Good morning. It's June 5th. It's a little overcast in New York City. And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. It's a slowish news day so far. The lead story on the front of this morning's New York Times is in Europe. Biden will find strife and solidarity. Mashing together today's trip for the D -Day anniversary with a couple of other trips in weeks to come to talk about the incoherence of the Biden administration's positions on Ukraine and Gaza as the US tries to lead an international alliance in support of the former and to block the international movement in support of the latter. Speaking of which, on page seven, Chip Roy and the House Republicans managed to qualify as international news by passing a vote to sanction the International Criminal Court for trying to charge Benjamin Netanyahu with war crimes for all the war crimes that he's committing. The Times reports that Biden does not support this particular measure because the Times writes it would impose sanctions on such a broad swath of officials, including court staff members and any witnesses involved in a potential case. But the story says it reflected broad bipartisan anger in Washington after the court's top prosecutor announced late last month that he would seek charges against both Israeli and Hamas leaders.

Above that, with a picture of stricken people crouching in rubble, the headline is Anguish as Gaza waits for a ceasefire deal. No final word from Israel or Hamas. Asked by a reporter in Washington on Tuesday, the Times writes, if Mr. Netanyahu was playing politics with the war, Mr. Biden said, I don't think so. He's trying to work out a serious problem he has. This is where you bring out the Angry Goose meme, the meme of 2024 to have the angered goose ask, what serious problem is that? The Times more or less answers that. But, the story says, with a completely superfluous, if not deceptive, implement of the word but, Mr. Netanyahu is widely seen both at home and abroad as concerned that an end to the conflict could lead to the collapse of his government, especially in light of investigations into how Israel ignored evidence that Hamas was preparing for the attack. On October 7th, that killed about 1 ,200 people, according to Israeli officials, and how slowly Israel's defense forces responded. That's good, albeit incomplete, beyond the fact that if he stops killing Gazans, he might be held accountable for encouraging Hamas and failing to defend Israel against it. There's also the fact that when he stops killing Gazans and leaves office, he becomes subject to all the unrelated criminal prosecutions that he has been obstructing and avoiding. Back on page one  the Indian election results make the paper. Narenda Modi did win, but by an embarrassingly small margin. On the left is news analysis about Biden's xenophobic Trump -style maneuvering at the border, in which he caved to Republican attacks while validating them. Echo of Trump as Biden acts on the border is the accurate headline. And down below that, notorious Turing test fail or Kevin Ruse keeps bumbling his way onto the front page by focusing on whatever's most irrelevant in the AI movement. Here the story is that whistleblowers are sounding the alarm about how open AI is failing to take measures to protect the world from the onslaught of a potential god computer. That sounds bad, but as John Herman pointed out in New York Magazine, the whole thing about the danger of a godlike computer has worn out its usefulness as a marketing hook and been dropped. Since these systems are manifestly not getting anywhere close to intelligence, let alone human intelligence, let alone superhuman intelligence. The problem with OpenAI and its unchecked advances is not that it's recklessly playing with unfathomable powers, but that the product stinks, is being implemented across all kinds of fields with no justification or quality control, and is apparently dragging the entire online corpus of information. down to its level of mechanical idiocy and falsehood. What Roos wants to present as a hideously dangerous arms race is more like what would have happened in the nuclear arms race if the missiles didn't actually launch and the bombs didn't actually explode when or where they were supposed to, but we nevertheless ended up blanketed in fallout and surrounded by uncontained radioactive waste. In news about what AI actually does, a story posted online by the Times reports, Israel organized and paid for an influence campaign last year targeting US lawmakers and the American public with pro -Israel messaging, as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the war with Gaza, according to officials involved in the effort and documents related to the operation. The campaign spent $2 million and used Chad GPT to make posts. Among the targets, the Times reports was representative Richie Torres.

Some of the fake accounts, the Times writes, responded to posts by Mr. Torres on X by commenting on anti -Semitism on college campuses and in major US cities. In response to a December 8th post on X by Mr. Torres about fire safety, one fake account replied, Hamas is perpetrating the conflict. The post included a hashtag that said Jews were being persecuted. It's hard to imagine a more pointless use of money and energy than spamming Richie Torres to nag him about supporting Israel.

Richie Torres was already a pro -Israel spam operation. That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.