Blinded by AI – FT#198

03 Aug Blinded by AI – FT#198

Show Notes

The Blinded by AI Fallacy occurs when someone bases their claim on an unrealistic view of what artificial intelligence is currently capable of reliably achieving.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of RFK Jr describing the horrifying lengths the DHHS will go to to avoid work:

Then we talked about this clip of Mike Johnson pretending DOGE did good stuff:

And finally we looked at this Elon Musk tweet:

Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer https://t.co/bVHzUmY9WN

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2026

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Boris and Kier both claiming great things about AI:

And he finished with Yvette Cooper praising AI facial recognition as a crime-fighting tool:

Fallacy in the Wild (Sting: Blind – Talking Heads)

In the Fallacy in the Wild, we looked at this social media exchange about the Pope at the 2005 World Series:

Then we discussed this clip from an interview with Richard Dawkins and the associated article he wrote about Claude:

And finally, we talked about this clip from St Denis Medical:

Fake News

Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:

Mark got it right this week and is still on 48%!

The Reflecting Pool is still not a logical fallacy

We talked about the continuing saga of how the DOJ have admitted it wasn’t vandals.

The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about

• Three months after a gunman turned the White House Correspondents’ Dinner into an actual news event rather than the usual parade of Beltway self-congratulation, Trump finally got his rescheduled shot at the mic on Friday, and it went about as well as everything else he’s tried this year. Like all the best stand-up comedians at a corporate event, he spoke for over an hour, and based on the amount I was physically able to make myself watch, I imagine the assembled journalists were praying for another assassination attempt. If the US bombed this hard in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz would have opened weeks ago. He tried a few things that were shaped like jokes, but since they were written by people like Stephen Miller and spoken out loud by someone like Trump, they got as many laughs as his eulogy for Lindsey Graham, despite the fact that multiple people in the room were from Trump’s administration. He turned on his speechwriters and then it was the usual highlight reel: insulting journalists by name, dusting off nicknames for Democrats that were stale in 2020, and picking a fight with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, who’d just won an award for her coverage of the infamous Zelenskyy Oval Office meeting. Trump’s response to a journalist winning an award for good journalism was to tell her, in front of hundreds of people, that she “never smiles,” and to ask her, repeatedly, to smile for him. Somewhere, an HR training video is being hastily updated with a new slide. Many people have suggested that the journalists are somehow complicit in all his bullshit by attending the event where he’s basically a guest of honor, but I disagree. They sat in silence while he rolled out lines that usually get people chanting USA and then he had to sit there while Wall Street Journal reporters won an award for courage and accountability in reporting, for their investigative work on a lewd birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein bearing Trump’s name. While presenting the award, Wolf Blitzer said “Trump quickly filed a $20 billion lawsuit against the Journal, revealing reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address. Her family had to be relocated. The Journal was kicked off of Air Force One, but the reporters continued to file revelatory stories.” And the outgoing president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Weijia Jiang, said there is “an existential difference between criticizing the press and trying to undermine it. One is healthy, and it makes all of us better. The other is exactly what the founders hoped to prevent.” I think, if anything, Trump should be made to sit in more rooms where people win awards for telling him he’s a cunt.
• Apparently Sergio Furnari, the Sicilian-born New York artist has been complaining of being out of pocket to the tune of a 6-figure sum, having difficulty walking, and dealing with the potential smell of urine, what better way to be welcomed into the world of Trump you’d think. Well since sculpting the somewhat uncanny-valley-dwelling lifesize statue of Charlie Kirk, mic in hand and shirt emblazoned with Freedom in place, which is due to be unveiled in Times Square in September, Sergio’s feeling a bit cursed. First the crowdfund appeal he launched into the x-twittersphere amongst the Maga hordes proclaiming Kirk to be the messiah (he’s not the messiah…) raised about 8 grand, it appears keyboard warriors don’t get to the bank much or their keyboarding doesn’t extend to hitting the donate button, protest don’t translate directly to dollars, which is why you have to have a range of say collectible cards, crypto, watches, bibles etc to continually suck interest and cash from the same small donation pool ey Donnie! Determined to complete the statue despite not having listened to Kirk’s podcast but wanting to assert support of the first amendment and Charlie’s widow, Sergio has forked out 100 grand of his own money, with which he might have chosen a better skin colour than the same makeup used for Yoghurt from Spaceballs as Wren Woodson from Y! Entertainment perfectly pointed out, Sergio’s also broke his foot falling over a roll of tape and suffered an onslaught of online messaging thanking him for erecting the statue cos there’s no public toilets in Times Square. Yep deluded, misguided, hobbling, broke and smelling of piss, Sergio’s got to be considering enstatue-ising Trump next surely! Sergio promises to make the next one out of bullet-proof steel – yeah ‘Merica!
• Rand Paul, Kentucky’s most punchable Senator (which is a close contest on the off-chance Mitch McConnell is still alive), has spent six years insisting Anthony Fauci personally engineered a global pandemic in a Wuhan lab and then covered it up like a cat with a shit-encrusted litter tray. Last week Paul dropped a thousand-plus pages of Fauci’s private pandemic diary on Twitter, presumably hoping to crowd-source the search for a smoking gun that’s eluded him since 2020. His best result was an entry from January 26, 2020, in which Fauci notes that Wuhan’s wet market “was not the source, it was the amplifier” of the outbreak, which Paul triumphantly declared as proof that Fauci privately knew that a lab leak, was to blame while telling the public it was the market. Unfortunately for Paul, literally the next line in the diary is “having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans,” which shits all over his claim that Fauci knew it was artificially created. His fevered tweets about Fauci’s private writings contradicting later public statements have been widely dismissed by scientists pointing out the linear progression of time and the fact that science means that information changes based on new evidence. None of this stopped Paul, who also took the diary down Monday night and quietly reposted it Tuesday morning with fresh redactions, along with a bonus 465-page “prequel” of Fauci’s older emails, because he might as well do something with all these push-pins and balls of yarn he’s got lying around. All this was just the appetizer for Wednesday’s Senate hearing, where Fauci – the man who spent decades testifying before Congress on demand, sometimes multiple times a week, about diseases most of us can’t pronounce – showed up and pleaded the Fifth. Repeatedly. Fauci’s explanation was that he didn’t trust Paul’s committee not to twist any answer into a perjury charge, which, given Paul’s stated life goal of getting Fauci “behind bars,” seems like a completely reasonable use of a constitutional right that exists for exactly this situation. As podcaster and all-round awesome person Allison Gill explained it, “When Justice is blind, bad guys take the fifth. When justice is corrupt, good guys take the fifth”. It was, in my opinion, a superhuman act of restraint. I wouldn’t have been able to prevent myself from explaining, loudly and in detail, all the ways in which Rand Paul is a petty, spiteful, grandstanding piece of shit, who is fractally wrong about every claim he makes, which is just one of the many reasons I’m not a respected public official. Paul responded to the failure of his cunning trap with yet more petty spite, promising “repercussions” and announcing a committee vote next week on holding Fauci in contempt, plus musing aloud about whether Biden’s preemptive pardon for Fauci even holds up in court. Bonus fun fact: at some point during the proceedings, Capitol Police physically removed one of Fauci’s own attorneys from the room, which is not something that tends to happen at hearings that are going well. The hearing produced no new revelations whatsoever about how COVID started or how the government handled it, just three more hours of dueling narratives about a six-year-old feud between a man who studies diseases for a living and a man who studies how to get his face on Fox News for a living.
• You’d think being in computers and that, Mark Zuckerberg would know about the Garbage In Garbage Out data-handling truism that is central to all such digital systems. But when it comes to a) making money and b) competing in the AI field against the likes of ChatGPT and perhaps even c) heading off accusations that Musk levelled at Grok for being too woke, Meta’s struck a deal with NewsMax and Fox News to populate Meta AI with “archived content” that Meta will apparently be using “to support AI queries across Meta’s apps and devices.” The Newsmax archived content includes the misinformation around the Smartmatic and DOminion voting machines in the 2020 election which lead to Newsmax settling $100 million dollars to them after being sued. Newsmax is not an objective news source but a far-right organization that routinely distorts reality to suit its ideological goals. NewsGuard, which uses journalists to rank the credibility and reliability of news outlets, gives Newsmax a 20 out of 100. Newsmax “is unreliable because it severely violates basic journalism standards,” NewsGuard concluded. Newsmax received similar ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check (”Low“ for factual reporting) and Ground News (”Very Low“ on factuality.) Fox News also pushed election conspiracies and settled a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion for $787 million. Meta and Newsmax go way back, they’re soulmates  – a 2021 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified Newsmax as one of ten sites contributing to 69% of user interaction with climate misinformation on Facebook. According to the report, Newsmax was the third most common site linked to in posts containing climate misinformation. Newsmax has posted articles promoting conspiracy theories about chemtrails and denying that climate change is caused by humans. Facebook objected to the report’s methodology. Seems Zuck is determined to catch up to Elon when it comes to yet more enshittification of his bit of the internet – it’s like when Starbucks comes to town and the actual smart people support the local coffee outlets that have been in the neighbourhood for years –  all the more reason to head over to Discord, Bluesky and Telegram I guess
• Googly-eyed Kremlin bitch Kash Patel has lost another lawsuit, this time against blogger Jim Stewartson, who he sued for defamation when Stewartson called him a “Kremlin asset”, a “chud”, and a “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch”, as well as accusing him of sedition, lying to Congress, and planning January 6th. That last one’s a bit of a stretch – there’s no way Kash has the intellectual capacity or sustained periods of sobriety needed to plan something like January 6th. As to the others, as we all know, truth is an absolute defense. But that’s not why he lost. The FBI’s biggest DUI-hire, Kash, originally scored a $250,000 default judgment when Stewartson didn’t bother responding to the lawsuit, which is the legal equivalent of winning a fight because the other guy went to get a sandwich. But then Stewartson moved to set aside that judgment, arguing that Nevada had no jurisdiction over a Californian blogger posting about a Nevadan on the internet, and Judge Andrew Gordon agreed, voiding the whole thing. The judge was careful to note this doesn’t mean the insults were true, false, or protected opinion, just that Kash filed in the wrong zip code, so we still don’t technically have a legal opinion on the googly-eyedness of Kash, but the fact that the phrase is now permanently enshrined in the official court record is a pretty good consolation prize. This is Kash’s second courtroom faceplant this year, after a Houston judge tossed his suit over a former FBI official saying he spends more time at nightclubs than at FBI headquarters, ruling that “rhetorical hyperbole” isn’t defamation, which is a polite judicial way of saying “yeah, but everyone kind of knows that’s true.” And he’s still pursuing a quarter-billion-dollar suit against The Atlantic over a story about his drunken shenanigans, so at this rate he’ll have sued every publication and podcaster in America before he successfully wins a single one of these cases, but he does seem pretty determined to prove in court that he cannot prove anything in court. Meanwhile, lest you thought the Kremlin bitch part of the insult was also still in question, Kash has apparently found time in between getting his lawsuits laughed out of courthouses to plan a little autumn getaway to Moscow and St. Petersburg on October 14th and 15th, and is expected to be hosted by Russia’s FSB, which is the modern rebrand of the KGB, the same organization that used to be the entire premise of every FBI training video. Nobody knows if he will meet Putin himself, and the FBI, DOJ, and White House have all declined to comment on the purpose for the trip that is happening just a few weeks before the midterms so we can’t possibly know if he’ll be warning the Russians off any election interference or pointing them in the right direction. All we know for sure is that he’s worked hard to cast doubt on their involvement in Trump’s 2016 win, despite the intelligence agency he runs being one of many who openly accept that there was Russian interference that aided Trump. Do try not to sue anyone while you’re there Kash, the jurisdiction issues would be even more complicated than last time.
• Never fight with your Auntie, never fight with Auntie Beeb – Trump’s case for suing the BBC for damages states “ all of President Trump’s brand, properties and businesses are impugned or said to have been impugned.” This was reiterated by U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett a couple of weeks ago. It does mean however, as she continued that “reputational, economic damages, all of that is now at issue in this case”. Which opened the door for the BBC to explore the finances of more than 400 companies owned by a Trump family trust. Trump of course will doubtless appeal to a tame judge but it does bring a smile to the lips at the prospect of the BBC legally being able to scrutinise those mysterious hidden interlaced web of secrets hitherto kept hidden from the rest of the world. And of course it would go against all the principles that a public service broadcaster holds dear to consider publishing or broadcasting those findings at any stage now or in the future!  Meantime Trump attorney Alejandro Brito had been attempting to slide, in a somewhat Boris-like fashion, a more nuanced fag-paper thin reading of the original suit cos the case has ‘evolved’ and “The damages are limited in a way that is different from when the case was originally filed,” Brito said in court. “Even if there has been a harm to the brand, we are not pursuing that as part of our damages….It’s a far more narrow scope of what this case is about.” Which given Trump is the art of the deal personified, how do you separate the man from the brand – he’s all brand, nothing but – I paraphrase the BBC’s lawyers response but you get the drift. Wonderfully Judge Lett said she lacked the power to drop the allegations of business damages from the complaint. If the suit continues, Trump is virtually certain to be required to sit for a deposition. However, the BBC has moved to dismiss the suit on the grounds that the UK-based broadcaster lacks enough of a presence in south Florida to give the court here jurisdiction over the network. There’s yet to be a ruling or scheduling of a hearing on that motion. Meanwhile I’ve signed up for the BBC mini-series airing in 2029!!
• Last week Trump Executively ordered the National Park Service to install signs on the sidewalks outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History cautioning visitors that the museum inside contains “inaccurate information” about, checks notes, American history. It’s basically the equivalent of slapping a cigarette-pack warning on a building, except instead of “this may cause cancer,” it’s “this may cause you to learn that slavery happened and was bad.” This all builds on a scathing 162-page report the White House Domestic Policy Council dropped on July 4th, because nothing says America’s birthday like commissioning a report accusing your own national history museum of “radical” left-wing ideology and “extreme political activism.” The report claims the museum “cannot be trusted to tell America’s story honestly,” which is an amazing thing to say about an institution whose main job is displaying old flags and Fonzie’s leather jacket. Trump’s order goes on to accuse Smithsonian leadership of viewing American history as “a ‘prime tool’ to advance ideas of social justice,” which I can only assume means someone put up a plaque near the Civil War exhibit that mentioned that the Confederacy lost. The order directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a man whose job description increasingly seems to include “install propaganda near tourist attractions,” to work with the Park Service to get these signs up on public walkways, pointing visitors toward “locations and resources for accurate information regarding America’s history.” What those resources actually are, the order doesn’t say, but I’m going to go ahead and guess that a peer-reviewed journal is unlikely to satisfy the administration as much as a Truth Social post from someone called Patriot1776. This comes just days after the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, was hauled in front of Congress twice to answer questions about her “loyalty to the United States,” which is a real sentence I just said in 2026, and not a scene from a Margaret Atwood book. The Smithsonian, for its part, declined to comment on the Executive Order, because what are they going to say? How do you even spell that sound that scholarly integrity makes when it’s being crushed under the fascist boot of the Ministry of Truth?
• Andy Burnham has been to the sea again, to the Dover sea and the sky, Farage’s been on about migrants again, I suspect that’s the reason why. Farage’s Reform party are saying they would deploy the biggest naval manoeuvre in the channel since the second world war and have the Royal Navy forcibly divert boats back to from whence they came. In a clear breach of those human rights treaties that were put in place precisely after the second world war including the European Convention on Human Rights, which shadow home secretary Chris Philp told us “The Conservative plan is to leave the ECHR so all illegal immigrants can be deported within a week of arrival. If Andy Burnham was serious he would do this – but he’s too weak.” Thankfully Andy Burnham is about solutions and not point-scoring and a spokesman for Labour said “Anger and easy answers won’t bring crossings down,” and establishing safe routes, you know the ones that Suella and Pritti dismantled would disincentivise the smuggling gangs selling passage in unsafe boats, that and reestablishing an uplift in the contribution to overseas aid. Farage’s Clacton by-election circus boasts the longest ballot paper in history at 3-feet long – a logistical problem for the electoral commission in charge of working out how to fold it up! Farage should be able to help he’s been stashing millions of folding paper in envelopes for years! In other gentle left-wing news Labour’s Bev Craig – looking like Andy Burnham and Yvette Coopers’ secret love-child – won the election for Mayor of Manchester, the position vacated by Andy to become PM, and Diane Abbott the grand dame of the old left has been re-admitted to the Labour Party after Starmer kicked that decision can down the road into the long grass after Abbott was found not to be in breach of whatever trumped up charges Starmer brought in to purge the left cos it made him unpopular. I wonder if Corbyn’s possibly stroking his chin now?

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