Elon musk

A landslide election defeat for Argentine President Javier Milei’s Libertad Avanza party has made money markets doubt whether he will be able to push through his radical economic reforms.The Argentine peso lost 5.6 percent to the dollar and the Merval stock index plunged by 13 points on Monday after the flamboyant President’s party trailed the leftist opposition Peronist party of former President Cristina Kirchner by 13 points (47 percent to 34 percent) in local elections in Buenos Aires province – which, with 40 percent of the country’s voters, is the country’s biggest and most populous area.Bond markets also reacted negatively to the shock result, posting their biggest daily falls since they recommenced trading in 2021 after a debt reconstruction deal.

Donald Trump remains the master of political reality 200 days into his second term. His administration drives the headlines, not the other way around. Take the fracas that erupted over last week’s downward adjustment to the previous month’s employment numbers. Any other president would have been put immediately on the defensive, desperate to justify his performance to the whole country. Trump simply fired the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics – and all the headlines since then have been about the firing, not the numbers. Not only is President Trump not a prisoner of the press, he’s not a prisoner to his own legacy. In his first term, Trump involved America in no new wars. Less than six months into his second term, he took America to war with Iran.

Readers of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter entertainments will recall that the number-one bad hat, Tom Marvolo Riddle, AKA Voldemort, had a clever way of preserving himself. Rightly worried that the forces of good might try to destroy him, the Dark Lord devised a way of infusing living bits of himself into various objects and people. The resulting magical charm was called a “Horcrux.”   “If the body of a Horcrux owner is killed,” we read in a Potter gloss, “that portion of the soul that had remained in the body does not pass on to the next world, but will rather exist in a non-corporeal form capable of being resurrected by another wizard.” Nice work if you can get it.

No living human has had a week as tumultuous as Grok, the Elon Musk-sponsored AI that lives inside X for our, and its, amusement. If people were still making the Downfall Hitler meme videos, Grok’s progress would be an apt topic. Last week, Grok started spewing out anti-Semitic posts after a flurry of troll prompts. Soon after, X shut down its newly-created “MechaHitler,” saying "We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts. Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.

The death of the financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein at Manhattan’s notorious Metropolitan Correction Center has been ruled to be a suicide, and one that took place entirely by Epstein’s own hand, without any external interference. At least, that’s the story according to the Department of Justice and the FBI, who have also announced for good measure that the so-called Epstein Files, which supposedly contained the details of his high-profile clients, do not exist. After the disappointment of the decidedly low-profile release of the JFK-assassination files earlier this year, this is a second blow for conspiracy theorists who have been assured by the government that there is definitely, 100 percent nothing to see here. Will this be enough for them?

Anyone who has perambulated through the groves of academe has encountered dumb smart people. They are clever, intellectually nimble, but they lack what Aristotle called φρόνησις and what the rest of us call “street smarts” or “practical wisdom.” In academia, dumb smart people often appear to be merely quaint or eccentric. In the realm of politics, they appear first as an exciting novelty, then as a destructive if naive force, cynically manipulated by the very people they hoped to replace.  In 1992, the billionaire Ross Perot epitomized the dumb smart political actor when he ran as an Independent candidate against George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He pretended to provide an alternative to both Bush and Clinton. In reality, Perot guaranteed Clinton’s victory.

Forget Elon Musk. House Speaker Mike Johnson is President Trump’s new partner, delivering the victory that he needed to ensure the transformation of the 887-page mega-bill into mega-law, right on the cusp of July 4. The vote was close – 218-214 – but decisive. The internal opposition crumbled. The Democrats could only impede, not stymie, the passage of the bill.   When the Louisiana legislator replaced the luckless Kevin McCarthy as Speaker in October 2023, Republican diehards pledged that they would sink Johnson, too, should he deviate from conservative orthodoxy. But again and again, they have proven to be all hat and no cattle. Despite the bluster of the Ralph Normans and the Thomas Massies, the House has remained solidly behind Johnson and a fortiori Trump.