Sep
8
2025

"Do You Wanna Get Sloppy? Well, Do You, Punk?"

YouTube sez the video is "produced with Claude, ChatGPT, Suno AI, VEO, Photoshop's generative AI capabilities, Premiere Pro, and one human in the loop." Impressive! [The human is Greg Beato.]

And it comes to Pun Salad via Virginia Postrel's embedding it in her substack article: AI Slop and Human Play. She is, as usual, insightful about a topic that is surrounded by the Three Horsemen of Stagnation: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

“AI slop” is AI-generated content—text, video, photos, ads—that is poorly executed, generally annoying, notably inauthentic, and overly abundant. I’ve started receiving a lot of emails from services wanting me to hire them to promote The Fabric of Civilization. Some of these emails seem to represent real people who are using AI to write. Others are unsigned and don’t appear to have a human (even a fake one) in the loop. They’re just playing the game of large numbers. All seem to be scraping Amazon and regurgitating book descriptions found online. I imagine many of the press releases clogging my email box are similarly composed, although it’s hard to tell the difference between lame press releases written by humans and lame press releases written by AI. Neither gives any thought to the exact interests of the recipient.

More fun and insight at the link, of course.

Also of note:

  • The real news is all the pouncing MAGAs. Glenn "Blogfather" Reynolds takes to his substack to chronicle another example of MSM malpractice: From Rabble-Rousing to Rabble Snoozing. After noting how the media pumped up the stories around Nicholas Sandmann and George Floyd, he notes the relative "rabble-snoozing" silence for…

    Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, was killed on a Charlotte commuter rail train by a crazed black man, Decarlos Brown, Jr. He sat down behind her, and then, for no obvious reason, pulled out a knife and began stabbing her in the throat. There was blood everywhere.

    And there’s video, which the Charlotte town officials tried and failed to keep secret. But the national press is, as noted above, not simply downplaying it, but ignoring it.

    They’re not even making excuses. They might say that violence on commuter trains isn’t news — though I don’t know if that’s true when you’re talking Charlotte instead of the Bronx. They might say that black on white violence isn’t news, though that’s kind of an iffy position. Everyone knows, and DOJ statistics demonstrate, that’s it’s much more common than white on black, but do they want to invoke that as a justification? Maybe they don’t want to encourage random violence by crazy people? But they cover that all the time.

    What we're beginning to see instead are stories like this from Axios: Grisly Charlotte stabbing of Iryna Zrutska fuels MAGA's crime message.

    Yes, as noted above: "MAGAs Pounce" is the real story.

  • Off with their heads! Jonathan Turley notes the upswing in execution porn. The New Jacobins: Guillotines Return as Form of Political Expression. (Pardon his shameless book plug.)

    “We got the guillotine, you better run.”

    Those words could have easily been expressed at the turn of the nineteenth century as French Jacobins and other groups called for the heads of the wealthy and privileged classes.

    Indeed, for some of us, it was a bizarre sense of déjà vu. As the scene unfolded with this chant and a full-sized guillotine in Portland, I was putting final touches on my forthcoming book, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution. The book, published by Simon & Schuster, will be released in 2026 as part of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It explores the American and French Revolutions and why one became the most stable democracy in the world and the other became the blood-soaked “Terror.”

    The appearance of guillotines is becoming commonplace in protests by the left. From protests against Trump to those against Israel, the symbol of the Terror is being rolled out as a warning to those with opposing views: “We got the guillotine, you better run.”

    As another data point, Jacobin magazine bills itself as "a leading voice of the American left."

  • Clear skies ahead? Steven E. Koonin hails a positive output from the Trump Administration (to which he contributed), and it's hard to disagree: At Long Last, Clarity on Climate. (WSJ gifted link)

    A recent Energy Department report challenged the widespread belief that greenhouse-gas emissions pose a serious threat to the nation. It likely soothed Americans irked by forced energy transitions, but you would be wrong to assume it reassured many alarmed by hypothetical climate catastrophes.

    There is a disconnect between public perceptions of climate change and climate science—and between past government reports and the science itself. Energy Secretary Chris Wright understands this. It’s why he commissioned an independent assessment by a team of five senior scientists, including me, to provide clearer insights into what’s known and not about the changing climate.

    Collectively, our team brought to the task more than 200 years of research experience, almost all directly relevant to climate studies. The resulting peer-reviewed report is entirely our work, free from political influence—a departure from previous assessments. It draws from United Nations and U.S. climate reports, peer-reviewed research, and primary observations to focus on important aspects of climate science that have been misrepresented to nonexperts.

    Steven goes on to summarize some of the report's key findings. Worth a look!

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