious hate crimes targeted at Jewish people since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Since the spike, the number of offences has declined but to a level higher than seen before the conflict.
Annually, there were 3,282 religious hate crimes targeted at Jewish people in the year ending March 2024, more than double the number recorded the previous year (1,543). These offences accounted for a third (33%) of all religious hate crimes in the last year. By comparison, the proportion in the previous year was 20%.
There was also an increase in religious hate crimes targeted against Muslims since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict, with 3,866 offences in the latest year, up 13% from 3,432 recorded the previous year. In the last year, almost 2 in 5 (38%) of religious hate crimes were targeted against Muslims.
It bears mentioning here that, as of the 2021 census, the UK’s 3,801,186 Muslims make up 5.97% of the British population, while the country’s 269,283 Jews comprise 0.5%. If you’re counting, that means Muslims outnumber Jews in the UK at a ratio of over 14:1.
By dividing the population by the number of incidents, the per capita hate crime rate is 1 in 82 for Jews compared to 1 in 983 for Muslims. That would suggest that, as a group on a per capita basis, Jews in Britain are nearly 12 times more likely than Muslims to be the victim of a hate crime. The government’s response to this has been to focus on funding an effort to increase reporting and monitoring of anti-Muslim hate crimes.
Faith Minister Lord Khan, who is running point on the new fund, gave a speech to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in December 2024 in which he lamented the “universalisation of the Holocaust...in which the unique and distinctive nature of the Holocaust is set aside.”
“It is as though antisemitism is no longer a problem and Jews are no longer threatened,” he said.
His government certainly seems to think so.
Meta’s Week Of Pain
Meta has taken a pasting recently. After placing themselves at the forefront of the horrorshow concept of an internet in which social media is just AI talking to itself by announcing in September 2024 that they would “generate synthetic content tailored to individual users”, and then using AI to generate artificial selfies of Instagram users, they have now integrated Meta AI into WhatsApp.
From their FAQs:
You can:
Have conversations with Meta AI
Chat with Meta AI in existing group chats
Ask questions and get helpful recommendations
Talk about shared interests
Interact with their content
Create AI-generated images in chats
Forward messages to Meta AI to ask questions or learn more
The Standard reports, with a kicker at the end (emphasis mine):
Annoyed users have been venting about the chatbot’s arrival since its launch in 2023. Complaints have been surging on social media after its expansion into the EU and beyond.
The biggest gripe? There’s no way to switch it off or remove it.
The Express expanded on the suck:
“Meta AI is an entirely optional service that you can choose to ask questions, teach you something, or help come up with new ideas,” Meta spokesperson Ellie Heatrick told Express.co.uk. “A user needs to take an action to chat to or invoke Meta AI.”
It’s “optional” whether you use it or not when it pops up in your WhatsApp soon, but you can’t switch it off.
On a suitably disgruntled Reddit thread, one user shared their experience:
Today in a chat with my sister, the sentence "I use AI" appeared in our chat. Neither of us typed that sentence. I can only figure that Meta AI was trying to horn in on our chat. We were chatting about finding a short term rental online so maybe Meta wanted to do it for us. But it was spooky that it intruded in our chat to add it's [sic] own comment.
Spooky indeed.
It gets dirtier. Wherefore did Meta’s AI arise? Was it trained on everyone’s Facebook and Instagram posts in a typically gross but legal manner? Or did the nerds in the nerdery resort to skullduggery?
Funny story…
As Forbes reports, creators have filed “a major class-action lawsuit alleging copyright infringement and unfair competition” against Meta:
For those unfamiliar, LibGen—or Library Genesis—is essentially a digital warehouse of stolen intellectual property, neatly stacked with pirated books, academic papers, and various works authors and publishers never approved.
[…]
In recently filed court documents, Meta, led by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is alleged to have deliberately and explicitly authorized a raid on LibGen—and Anna's Archive, another massive digital pirate haven—to train its latest AI model, Llama 3.
Court documents here.
The details of the alleged heist are pretty damning:
The gist is as follows: senior Meta management recognized they urgently needed high-quality content to populate its large language model (LLM)—"books are actually more important than web data," one email chillingly admitted.
Meta staff turned to LibGen, home to more than 7.5 million pirated books and 81 million stolen research papers, to fill that gap. They did the same with Anna’s Archive.
After internal discussions, court documents suggest that Zuckerberg himself greenlit the theft.
Dan Pontefract, the author of the Forbes piece, used an online tool to find out that all five of his books were “pirated and included in Meta’s dataset”. He then tears a hole in the ‘fair use’ argument that Meta and other tech companies have been falling back on to dismiss their larceny.
Meta—with its $164.5 billion in 2024 revenues and almost $62.4 billion in profits—could have easily negotiated agreements with publishers and authors.
[…]
Based on their 2024 financials, Meta is not some struggling teacher in Boise, Idaho, photocopying textbook pages for their students. Meta ranks among the top 10 most valuable companies in the world. Meta’s market capitalization was roughly $1.8 trillion as of this writing.
It remains to be seen whether the verdict establishes a “perilous precedent”, as Pontefract fears, or finally calls the hounds to heel.
With all that going on, Meta still found yet another way to make the world a worse place. They’re nothing if not overachievers…
Bloomberg reported this week that Meta are planning to launch a new version of their Ray-Ban smart glasses, “code named Hypernova”, possibly by the end of 2025. The newest addition to the corporate surveillance hellscape being constructed relentlessly around us will hit shelves for between $1,000 and $1,400, in case you’re interested. Bloomberg took a look at the features:
A look at a prototype version of the first Hypernova glasses indicates how the glasses are likely to work when they go on sale.
When they are turned on, the display shows a “boot screen” with logos for Meta and other partners — such as chipmaker Qualcomm Inc. — on the product.
Once the device is on, the user will see a home screen comprised of circular icons laid out horizontally, similar to the app dock on Apple devices or Meta’s Quest mixed-reality headset.
The glasses include dedicated apps for taking pictures, viewing photos and accessing maps. There is also support for notifications from phone apps, including Meta’s Messenger and WhatsApp.
The glasses will otherwise work similarly to the current Wayfarer-style Ray-Ban Metas, focusing on capturing images and video, accessing AI via built-in microphones and pairing with a phone for calls and music playback. The new version will continue to rely heavily on the Meta View phone app.
Like Meta’s other new devices, the glasses will run a highly customized version of the Android operating system from Alphabet Inc.’s Google. The company isn’t currently planning to include an on-board app store.
Users will be able to control the glasses using capacitive touch controls on the sides of the glasses, meaning they can scroll through apps or photos by swiping against the temple bars and then tapping to open something specific.
Meta also plans to begin offering a so-called neural wristband for the first time, which will allow a wearer to control the glasses with gestures, such as rotating their hand to scroll through apps and photos and pinching their finger and thumb to select items. Meta is currently planning to bundle the accessory, codenamed Ceres, in the box with the glasses.
Of course, the glasses will have a camera built in, so anyone wearing suitably chunky Ray-Bans could be recording you as they pass you in the street or peak over your shoulder on the train (or at a urinal).
Meta also has smart glasses without a display, called Supernova 2, in the pipeline, as well as the follow-up to Hypernova, imaginatively named Hypernova 2, slated for launch in 2027. Hypernova’s sequel will feature “a binocular display system, which means the device will have two screens and show information in both eyes.” That sounds disorienting, horrific, and pointless, but then, so does all of this.
Bloomberg describes at length the questions the company has about their products and goals for bringing them to market, but some questions go unasked:
Who actually wants this stuff?
What about all the people being photographed and filmed by these glasses surreptitiously, who might much rather not be filmed?
Where is the public’s desire to resist? Remember the days of Google Glass, when people snatched them off the faces of the geeks who bought them and gave them what for?
Remember?
That’s it for this week’s Weird, everyone. Thanks as always for reading.
Outro music is Devo with Peekaboo, dedicated to all the worker bees tightening the proverbial nuts and bolts on the digital Panopticon.
Stay sane, friends.
Ba dum tss.
“Bear Stearns is fine!” Never gets old.