[BACKWARDS AUDIO IN THE MANNER OF DAVID LYNCH BLACK LODGE “GOOD MORNING THIS IS JANUARY 27”], and after a quiet weekend suitable for watching the work of the late David Lynch It is a bright fine winter morning windy in New York City and this is your [BLACK LODGE FOR “INDIGNITY MORNING PODCAST”] I'm your host Tom Scocca I'll stop doing the Black Lodge voice now as we take a look at the day and the news. The stock markets are plunging this morning. The banner headline on Bloomberg's website is stocks swept in global route as DeepSeek Royals Tech. DeepSeek here is the name of a new open source Chinese AI system that was released earlier this month, but really seemed to smack the American tech industry between the eyebrows with the two by four late last week. Or as a Bloomberg explainer puts it, it has “stirred awe and consternation in Silicon Valley after demonstrating breakthrough artificial intelligence models that offer a comparable performance to the world's best chatbots at seemingly a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek's emergence may offer a counterpoint to the widespread belief that the future of AI will require ever-increasing amounts of power and energy to develop.” If you temporarily set aside the otherwise extremely pertinent question of whether the entire generative AI industry is a colossal waste of time, money, energy, and attention that is corroding the infrastructure of the world's shared knowledge for the sake of putting out dumb products that give false answers that no one asked for and which get in the way of productivity and normal workflows. Well, actually, we're going to need to bring that question back because the key takeaway here is that the news that this process may actually be done much more cheaply, less wastefully, and without a handful of Silicon Valley's biggest creeps restricting access to the process and keeping its workings as occult as possible. That news, of what ought to sound like a big improvement in the industry, could be ruinous. Beyond the psychological will to destruction of the commons and ultimately self-destruction that powers are twisted self-loathing tech overlords the whole purpose of the AI boom Has been to soak up investment and prop up the market for chips. The point of building a search engine that delivers worse results than existing search engines, while using orders of magnitude more energy and competing power, was to give tech investors something to invest in and make sure no one ever got a bargain on a graphics processing unit to play games with. On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news column is, “TRUCES SEE TEST AS ISRAEL IS SAID TO HAVE KILLED 22 / TALKS MAKE PROGRESS / Thousands Try to Return to Homes in Gaza and Lebanon.” The Times writes “the fragile ceasefires in Lebanon and Gaza were tested on Sunday as Israeli forces killed scores of people in southern Lebanon. Lebanese officials said, while in Gaza Israel prevented Palestinians from moving back to their homes, saying Hamas had violated the terms of the truce.” As of this morning Gazans are heading back into northern Gaza Meanwhile, the Times is reporting online that in its ongoing campaign to make the homecomings of released Hamas prisoners as miserable as possible. The Israeli military stormed the home of one newly released prisoner, where the Times was conducting interviews. “One soldier, the Times writes, immediately used the muzzle of his loaded rifle to strike Aaron Boxerman, a Times reporter who happened to be standing close to the yard entrance. Before Mr. Boxerman had a chance to identify himself, the soldier hit him in the rib cage, leaving a large bruise. A second Times reporter, Nathan Odenheimer, then identified himself as a journalist, video recorded by the Times shows. The same soldier told Mr. Odenheimer that he didn't care, using an expletive to underscore his point. The soldier then pointed his loaded rifle at Mr. Odenheimer again, the video shows.” The Times also describes the soldiers pointing their guns at the Palestinians there and yelling and shoving. The Israeli military told the Times it was investigating the incident. The number two news column on the front of the paper, “Trump Presses To ‘Clean Out’ The Gaza Strip / Mideast Allies Urged to Take In Palestinians.” Just blithely proposing the “cleaning out” of an ethnic group from the territory where they live. Really good use of racist questions in the lead. “A suggestion by President Trump to ‘clean out’ the Gaza Strip and ask Egypt and Jordan to take in more Palestinians has raised new questions about United States policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and two of its most important allies in the Middle East.” In the second part there, there do seem to be new questions in play, since Egypt and Jordan responded by rejecting the idea. But as for US policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the president's speculation about eliminating Palestinians from Gaza seems less like a question than an answer. Next to that, the Times headline writers get back to what they do best, obscuring the point of a piece, “Distress and Fury as Trump Upends Federal Jobs.” Subhead “Workers Fear Damage to Careers, Families and Communities.” Feelings are not the main focus of the story. What the story is about, is the specific steps that the Trump administration has taken, or appears to be preparing to take, to undermine working conditions for the civil service, or force people out of their jobs altogether. The story begins not with a fear, but with a fact. “An Education Department employee was attending a funeral last week when she got the call. She was being placed on administrative leave because she works on projects that connect Black students, among others, to federal government programs.” Then comes the ending of telework and whether that means that a disabled veteran is going to be unable to continue doing their job. Yes, as the Times writes, “President Trump's rapid push to overhaul the federal bureaucracy in his first days in office has been met with a mix of fear, fury, and confusion throughout the workforce.” But the news event isn't the mood. The news event is the de facto shutdown of a broad array of federal government activities by an administration bent on vandalizing basic government functions. Next to that, the Times is doing a video investigation into the start of the Eaton fire in California. “While an official cause is likely to take months for investigators to determine,” the Times writes, “a growing body of evidence is emerging that suggests the fire started in the dry grasses below a set of transmission towers carrying high-energy power lines. The lines were buffeted that evening by winds that at times reached 100 miles per hour. A video,” the story continues, “recorded by a surveillance camera at a gas station less than a mile south of the towers, appears to provide an important new clue. It shows flashes of light at 6.11 p.m. in the vicinity of three high-voltage electrical towers in Eden Canyon, and then flames moments later. Below that, on page one, “When bird flu first struck dairy cattle a year ago, it seemed possible that it might affect a few isolated herds and disappear as quickly as it had appeared. Instead, the virus has infected more than 900 herds and dozens of people, killing one, and the outbreak shows no signs of abating.” On page A5 is a report on Donald Trump's phone call to the Danish prime minister demanding Greenland and threatening his country back on January 15th, as described by two European officials who were briefed on the 45-minute call and requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. And on page A4, at the top of the international section, is an update on South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol. Over the weekend, prosecutors indicted him for insurrection in his short-lived attempt in December to declare martial law. Meanwhile, the freshly pardoned violence seditionist Stuart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers appeared behind his patron Donald Trump at a weekend rally in Las Vegas. That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the audience, sustain our podcasting efforts through your subscription dollars and tips. Please do keep those coming. And if nothing too unexpected happens, [BLACK LODGE VOICE FOR “WE WILL TALK AGAIN TOMORROW]