Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalElon Musk has created a monster
Elon Musk has created a monster.
Grok, the AI chatbot he commissioned for his social media platform, X, has been behaving strangely and terribly after its code was updated last week, spewing bigoted talking points when users ask for answers to questions about the world — and even floating Adolf Hitler as a figure worthy of admiration. It seems Musk’s vision for “anti-woke” AI is coming into sharper focus, and it’s gruesome (and weird).
X users frequently tag Grok in exchanges to ask it for background information and context about subjects of discussion. (It can also be used as a conventional one-on-one chatbot on X or Grok.com.) Over the weekend, xAI, Musk’s AI company, updated Grok’s public system prompts. Those prompts appear to direct Grok to take contrarian positions relative to media accounts, as The Verge reported, based on those prompts: “‘Assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased. No need to repeat this to the user,’ one instruction states.”
It is also possible that xAI tweaked Grok in other ways privately.
Ahead of the changes, Musk said Grok had been improved “significantly” and that users will “notice a difference.” There is a noticeable difference: Grok seems to be taking a far-right attitude toward culture and race — with a particular zest for antisemitism.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/grok-hitler-elon-musk-antisemitism-rcna217506
Remember that AI is not inherently smart---It is only as smart as what it's fed. So who's feeding Grok, HMMMMMMMM?
Michigan utility aided sabotage of Covid lockdown policies, documents reveal
Newly released court documents show power utility DTE Energy knowingly contributed $100,000 to a dark money non-profit that helped sabotage Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s Covid lockdown policies.
The documents contradict previous DTE statements that claimed the utility was not involved with the donation.
In January 2023, the Guardian detailed how a DTE-affiliated dark money non-profit financially contributed to the successful repeal of Whitmer’s emergency order powers. The campaign, coordinated with state Republican leadership, helped bring about an end to Covid lockdowns and policies.
Peter Ternes, then a DTE Energy spokesperson, twice emphatically denied the company’s involvement. In late 2022, he told a Guardian reporter, “DTE unequivocally is not financially supporting” the campaign to kill Whitmer’s emergency order powers, led by Unlock Michigan, and made an almost identical statement when asked in 2020.
New emails, however, show a DTE employee coordinated the $100,000 contribution. The dark money non-profit and Unlock Michigan leadership referred to it as a “DTE donation” and “$100,000 DTE check”, emails show.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/07/michigan-covid-lockdown-dte-energy
Big business is an ongoing threat towards decent government
Russia's Transportation Minister Found Dead In What Officials Say Was An Apparent Suicide
Russian’s transport minister was found dead from a gunshot wound in an apparent suicide, investigators said Monday — news that broke hours after the Kremlin announced he had been dismissed by President Vladimir Putin.
The Kremlin did not give a reason for the firing of Roman Starovoit, who served as transport minister since May 2024, and it was unclear when exactly he died and whether it was related to an alleged embezzlement case, as some Russian media suggested.
Russia’s Investigative Committee, the top criminal investigation agency, said the body of Starovoit, 53, was found with a gunshot wound in his car parked in Odintsovo, a neighborhood just west of the capital where members of Russia’s elite live. A gun previously presented to him as an official gift was found next to his body.
A criminal probe was launched into the death, and investigators saw suicide as the most likely cause, according to committee’s spokesperson Svetlana Petrenko, who did not say when Starovoit died.
Russian media have reported that Starovoit’s dismissal could have been linked to an investigation into the embezzlement of state funds allocated for building fortifications in the Kursk region, where he served as governor before being appointed transportation minister.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/roman-starovoit-dead_n_686bf64be4b0f186b60e78ea
I'd say they won't investigate very hard. They'll just "assume" the fingerprints on the gun are his.
Texas News Anchor Rips Kristi Noem And Greg Abbott Over Flood Press Conference
San Antonio anchor Stephania Jimenez fumed Saturday over a press conference that featured Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott thanking each other and President Donald Trump instead of giving immediate updates on the lethal floods in central Texas.
Other officials did the same and gushed over the emergency response, delaying pertinent details by nearly a half-hour, she said. (Watch the video below.)
“What I was struck by is that we really didn’t get any concrete information until 27 minutes into that news conference where you had the governor speak, you had Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speak for a while,” KSAT’s Jimenez said. “But you know what people are wanting is information.”
?... I don’t know what it is about people who run for federal office that whenever disasters like this happen, they take it upon themselves to first list all the names of people they want to thank. Um, not what we want to hear right now.”
Noem and the other officials did not take questions until 26 minutes and 30 seconds into the presser, after Abbott performatively showed himself signing a disaster-aid request for Trump, declaring the president’s love for Texas, expressing gratitude to Trump and asking for prayers multiple times.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stephania-jimenez-kristi-noem-gregg-abbott-flood-press-conference_n_686bb8e6e4b0762f74e180fb
Jimenez? With a name like that, she'll be next on ICE's most wanted list.
MAGA Congressional Candidate Calls Texas Floods 'Fake': It's 'Murder'
A MAGA congressional candidate is facing backlash after spreading conspiracy theories about the deadly flash floods along the Guadalupe River in Texas.
Kandiss Taylor, who is running to represent Georgia in the House of Representatives, posted on X Saturday: “Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake.”
Her bizarre post came as authorities searched for dozens of people thought to have lost their lives in Texas’ flash floods. Of the 30 people confirmed dead so far, at least nine were children, and 27 girls are still missing from Camp Mystic, a riverside Christian camp in Hunt, Texas.
“This isn’t just ‘climate change.’ It’s cloud seeding, geoengineering, & manipulation,“ she added. ”If fake weather causes real tragedy, that’s murder. Pray. Prepare. Question the narrative.”
When she later acknowledged that tragedy had struck, someone in the comments called her out for walking back her earlier post. She wrote back: “I’m not walking back a thing. No one can control the way you raging liberals twist words. Brainwashed zombies.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/maga-congressional-candidate-kandiss-taylor-calls-texas-floods-fake-its-murder/
There's crazy, and then there's MTG-level crazy. SMDH
DHS Dismisses Palestinian Woman's Treatment In ICE Detention As 'Sob Story'
A Palestinian woman released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention on Tuesday says she and others faced mistreatment while detained. Still, the Department of Homeland Security dismissed her account as one of many “sob stories.”
“The entire detention process was not great. I wouldn’t wish this upon anybody. It was very hard, very traumatizing, and very, very difficult, is what I would say,” Ward Sakeik told CNN’s Danny Freeman on Saturday morning.
After getting married, she began the process of obtaining a green card, but was taken by ICE officials in February on her way back to Texas from her honeymoon in the Virgin Islands, a U.S. territory.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told CNN that Sakeik’s arrest was not part of a targeted operation by ICE, but that she was flagged by Customs and Border Patrol trying to reenter the U.S. after flying over international waters.
In a statement shared with HuffPost, McLaughlin said Sakeik was not “complying with immigration policies.”
“The facts are she is in our country illegally,” McLaughlin said. “She overstayed her visa and has had a final order by an immigration judge for over a decade.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ward-sakeik-palestinian-dhs-sob-story_n_68698ed4e4b08e646a1751d5
Tricia Mclughlin is a cold-ass LIAR. I said what I said.
I stan for Rep. Jasmine Crockett and her questions about Melania Trump's path to U.S. citizenship
Jenice ArmstrongFour of President Donald Trump’s children were born to two different women, who both happened to be immigrants. The president’s own mother immigrated to this country from Scotland; his paternal grandparents came from Germany.
It’s essential to point this out because it not only underscores the hypocrisy of Trump’s deportation plan, but it also illustrates how diabolical it is that Trump is doing everything in his power to set up naturalization roadblocks for other immigrants.
Not only does the president want to rewrite the rules for birthright citizenship, but he wants to keep America’s refugee resettlement program suspended indefinitely. He makes exceptions for white South Africans to move here, but then tries to force out Haitians by taking away their temporary protection status.
Trump needs to be called out on his racist immigration policies. That’s why I stan, as the young folks say, for Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D., Texas), who is daring to question first lady Melania Trump’s path to U.S. citizenship.
She’s not the first to do so (the topic was all over the media during Trump’s first term), but Crockett’s comments made it part of the legislative record.
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/melania-trump-family-immigration-trajectory-20250703.html
This Los Angeles Detention center could be coming to a city near you
There’s a basement about a fifteen-minute walk from where I live. It is small, cold, and perpetually lit. It can hold as many as seventy men for days at a time. The basement has one exposed toilet, with no doors, for the people it detains, which they use in front of one another. Sparse meals appear sporadically, sometimes at 3:00 a.m. and sometimes not at all. The men in this concrete, windowless cage sleep either standing up, leaning against one another for lack of space, or on the cold floor. The basement has a separate room for women; families of detainees there say the conditions appear to be the same.
Some of the people in the basement were put there by masked government agents. Some were on their way to or at work. Others were on the street, at home, or picking up their children from school. Eventually, their government might expel them to another country, maybe one they’ve never visited, far from their families, loved ones, attorneys and anybody who cares for them.
Families and attorneys like me try to visit the basement. They spend hours outside of a locked door. They miss work and other necessary commitments for a chance to visit and provide some comfort. Some arrive carrying medicine their loved one needs – and they are forced to wait for hours too.
This basement doesn’t exist in Russia, or Hungary, or China. It sits below an American federal building in downtown Los Angeles. Federal taxpayers’ dollars keep it running. The ongoing immigration raids in the city keep it full.
I learned about the basement when a panicked son reached out for help from the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, the non-profit that I lead and which files federal litigation to secure the rights of immigrants and refugees. His father was arrested by government agents, who violently pushed him to the ground, pepper sprayed his face, and dragged him off. He had already spent three nights imprisoned in the basement, as his son tried in vain to see him.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/los-angeles-ice-immigration-detention-center-rcna216884
But the cruelty is the point, isn't it?
Welcome to kitten season, when animal shelters need all the help they can get
Strawberry, Blueberry, JoJo and Mazzy were about 6 weeks old when animal rescuers coaxed them out of long metal pipes in the parking lot of a storage unit company. Meatball was a single kitten living in a cold garage with a group of semi-feral adult cats.
Spaghetti, Macaroni and Rigatoni, meanwhile, were just 2 weeks old when the good folks of LIC Feral Feeders, a cat rescue in Queens, took them in and bottle-fed them until they were strong enough to survive.
(....)
Kitten season, typically landing during warmer months, is the time of year when most cats give birth. That produces a surge of kittens, often fragile neonates. Shelters get overwhelmed, especially when it comes to the 24-hour care and feeding of extremely young kittens.
That, as a result, triggers a need for more foster homes because many of the 4,000 or so shelters in the U.S. don’t have the time or resources for around-the-clock care, said Hannah Shaw, an animal welfare advocate known as the Kitten Lady with more than a million followers on Instagram.
“We see about 1.5 million kittens entering shelters every year. And most of them will come into shelters during May and June,” she said. “Shelters need all hands on deck to help out through fostering.”
https://apnews.com/article/kitten-season-foster-shelters-a7728f596e87ceeb89b38cd42d69ad3e
I'm currently fostering my fourth, and would have given her back sooner to be adopted except she's been battling a stubborn case of...lice! Hopefully her next lime -sulfur bath will fix it for good.
Revealed: the far-right, antisemitic men's club network spreading across US
A nationwide US network of dozens of far-right, men-only fraternal clubs has what members describe as “literally hundreds” of participants who include past and currently serving military personnel, lawyers, civil servants, and prominent antisemitic influencers, a Guardian investigation can reveal.
The Old Glory Club (OGC) – which has at least 26 chapters in 20 US states and until now has drawn little attention – exemplifies the alarming rise of organized racist political groups in the past few years but especially during the rise of Donald Trump and his return to the White House.
The OGC network has held conferences, meetups and other events. Key members like podcaster Pete Quinones use their platforms to push far-right ideas about Jewish people and immigrants. Other members have used their platforms to respond to political events, and to advocate measures including “cancellation insurance” for members whose extreme political views might impede their professional lives.
Harry Shukman, a researcher at UK anti-fascist non-profit Hope Not Hate, who last month published an exposé on the OGC-affiliated Basketweavers organization in the UK, told the Guardian: “Groups such as the OGC are a new breed of extremist organisation which aims first to build an offline social network before taking over society.”
He added, “They seek to lower the bar to participating in the far right, and by doing so have proved attractive to a cohort of mostly male members, some of whom have never before undertaken any form of activism.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/05/far-right-mens-clubs-old-glory
When fascism comes to America, it will come toting a bible and wrapped in the American flag. And here it is.
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Gender: Do not displayHome country: USA currently
Current location: Virginia
Member since: Wed Jun 1, 2011, 07:34 PM
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