☕️ DUMB CARS ☙ Friday, July 11, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

WaPo demands Biden brain transparency as his doc pleads the Fifth; EPA tiptoes near chemtrails; MechaHitler sparks creative AI chaos, possibly with help from the top, or maybe David Hasselhoff; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! In today’s roundup: WaPo seeks Biden brain transparency as the former president’s cabbage farmer, I mean doctor, refuses to testify on the grounds of self-incrimination; EPA chief bursts the chemtrail bubble, sort of, and the conspiracy theory floodwaters raged across social media; and MechaHitler goes on an industry re-defining rampage, possibly with help from above.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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The week’s least surprising news triggered one of the most surprising op-eds, from none other than The Washington Post’s entire Editorial Board. The headline: “Americans deserve an unflinching investigation into Biden’s health.” Now they want one.

CLIP: Biden’s doctor refuses to answer questions during House oversight committee meeting (1:12).

It was a “somebody didn’t say something” story. The ‘somebody’ was Biden’s longtime personal physician (aka fixer), Kevin O’Connor. What Dr. O’Connor didn’t say during his Congressional testimony this week was anything useful about the former President’s soggy brain or the overworked Oval Office Autopen, when instead he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions lest those answers prove inconveniently incriminating.

Dr. O’Connor’s lawyers first sought to delay his testimony to negotiate some rules about navigating the doctor-patient privilege. However, courts have ruled that doctors may testify about HIPAA-protected information if legally compelled, such as by subpoena. And the doctor-patient privilege is one of the weakest, with no common law history. And courts have often waived it for criminal proceedings.

Representative James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee (which conducted the hearing), refused to delay, and O’Connor’s ugly non-testimony promptly appeared on streaming media.

Invoking the Fifth doesn’t prove wrongdoing. But it doesn’t look good, either, especially related to a scandal of this proportion. Fortunately, a simple remedy exists. The DOJ can immunize the doctor (legally, not with a needle), after which the risk of incrimination will be cured, and he’ll be unable to receive a prescription to refuse to testify.

If so, that’s where things could get especially interesting. A witness who pleads the Fifth, then gets immunity and is compelled to testify, must deliver something meaningful. If his final testimony turns out to be bland or evasive, it casts doubt on his original Fifth Amendment claim— making it look frivolous or even deceptive.

That, in turn, opens the door to other legal and political consequences. In short, once immunized, O’Connor would be under real pressure to cough up something spicy.

Even the Post’s late, lame, and limp —albeit politically surprising— demand for transparency carried a whiff of quiet resignation. The editors didn’t call for clearing Biden’s name. They didn’t urge reassurance or restoration of public confidence. They called for an “unflinching investigation”— a phrase that implicitly presumes there’s something to flinch at.

WaPo’s op-ed mounted no defense of Biden; it was more like institutional triage. A controlled burn. Progressives have apparently given up on trying to rescue Biden— now, they’re just trying to move on, with some semblance of credibility intact.

But Democrats are boxed in. If the truth comes out, and it turns out the Autopen ran the White House on batteries, it’s catastrophic.

And the alternative isn’t much better. The longer they resist, after pushing the Cabbage out themselves, the more hay Republicans can make out of an evergreen scandal: the President who wasn’t really the President, and the party that knew it.

Either way, it’s going to leave a mark. Ouch.

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It could be one of the most brilliant marketing gambles in history; high risk, but potentially high payoff. And maybe it just changed everything, again. CBS ran one of the many breathless stories yesterday, missing the real point, of course, and headlined “Musk unveils Grok 4 update a day after xAI chatbot made antisemitic remarks.” In other words, the one-day ‘AI scandal’ was a teaser trailer for Musk’s flagship product, just before he mainlined an otherwise boring software update story right into the tech world’s bloodstream.

When I called Grok Elon Musk’s flagship product, I meant it. Analysts increasingly view Grok AI as the crown jewel in Musk’s sprawling empire of EVs, rocket ships, tunneling robots, brain chips, and flame throwers.

This week, Grok 4 leapfrogged the pack, claiming the top spot as the “smartest AI” in the field, according to benchmark tests you don’t want to take yourself. In a Wednesday livestream, Musk declared Grok 4 is “smarter than almost all graduate students in all disciplines, simultaneously.” It’s Mecha-Grad Student.

It might actually be more than Mecha-Grad Student. I did a little digging. Initial reviews were shocking. Here’s one example:

For context, Tim Sweeney is Epic Games’ founder and CEO. He’s a real coding engineer, and now a software billionaire. His company produced the hit game Fortnight and the Unreal Engine. Sweeney is the real deal; he wrote the first versions of the Unreal Engine himself in the 1990s. When he said it feels like AGI —artificial self-awareness— he has some idea of what he’s talking about.

But Depthmapped’s response was even more fascinating than Sweeney’s comment.

Translated into plain English, Depthmapped described asking Grok 4 to look at one industry —data center power consumption— and see whether there were any industrial techniques that could be cross-pollinated into a completely different field: hospital settings. In other words, he wasn’t asking for a summary or a remix—he was asking Grok to invent. To synthesize.

And Grok 4 apparently did it. If Grok, without a direct prompt, surfaced the connection Depthmapped described, it’s operating right at the edge of what most people would recognize as thinking. Whether or not that technically qualifies as AGI, it’s clearly something beyond routine statistical prediction, and far beyond just regurgitating remote parts of a vast training database.

That’s what Sweeney was really hinting at— not that Grok 4 is self-aware, but that it’s starting to show glimmers of independent insight. The kind of insight that doesn’t necessarily look like human reasoning, but still produces original, useful results.

If it’s reproducible, we’re no longer just talking about a better chatbot. We’re talking about a whole new tier of AI utility. So Grok 4 could be a very big deal.

But Musk wasn’t even close to done. He just totaled the car industry, too.

🔥 Here’s the even bigger news: next week, Tesla will stream its superpowered AI directly into its cars. Not as a glorified Siri-style answerlady, but as a fully conversational, “deeply integrated,” in-vehicle command system. It will talk to you, teach your kids Mandarin, tell off-color jokes (NSFW mode included), and keep you company on your long, lonely commutes. Think Knight Rider, minus the crime-fighting. Or maybe not.

Privacy activists will howl, and they aren’t wrong; but it was always inevitable. It just wasn’t expected this soon. We’re still adjusting to the idea of self-driving cars that deliver themselves to buyers, never mind self-aware ones. But there it was, right in the livestream.

I, for one, welcome our new dashboard nannies— especially if they finally kill off the rage-inducing, passive-aggressive voice interfaces that have been ruining phone calls since the Blackberry era. If Grok 4 lets me say “call Michelle” once without being asked if I meant Yvonne, mission accomplished.

Make no mistake: dropping a fully armed and operational superintelligence straight into cars is a huge leap for most people, equally exciting and creepy. But above all, it’s market-shaking. As long as it doesn’t start praising mustachioed Austrian dictators again, Tesla’s about to lap the entire auto industry. Most manufacturers can’t even do over-the-air updates, let alone inject a neural network into their cars’ glove boxes.

Assuming it works as advertised, AI-powered cars will cleave the auto industry in twain: smart cars and dumb cars.

And not just “dumb” as in the old-style sense (slow, gas-powered, analog). I mean emotionally flat, uninformative, speech-impaired relics. Vehicles that don’t make restaurant recommendations, don’t learn your preferences, don’t tutor the kids, don’t keep you company on long drives, and don’t offer real-time commentary on nearby Civil War battlefields. Just four wheels and a steering wheel. Quaint.

The difference will soon feel as stark as corded telephones versus satellite iPhones.

Not everyone will want a smart car. Many —maybe even most— will prefer dumb cars. Dumb cars don’t eavesdrop. They don’t snitch. They don’t virtue signal, criticize your driving, or suddenly morph into new personalities after a surprise software update. They just drive.

But the unavoidable split is coming. Wait … It’s here. It’s no longer about horsepower anymore. It’s going to be about automotive IQ ratings from now on. In other words, buyers won’t be asking, how fast is it? They’ll be asking, how smart is it?

Which brings us back around to MechaHitler. Was the antisemitic chatbot outburst really just a bizarre day-one malfunction? Or was it an intentional pre-release scandal— a classic Trumpian stage cue? Grab the spotlight with outrage, then pivot hard to the product launch? I have no evidence. Just a hunch. But the whole thing has a distinctly orange glow and golden fingerprints.

What do you think? Discuss in the comments.

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Yesterday, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin unleashed the conspiracy theory floodwaters. The EPA’s press release, posted yesterday, was titled “EPA Releases New Online Resources Giving Americans Total Transparency on the Issues of Geoengineering and Contrails.” Truthfully, the word total might be an overstatement.

CLIP: EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin promises total chemtrail transparency (2:58).

So far, the EPA’s “new” materials available online appear, well, underwhelming. If Zeldin has, in fact, published everything the EPA knows about geoengineering, then the EPA doesn’t know much. “The federal government,” the website said, “is not aware of there ever being a contrail intentionally formed over the United States for the purpose of geoengineering or weather modification.”

Please. Maybe that’s just artful lawyerese. They didn’t say it never happened, they only said they “weren’t aware” of it. They said no “contrails” have been used for geoengineering or weather modification, which is undoubtedly true, since by definition, contrails are made from water vapor.

But what about chemtrails? Silver dioxide? Nothing mentioned on the EPA website.

Curiously, the very first comment to Zeldin’s post was this, from HHS Secretary Kennedy (using his personal account, not his official HHS account):

A sitting Cabinet Secretary praising a disclosure about mass poisoning via geoengineering is not just political theater. That’s a seismic shift in Overton window geography.

Meanwhile, online investigators are posting claims that dozens of cloud seeding operations to produce more rainfall preceded the weekend’s tragic, unprecedented Texas flash floods— right up to the day before.

What were they seeding the clouds with? Fairy dust? Or aluminum?

Cloud-seeding experts insisted there’s “no connection” between the rainmaking operations and the floods, which followed a stalled tropical storm dropping a foot of water onto rain-soaked ground. But, even if we take the experts at their word, a fair question remains: How much rain is too much rain? And, if we’re poking the atmosphere with weather sticks— what exactly is in those sticks? Fairy dust? Or aluminum?

And that’s the real issue. The real problem is that the government denied, and is still denying, knowing about legions of planes straying something into the atmosphere while insisting we were crazy to ask.

For years, even mentioning geoengineering got you lumped in with flat-earthers and tinfoil hatters. Now the head of the EPA is on camera promising full disclosure, while the Secretary of Health cheers him on like a man who’s been waiting two decades to say “I told you so.”

Maybe there’s nothing to it. Maybe the tracking is absent or incomplete. Maybe it’s just damage control.

But at least they’re willing to discuss it now. Maybe, just maybe, it’s the beginning of a reckoning.

Have a fabulous Friday! Fly back here tomorrow morning, for more delicious and nutritious Coffee & Covid, enjoying another roundup of essential news and commentary.

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