Funny whose bank accounts never get frozen
Sorry, sick kid, but some things are more important than getting you to hospital on time.
Amazing what you can get away with, when you know there will be no consequences whatsoever for your actions:
The emergency for Toronto may not just be that an ambulance with a child on board was blocked from getting to a hospital by a pro-Gaza protest, but that the demonstration is considered by the city to be a higher priority.
An ambulance responding Saturday to a child in medical distress needed to use a detour to get around a pro-Palestinian protest at Yonge and Bloor Sts. and was forced to find another route to a hospital upon loading the stretcher-bound child.
“It was shocking,” said journalist and lawyer Caryma Sa’d, who said paramedic sources expressed their anger that there was difficultly responding to a call for a child facing a medical issue because of a blocked intersection. “I fully expected the ambulance would be able to get through the intersection, as I have seen happen at other demonstrations.”
[…]
Toronto Paramedic Services and Mayor Olivia Chow’s office have not yet responded to questions about this. But Toronto Police responded, saying they did not believe the incident had risen to the level of an emergency. If they did, police said they don’t need an Emergencies Act declaration from Ottawa to clear the route, as some protesters believe.
“Police have emergency powers and if officers determine that demonstrators need to be moved to facilitate emergency access, they will act accordingly,” said Toronto Police spokesperson Stephanie Sayer.
I seem to remember the Emergencies Act being used against other street protests not too long ago. It was kind of a big deal at the time.
Aside from the organizers’ stated aims, the “Freedom Convoy” and the pro-Hamas events (let’s not pretend they’re anything else, as Peter Tatchell found out the hard way) aren’t exactly the same. The former was an occupation which went on for several weeks straight, while the latter demonstrations have taken place every few days, over and over again, since before Israel responded to the October 7 pogrom.
Well, they haven’t yet devolved into an indefinite occupation, a la the 2020 “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” in Seattle. For the past year and a half I’ve seen nothing to suggest they’ll get into any kind of legal trouble for taking that next step.
Honestly, part of me wants them to try. Protesting in front of synagogues and Jewish hospitals and Jewish restaurants is de facto legal in Toronto as long as your antisemitism is covered by the fig leaf of “anti-Zionism,” so maybe shutting down the city centre for a few weeks might spur the authorities into taking notice.
Or maybe they’ll give them free security and feed them and stuff. But at least the rest of us will know for sure who’s above the law, assuming we don’t already.
I can’t believe it. Here I am actually writing like a sucker, while major media outlets are getting AI to do all the work.
First it was zombie Sports Illustrated, and now the Chicago Sun-Times:
The Chicago Sun-Times newspaper’s “Best of Summer” section published over the weekend contains a guide to summer reads that features real authors and fake books that they did not write was partially generated by artificial intelligence, the person who generated it told 404 Media.
The article, called “Summer Reading list for 2025,” suggests reading Tidewater by Isabel Allende, a “multigenerational saga set in a coastal town where magical realism meets environmental activism. Allende’s first climate fiction novel explores how one family confronts rising sea levels while uncovering long-buried secrets.” It also suggests reading The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir, “another science-driven thriller” by the author of The Martian. “This time, the story follows a programmer who discovers that an AI system has developed consciousness—and has been secretly influencing global events for years.” Neither of these books exist, and many of the books on the list either do not exist or were written by other authors than the ones they are attributed to.
The article is not bylined but was written by Marco Buscaglia, whose name is on most of the other articles in the 64-page section. Buscaglia told 404 Media via email and on the phone that the list was AI-generated. “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. No excuses,” he said. “On me 100 percent and I'm completely embarrassed.”
[…]
Other articles in the Heat Index insert have what appear to be AI-generated sections as well. For example, in an article called “Hanging Out: Inside America’s growing hammock culture,” Buscaglia quotes “Dr. Jennifer Campos, a professor of leisure studies at the University of Colorado, in her 2023 research paper published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.” A search for Campos in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography does not return any results. While it’s not exactly clear why the AI said this, the only mention of “Jennifer Campos” on the University of Colorado’s website is about the graduation of a student named Jennifer Campos, who works in advertising. The same article also mentions a “2023 Outside Magazine interview” with Brianna Madia, the author of Nowhere for Very Long, a book about van life. “A hammock is basically my most essential piece of furniture,” Buscaglia quotes her as saying. Outside interviewed Madia in 2019, but hammocks were not discussed. Outside also did an article about her favorite van life gear in 2017, and she did not mention hammocks. The quote Buscaglia included does not show up on the internet outside of his own article. There are examples like this throughout the section, and several of them have been pointed out by the journalist Joshua J. Friedman on Bluesky.
Thank God the legendary Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert is no longer around to see what his paper has become and…oh, God, they’re going to create an AI version of Roger Ebert to write about how much he hated hated hated hated hated movies which may themselves be generated by AI, aren’t they?