- Losing My Perspicacity
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- Losing My Perpsicacity, August 25, 2025
Good morning and Happy Monday! Thanks for reading this morning. In Chicagoland, we had a high of 73 yesterday with brilliant sunshine and a delightful breeze, and all the windows to my house are finally open as I write this. Glorious.
Before we get to today’s news, something has been bugging me, and I want to correct the record. Sometime last week (the week before? I can’t remember), I was writing about AI, and I wrote this:
And, aside from putting people out of work and the environmental impact, this is my real beef with AI. We keep hearing about how it’s going to transform our lives and make everything better in every conceivable way.
That is entirely untrue, and I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote it.
My biggest problem with AI, aside from putting people out of work and the environmental impact, is that guys like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckberg have literally stolen all the content they’ve used to train their Large Language Models, or LLMs. Those are what generate the content in generative AI. Guys like Zuckerberg and Altman have pirated millions of copyrighted works to feed into their AI monsters.
I usually wait until later in the evening to write LMP, because writing it earlier in the day practically guarantees that huge news will break as soon as I’m done, and I’ll have to start all over. So I’m blaming my oversight on fatigue and ADHD. The reason it bothers me so much is that my book, Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America, is one of the books that shows up in The Atlantic’s search tool for LibGen, the pirated books database that Mark Zuckerberg used to train Meta’s LLM.
You spelled my name wrong, dipshits.
This is the second time my copyright has been violated and my book disseminated without compensation. On publication day, the guys over at Barstool read the entire thing on their YouTube channel for seven hours, essentially giving away a book I spent two years of my life writing for free. Watching Zuckerberg, who is $260 billion, pirate works from authors (most of whom probably got paid peanuts for their books) who put their blood, sweat, and tears into their work, all so that he can create a bot that will put more writers out of work, makes me incredibly angry.
What’s more, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who everyone seems to have forgotten is being sued for sexual abuse by his younger sister, has admitted that stealing copyrighted content is part of their business plan:
OpenAI — currently valued at a minimum $80 billion — told the British Parliament on Monday that its content-generating ChatGPT product would be impossible to create without the company's use of human-created copyrighted work for free. As reported by the Telegraph, the company's remarks were submitted to a House of Lords subcommittee which is weighing possible changes to AI and copyright law amid ferocious backlash from human writers and creators.
"It would be impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials … Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today's citizens," OpenAI said in its evidence filing, adding that the company believes "legally copyright law does not forbid training."
Too bad, so sad. Maybe the broligarchy should come up with something else to spend their time on, because watching billionaires steal work from artists so they can make billions more feels like the kind of thing someone should step in and stop. Where is President Elizabeth Warren when I need her?
Alas, artists aren’t getting any help from the courts. In June, a federal judge ruled that copyrighted content falls under the ‘fair use’ doctrine, as long as the original source was legally acquired. That case is still slated to go to trial, and several other cases are in the works, as well, many headed up by famous writers.
I recently signed on to one of the class actions — I’ll find out if I’m part of the class later in the year, which is why I was so befuddled that I left all of this out of my segment on AI.
At any rate, AI is bad, billionaire tech bros are worse, and please support authors and other artists whenever, however you can. We’re all in an existential fight for our livelihood right now.
On that note, and before we get to the news, a quick plea for you to consider becoming a paid subscriber of LMP. For the cost of a cheap cocktail — which I desperately need — per month, you can get LMP delivered to your inbox five days a week!
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Today: How to know if things are bad; Wes Moore’s trolling is hilarious; Why am I finding out about a new epidemic from the WHO and not the CDC?; and The High Note.
Let’s get into it.
How to know when things are bad
There are a lot of metrics we can use to decide just how bad things in America are under Donald Trump. Egg prices, for example. Today, the pasture-raised eggs I usually buy were $11.99 a dozen. That’s TWELVE DOLLARS for a dozen eggs. For $12, my eggs had better be Fabergé or at least have something hidden inside one of them, like chocolate. Needless to say, I did not purchase the $12 eggs.
Gas prices. The stock market. Employment numbers. These are all things we use to try to gauge where we are and how we’re doing. But I’m going to suggest a new metric: The number of former concentration camps put back into service.
The Trump administration opened an immigrant detention site at a former Japanese internment camp in Texas, leading to condemnation from politicians, advocacy groups, and descendants of survivors of the WWII-era program.
Fort Bliss, a military base headquartered in El Paso, is slated to be the site of the largest federal detention center in the country. It currently holds around 1,000 detainees, but it is expected to eventually hold 5,000. Costing more than $1 billion in private contracts, it has also been used as a base for deportation flights.
(J. Peterman voice) Well, that is certainly bleak. Nothing like resurrecting one of our country’s darkest moments and trying to dress it up as patriotism and keeping America safe.
“Comparisons of illegal alien detention centers to internment camps used during World War II are deranged and lazy,” DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin told Newsweek.
Well, it’s not a comparison, Trish. It’s literally being reopened. So if you didn’t want comparisons to the infamous and devastating Japanese internment camps (Italian and German-Americans were also held in some of these camps), you should have put it somewhere else.
As you may know, Star Trek actor and social media icon George Takei is one of the Japanese Americans held during WW2, and
about the eight months his family spent in camps in Arkansas and Tule Lake, California.
“They stopped on the front porch and with their fists they banged on the door. My father answered the door and they pointed those bayonets at all of us and told us to leave,” said Takei, who was 5.
When his mother came out of the house, “tears were streaming down her cheeks. The terror of that morning is seared into my memory,” Takei said.
I can not believe we are doing this again.
Wes Moore, troll extraordinaire
Maryland Governor Wes Moore, for my money, one of the best Democrats out there at the moment, has jumped into the redistricting fray, and he is threatening Donald Trump in the most hysterical way:
Eliminating the one seat is very funny
— Laura Bassett (@lebassett.bsky.social)2025-08-24T23:18:34.890Z
Forcing the entire state to redistrict just to get rid of one GOP seat is the level of pettiness all Dems should aspire to be on. But hey! Every little bit helps. That one Republican-controlled seat in Maryland is held by Andy Harris, and he’s the kind of dumbass who posts things like this on X:
Get his ass, Wes.
Meanwhile, New York appears ready to do its own mid-decade restricting:
The gerrymandering has caught the eye of New York politicians: Governor Kathy Hochul responded by issuing a scathing statement late Wednesday, which says, in part: "Tonight, Texas Republicans delivered Donald Trump the rigged map he demanded."
"I didn't ask for this. I wish everybody played fair. But if you're going to change the rules of the game in the middle of it, then I'm not sitting on the sidelines and letting that happen," said Hochul.
The Democrat has vowed to try to move forward with mid-decade redistricting in New York – a process that would involve changing the state’s constitution, which prohibits gerrymandering and specifies that redistricting occur once a decade.
I am not a huge fan of Kathy Hochul, but if she gets this done, I won’t say another bad thing about her for, like, at least six months.
We’re waiting on you in Illinois, JB.
Is the CDC back online yet?
I realize that we’re gutting the public health apparatus in this country because RFK Jr.’s brain worm told us to or whatever, but I would have appreciated a heads-up on this one from someone in the United States government. Thank God for the World Health Organization.
Officials with the World Health Organization are alerting the public to a potential revival of epidemic proportions. New reports show the chikungunya virus is spreading outside of its typical distribution, according to Reuters.
***
Right now, an estimated 5.6 billion people across 119 countries are at risk of contracting the virus as it spreads to Europe and other continents, per Reuters. WHO officials are concerned that the pattern is similar to an epidemic of the disease that happened between 2004 and 2005 and impacted nearly half a million people.
Feels fairly reminiscent of the fall of 2019, no?
The chikungunya virus hasn’t been reported in the US (yet), but it has made its way to Western Europe and Latin America (200,000+ cases), places it hadn’t been seen before. It’s also reached endemic status in Mexico. Given the number of Americans going back and forth to Mexico and Latin America, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before we’re dealing with it here, too.
Although it is rarely fatal, chikungunya causes excruciating and prolonged joint pain and weakness.
“You have people who were working, with no disabilities, and from one day to the next, they cannot even type on a phone, they can’t hold a pen, a woman cannot even hold a knife to be able to cook for her family,” said Dr. Diana Rojas Alvarez, who leads chikungunya work at the W.H.O. “It really impacts quality of life and also the economy of the country.”
***
Between 2005 and 2007, more than two-thirds of all the disabilities — including that caused by cancer, arthritis and diabetes — reported in India were the result of a chikungunya outbreak that was sweeping through the country.
YIKES.
Mosquitos spread the chikungunya virus, so if you live in an area where mosquitoes are plentiful, there’s a chance the virus, like West Nile, could eventually reach your neck of the nape. There is a vaccine (two, actually), but you can protect yourself by wearing bug spray and avoiding being outside when mosquitoes are out. And for the love of God, dump out any standing water in your yard. Virus or no, we don’t need to set up mosquito brothels around humans. Oh, and if you think you have dengue fever, get tested for chikungunya.
I’m telling you this because two hamsters on a wheel and a bunch of people Aaron Rodgers follows on TikTok are running the CDC these days. I’m really looking forward to having a functioning federal government again someday.
The High Note
Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.
Today’s inspiration is the people of Orlando, who erased Ron DeSantis’s erasure of the Pulse nightclub shooting in no time flat.
People restore the Orlando pulse pride crosswalk
— Gwendolyn Corvid (@gwen-corvid.bsky.social)2025-08-22T23:16:03.349Z
That makes me feel so good about the world. You know what else is good about the world? Freddie Mercury.
Love is love is love is love is love.
Survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.
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