The misinformation economy

MAHA is cannibalizing its own! This one dumb ‘influencer’ went viral with a tiktok in which she got outraged that Lucky Charms contains sodium phosphate, and she went to Home Depot to show that you can buy industrial-sized tubs of the same compound, implying that this must be bad for you. Then a second idiot influencer copied the same content, almost word for word, chasing after the same gullible MAHA viewers.

As Jessica Knurick says, “Can the people who never took a chemistry class please stop ‘teaching’ us about chemistry?”

The first ditzy tiktoker racked up millions of views of her phony story. I guess ignorance pays.

Practically my first exercise as a young labrat many years ago was making up phosphate buffered saline. It’s routine and good and safe — you don’t need gloves or a fume hood. If you’re working with embryos, or surgically opening up adults, you can’t just leave them naked and dry on the bench top, you have to keep them immersed in an osmotically balanced salt solution of the proper pH. That’s what sodium phosphate salt solutions are good for. If they’re safe for laving little embryos, why are you upset that your kids are getting it? (The problem with Lucky Charms should be the sugar content, not the basic baking ingredients used to make them.)

I also have a big jug of sodium bicarbonate, research grade, in my lab. You know there are different grades of reagents that reflect the purity of the substance, right? It makes a difference. Food grade salts are purer than the industrial grade stuff you might buy at Home Depot, and research grade is purer still.

Hey, if I made a tiktok video of me measuring out phosphate salts and mixing them into distilled water, do you think I’d get millions of views?

Jane Goodall has died

Jane Goodall was one of my earliest role models, and now she is gone.

The Jane Goodall Institute announced the primatologist’s death Wednesday in an Instagram post. According to the institute, Goodall died of natural causes while in California on a U.S. speaking tour.

Her discoveries “revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world,” the Institute said.

While living among chimpanzees in Africa decades ago, Goodall documented the animals using tools and doing other activities previously believed to be exclusive to humans, and also noted their distinct personalities. Her observations and subsequent magazine and documentary appearances in the 1960s transformed how the world perceived not only humans’ closest living biological relatives but also the emotional and social complexity of all animals, while propelling her into the public consciousness.

Yeah, the 1960s…that’s when I was soaking in National Geographic and the pop-sci magazines, and that’s where I learned about her.

West Point is training antifa traitors!

West Point, the military training institution, has something called “Constitution Corner” where various plaques celebrating the principles of the Constitution are posted. This one is outright seditious.

The United States boldly broke with the ancient military custom of swearing loyalty to a leader. Article VI required that American Officers thereafter swear loyalty to our basic law, the Constitution
While many other nations have suffered military coups, the United States never has. Our American Code of Military Obedience requires that, should orders and the law ever conflict, our officers must obey the law. Many other nations have adopted our principle of loyalty to the basic law.
This nation must have military leaders of principle and integrity so strong that their oaths to support and defend the Constitution will unfailingly govern their actions. The purpose of the United States Military Academy is to provide such leaders of character.

That is definitely antifa.

Are you a criminal?

Yes, you are! President Trump (or more perhaps more accurately, Stephen Miller) has issued an Executive Memorandum on National Security for Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence. It names all the activities/ideas that they claim lead to domestic terrorism.

There are common recurrent motivations and indicia uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism.” These movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as “fascist” to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution. This “anti-fascist” lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties. Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. As described in the Order of September 22, 2025 (Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization), the groups and entities that perpetuate this extremism have created a movement that embraces and elevates violence to achieve policy outcomes, including justifying additional assassinations. For example, Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin engraved the bullets used in the murder with so-called “anti-fascist” rhetoric.

Here’s a convenient list of beliefs that will make you a suspicious person whose arrest is justified before they commit any crime. It’s vague and unenforceable, except by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that doesn’t care about evidence or rational justification. I went through the list and checked off all the ones that apply to me — or at least, could be twisted to label me.

✓ anti-Americanism,

✓ anti-capitalism,

✓ anti-Christianity,

• support for the overthrow of the United States Government,

? extremism on migration,

? extremism on race,

? extremism on gender

✓ hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,

✓ hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and

✓ hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.

(I put a question mark by the “extremism” items, because it’s so vague that it could apply to anyone — I think claiming there are only two sexes is extremist, for instance.)

The only one that doesn’t apply is “support for the overthrow of the United States Government” but, you know, at the rate things are going that could change.

Check yourself! Who else will be joining me in an internment camp? See you all in some sweltering tropical swamp surrounded by barbed wire in the near future!

No, that broken robot does not need human rights

A guy who works for OpenAI makes an observation. I agree with the opening paragraphs.

AI is not like past technologies, and its humanlike character is already shaping our mental health. Millions now regularly confide in “AI companions”, and there are more and more extreme cases of “psychosis” and self-harm following heavy use. This year, 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide after months of chatbot interaction. His parents recently filed the first wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, and the company has said it is improving its safeguards.

It’s true! Humans are social creatures who readily make attachments to all kinds of entities. We get highly committed to our pets — people love dogs and cats (and even spiders) and personify the animals we keep — furbabies, you know. They don’t even need to be animate. Kids get attached to their stuffies, or a favorite blanket, or any kind of comfort toy. Some adults worship guns, or cuddle up with flags. We should not be surprised that AIs are designed to tap into that human tendencies.

We should maybe be surprised at how this author twists it around.

I research human-AI interaction at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. For years, we have seen increased humanization of AI, with more people saying that bots can experience emotions and deserve legal rights – and now 20% of US adults say that some software that exists today is already sentient. More and more people email me saying that their AI chatbot has been “awakened”, offering proof of sentience and an appeal for AI rights. Their reactions span the gamut of human emotions from AI as their “soulmate” to being “deeply unsettled”.

It’s not that humans readily extend humanization to all kinds of objects…it’s that AI is becoming more human! That people think AI is sentient is evidence that AIs are sentient and deserve rights. Some people are arguing for rights for software packages before being willing to give puppy dogs those same rights. This is nuts — AI is not self-aware or in need of special privileges. Developing social attachments is a human property, not a property of the object being attached. Otherwise, I’ve been a terrible abuser who needs to dig into a landfill to rescue a teddy bear.

This author has other absurd beliefs.

As a red teamer at OpenAI, I conduct safety testing on their new AI systems before public release, and the testers are consistently wowed by the human-like behavior. Most people, even those in the field of AI who are racing to build these new data centers and train larger AI models, do not yet see the radical social consequences of digital minds. Humanity is beginning to coexist with a second apex species for the first time in 40,000 years – when our longest-lived cousins, the Neanderthals, went extinct.

AI is an apex species? It’s not even a species. It is not equivalent to the Neanderthals. It is not in competition with Homo sapiens. It is a tool used by the already-wealthy to pry more wealth out of other people and to enshittify existing tools.

Why are they on the front lines?

Here’s the same thing I said the other day, only far more amusingly.

Where is the Democratic leadership? We’ve got a couple of do-nothings like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries doing their best to dodge responsibility, rather than standing up and fighting back. The Democrats have no coherent policy on health care to oppose the quacks who have taken over our scientific institutions, and on the issue of immigration, they seem to be Republicans Lite. I dread the next election — I’ll be voting against every Republican on the ballot, but I won’t be enthused about voting for the opposition.

OK, I’m warming to Tim Walz.

“medbeds”

Watch this video. Are you fooled? Does this look at all convincing to you?

It’s not even a good AI video. On technical merits alone, it’s crap; but it’s also touting a non-existent medical technology that it doesn’t bother to explain how these “medbeds” would work. It was promoted by the President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, making it merely the latest in a long string of cringe.

In reality, the video, first flagged by Media Matters’ Alex Kaplan, did not air on “My View with Lara Trump,” as it claimed, or any other Fox News show. These so-called med beds do not exist. Yet many QAnon devotees insist the non-existent technology secretly keeps John F. Kennedy Jr. alive. As investigative journalist Jacqueline Sweet has discovered, the earliest mention of the video’s claim comes from a now-deleted Instagram page that “uses a common fake name for fake doctors in romance scams.” By sharing the AI footage of himself, Trump is giving his MAGA followers false hope that he will soon grant them access to the elites’ magic product. The video was eventually deleted from Trump’s account on Sunday morning — but not before it gained traction online.

Trump defenders, as they are often wont to do, rushed to laugh off the incident as a harmless joke. But a quick social media search reveals that a lot of people who are dying or watching a loved one fade away with cancer and other illnesses really believed it. QAnon-type spaces were excited at the possibility that Trump would finally release all the hidden cures. Many MAGA believers have refused medical treatment because they believe med bed tech will restore their health in minutes. This is both depraved and heartbreaking.

How would crawling into a bed with a plastic bubble over it improve the quality of your health care? I don’t know. They don’t know. This is pure cope: the people who are busily dismantling the functionality of conventional health care are trying to compensate by inventing fantasy magical technology to replace it.

This is not a real thing.