If you think Lemmy is bad, check out 4chan/b and /pol. We’ve had a few active shooters forecast there first, but it’s ignored in a sea of statements of intent and calls to violence.

An awful lot of people have suicidal or homicidal thoughts cross their mind. Doubly so in an era in which entire demographics have no plausible hope for their future. I, for one, want to see the lifetime appointments of Federalist Society jurists become a liability. Especially, Justice Kavanaugh.

So this incident raises a question of what specific clause of text convinced a human agent to escalate the matter to escalate to authorities who are very fond of using deadly force. Or if this is just a matter of a corporate CYA response.

So I saw a few relevant newspieces:

~ Companies are now ceasing their mandate to workers to use AI to do things that used to be done without AI. They’re now saying don’t use AI just to use AI. They’re trying to reduce their token purchases.

~ The estimation now for AI use cases is to reconsider if tokens cost ten times their current price. If the use case is still worth it, then that use case will likely survive the bubble. If it’s not worth it, it’s time to hire back employees.

~ The hyperscale AI industry will have to make $6 trillion annually to break even. Amazon makes $2 trillion by selling people material stuff. Walmart is similar. There may not be a market for $6 trillion in tokens every year, even from government projects. Also, it’s a bad sign if government projects are propping up the whole stock market.

~ China is mostly turning to a software AI model which does home and small business AI tasks fairly well without buying compute from a hyperscaler. You get a gaming machine, get open source AI software and a dozen terabytes of training data, and you should be able to create slop, vibe code or fix the grammar and style of your report. Also, hyperscale models are opinionated and don’t like certain topics. Home-grown AI doesn’t have those objections.

Liberal denominations — the ones that are consistent in their regard for beatitudes and calls to care for the poor, sick, isolated and stranger — have been on the ropes for some time. There was a lot of migration from liberal faiths into the atheist movement and secular community groups. And a lot fewer people went to church.

This would be likely a mass exodus from mainline and fundamentalist groups and yes, it’s fueled by the rise of white Christian nationalism and the association of MAGA and Trump with Christianity. Young people are seeing WCN as exemplary of what to expect in any Christian ministry, and want nothing to do with it.

Curiously, the He Gets Us movement utilized Jesus’ call to compassion only as a marketing tool, but was promoting WCN ministries who stand against those ideas, so it onlt taught its rarget audience to distrust Christian media.

It was noted by Bob Woodward in # Fear: Trump in the White House that Trump wanted to isolate the US from all other nations the way an abusive spouse isolates their partner to control them.

Generally, I avoid people who engage in MAGA talking points. The massive, oligarch-sponsored, far-right propaganda machine that dominates social media and television viewership uses the same brainwashing techniques used on US soldiers in Korea, and there’s no cure for that yet.

We know human beings can be manipulated. It’s why we regulate advertising and prosecute grift. FOX News should be unlawful has it stands, but so should gambling and here we are.

My own father is a MAGA disciple and an avid viewer of FOX News. He’s isolated from all other news sources, which is what they do. I have to protect myself from him.

This is what you asked for
Heavy is the crown…

If it were about Iranian nuclear weapon development, it wouldn’t be NASA doing the surveillance. Although weather phenomena is in NASA’s purview.

We already had high confidence intel before the war Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon. But since then, Trump has expressed that a nuke is the only thing he would respect.

Here in the US, we’ve been cultivating idiocy with a long standing anti-education movement in the Republican party.

More exactly, there are a multiple intersecting movements:
~ No public education / No education for the poors
~ Religious (Christian nationalist ideology) education for all
~ Charter schools as grift
~ Obey authority. Trust the state.

And these figured into the instant army that rallied to Trump in 2015-2016 from the rest of the Republican party. Principal figures from the party watched their own ideology collapse, and there was nothing they could do about it.

Masculinity in 2026 America is doing rude or harmful shit to show you’re beyond the reach of consequences, or just dont give a fuck. It’s Nietzsche’s discharge its strength quote turned into culture-war ideology.

The recent examples I use are Hokit’s comments about Michelle Obama at the White House UFC match, or Trump getting a World Cup red card penalty cancelled because he wanted it.

There are probably more recent examples. Renaming Lake Ontario comes to mind. Bombing Iran or Gaza are particularly grotesque examples.

Usually, US law enforcement errs on the side of illegal since they have the presumption of good faith (or at least did until ICE went gonzo about lies and cover-ups).

But anything that looks suspicious counts as probable cause meaning they can search you and relieve you of cash and valuables. Nowadays, they presume they can jusy rob you and it enhances the precinct budget for fun stuff.

We see this kind of overpolicing done more to minorities than whites, but so long as you don’t look super rich (enough to have a lawyer on your contacts list) then you’re fair game.

If this sort of thing is uncommon in their parts, it’s going to draw more attention than a red sports car.

In the Saints Row series they’re called kneecappers and I tried and uninstalled them because they caused too much mayhem. They also appear in the Spy Hunter 1983 coin-op video game

I remember seeing them on Speed Racer used by villains before seeing the chariot race version in Ben Hur.

IRL they’re obviously a hazard and inappropriate in traffic where people are just trying to collaboratively get home. (And yes, traffic is a collective cooperative effort, and we see that as soon as someone gets antagonistic.)

But Americans imagine themselves rugged individualists, a component of capitalist propaganda, and like to show they’re rebels with shit like rolling coal and truck nuts.

This totally looks like a FAFO moment that is going to turn into a regulatory statute.

Since it’s not a firearm, I doubt courts or officials will be interested at all in pursuing second-amendment liberties over this. They seem not to care about knives or ninja gear, either.

For a less bleak answer, they’re powered by kids wandering through the toy store amazed at all the rows.

So cybercrime is apparently not cybercrime when a major hyperscale AI does it.

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Sadly, there is an astounding number of stupid ignorant, gullible people who have not been trained in media literacy.

In fact, the problem is so epidemic we should have more organizations that create and proliferate media literacy content.

Such as If a news story sounds dubious, or if you are particularly invested in a story being true, search for other coverage from other news agencies, and (if the story isn’t verbatim) check the facts. The details that are consistent between separate coverage are more reliable than the rest.

Paywall or whatever bypass

It’s not new. Once it became possible to shop hi-res photographs, it became standard to narrow fashion models slightly in order to make them look even thinner.

I learned about it from documentaries intended to highlight the unrealistic appearance expectations that are driven by media.

When I see conservative political or ideological ads with black people, I assume they’re (desperate) actors, but AI works too.

Predicted by the Twilight Zone

ETA Yeah, our C-Suite employees are very rich nowadays, so much that it’s difficult for them to not fail upwards when they make stupid (or harmful) decisions.

Also human upper management and owners resent their own workforce, hence RTOs, efforts to micromanage them, denial of breaks and so on, all of which drastically reduce morale and productivity. This figures in to the hope that AI will replace human workers (almost) entirely, even if AI systems require more cost and maintenance and are less reliable.

But we don’t train AI based on logic, rather we train it on what’s been done before, hence, for example, predictive policing programs carry the same racial biases that the human-run justice system does, on which they are based. So AI executives may carry the same resentment-fueled policies that their human counterparts do.

Also if they’re entirely advisory, well, C-suite folk are not great at listening to advice. They tend to believe they’re the smartest guy in the room.

George W. Bush was not that long ago. He (too) won with a popular minority. He won by shenanigans in Florida with the help of a partisan SCOTUS.

Bush ran as a compassionate conservative_ but he moved hard-right as soon as he was in office. He started abusing power such as his conspicuous legal-boilerplate signing statements. (Essentially, _I don’t have to enforce this law, IF i don’t want to.) He immediately started rolling back environmental and consumer protections.

Then 9/11 happened, and we went to war, and language started pivoting towards Iraq and WMDs. Joseph Wilson wrote an article about how there’s no yellowcake (processed uranium) and to get revenge, the administration (via Scooter Libby) burned the CIA operative Valerie Plame, which was once a huge offense to the intelligence sector during the Cold War. I’m still sore about it, but I’m still sore about much of the Bush administration.

Soon we started learning about the extrajudicial abductions of Arab, Muslim, Americans, extraordinary rendition (to black sites), torture, the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, the PMC black ops (precursors to drone-strikes) and so on.

It was awful. So much that the Democrats were taking seriously blaxk and women candidates for the first time. So much so, that Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize, mostly for not being Bush. (Even he was surprised.)

I thought the US would never elect a Republican again.

I totally overestimated the civic savvy of American voters.