{"id":57236,"date":"2025-07-21T06:00:42","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T13:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=57236"},"modified":"2025-07-20T17:55:23","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T00:55:23","slug":"open-thread-july-21-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2025\/07\/21\/open-thread-july-21-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread July 21 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, an email from the Dekleptocracy Alliance (AKA anticorruptionaction.org) pointed out that Elon Musk&#8217;s AI chatbot, Grok, has a $200 million contract with the Pentagon and is &#8220;is now being embedded inside our most sensitive military infrastructure.&#8221; It is an email only, so I cannot link to the full letter, but it does go on, and it doesn&#8217;t get better. It&#8217;s just an email, not a post, and there is no link to the full text; if there were, I would have posted it. Also, Trinette came by, to take care of some stuff that I can&#8217;t. And Virgil&#8217;s aunt called to say his stepfather had passed away. This was not unexpected, as he was 100 last December. I can&#8217;t call Virgil, but when he calls me I shall tell him. He&#8217;s been expecting it and I&#8217;ve been telling him that when it happened his aunt Donna would let me know.<\/p>\n<p>If this reminds you of the opening of LesMiz &#8211; you are not alone. That was the first thing I thought of. &#8220;Look down, look down, sweet Jesus doesn&#8217;t care.&#8221; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/news\/story\/rumeysa-ozturk-what-i-witnessed-inside-an-ice-womens-prison\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">R\u00fcmesa Ozt\u00fcrk<\/a> is Muslim, but the principle is the same.<\/p>\n<p>I know there are hundreds and thousands of stories much like this. But one person&#8217;s story can speak louder than the numbers. You can be confident <a href=\"https:\/\/www.propublica.org\/article\/venezuelan-deportees-trump-immigration-asylum-el-salvador\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ProPublica<\/a> is looking into as many as they are aware of.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/KhFZizzAGjY?si=xMej0AOVbc-P2U74\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/AmH9pN0Cvmk?si=lzet4X4xC6JZtWjj\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-57242\" src=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/ice-agent.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"750\" height=\"983\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/ice-agent.jpg 750w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/ice-agent-229x300.jpg 229w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/ice-agent-114x150.jpg 114w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, an email from the Dekleptocracy Alliance (AKA anticorruptionaction.org) pointed out that Elon Musk&#8217;s AI chatbot, Grok, has a $200 million contract with the Pentagon and is &#8220;is now being embedded inside our most sensitive military infrastructure.&#8221; It is an email only, so I cannot link to the full letter, but it does go on, <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2025\/07\/21\/open-thread-july-21-2025\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":57127,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[4355,4111,6346,6553,6552,3811,3805],"class_list":["post-57236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","tag-animals","tag-cats","tag-deportations","tag-ice-detentions","tag-icestapo","tag-personal","tag-ukraine","category-35-id","category-3-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}