Notes from the edge of civilization: April 27, 2025
The NY Times cleans up Mexico's image; AI has already replaced jobs and you didn't even notice; 'therapeutic suicide' now a solution for Canadian military veterans.
In an opinion essay this week, The New York Times swooned over Mexico City’s transformation from a smog-choked, crime-ridden mess into a “pulsing center of global culture” that’s supposedly outshining the US as a migrant magnet.
Columnist Lydia Polgreen gushes about the city’s reborn parks, viral taco stands, and thriving economy — factories, tech startups, even a booming film industry. Once a springboard for Mexicans fleeing north, she describes how Mexico is now pulling in tourists and expats from the US, while still absorbing migrants from poorer ones. Her clear pitch is that Mexico is embracing “the welcoming values the United States has abandoned,” making it a shiny new beacon of opportunity.
The picture she paints is a globalist wet dream: a borderless wonderland where tech bros, digital nomads, and economic migrants all blissfully coexist under the glow of chic Edison bulbs at repurposed brick factories-turned-coffee shops. It’s a nice fantasy — but it’s just that. A fantasy.
Yes, Mexico has its charms. But it’s important not to confuse a curated Instagram reel with reality. The cartels still run the show, terrorizing the population on a daily basis. Mexico City isn’t an electrical vehicle Mecca, so air pollution is very much a thing. Corruption hasn’t magically evaporated, and the economic boom hasn’t lifted all boats. Try asking a working-class Mexican if they’re living the dream and the answer probably isn’t “claro que sí.”
But that’s the sleight of hand in these types of essays coming out of the ‘curated lifestyle’ laptop class. Polgreen conveniently sidesteps the gritty realities of daily life to instead lean hard into the narrative that, as Trump destroys America, Mexico stands ready to steal the spotlight.
Remember when Australia was a charming land of didgeridoos, kangaroos and the affable Crocodile Dundee? Australia has come a long way, baby! If you happen to live in Sydney, you may have been duped into thinking you were listening to a human on the airwaves, but Workdays with Thy (that’s the host, pictured above) on the Australian Radio Network (ARN) is fully AI. For the last six months, no one noticed.
ARN project leader Fayed Tohme subsequently acknowledged the use of AI to create the voice of Thy, writing in a since-deleted LinkedIn post that Thy “sounds real” and has real fans, despite not being a real person. “No mic, no studio, just code and vibes,” he wrote in the post, which was shared by Mediaweek. “An experiment by ARN and ElevenLabs that’s pushing the boundaries of what ‘live radio’ even means.”
Where do you even start with that? Underhanded, undeclared, unreal. The next time you hear some talking head try to placate you with a line like “AI isn't going to replace people, it's going to improve their lives,” please smack them. Hard.
As venture capitalist, Victor Lazarte, recently said: "This is bullshit. It's fully replacing people."
Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
For more on life in dystopian Australia, don’t miss our latest podcast episode:
If you’re struggling with depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress, would you consider ‘therapeutic suicide’? That’s what the Toronto Sun is calling euthanasia now.
The Sun tells the story of David Baltzer, who served two terms in Afghanistan with an elite branch of the Canadian Armed Forces, where he says his experience was like a scene from the movie ‘Black Hawk Down.’
Like many veterans, Baltzer struggled with trauma when he returned to civilian life and turned to alcohol and substance abuse to cope. At a low point just before Christmas in 2019, he sought help from Veterans Affairs Canada and was offered medically assisted suicide.
“He says to me, ‘I would like to make a suggestion for you. Keep an open mind, think about it, you’ve tried all this and nothing seems to be working, but have you thought about medical-assisted suicide?'”
Canada’s MAID program (Medical Assistance in Dying) is already one of the world’s most permissive. It was recently expanded to include non-terminal conditions, raising fears of misuse — especially for vulnerable vets who Baltzer says deserve care, not a death pitch.
Baltzer’s story isn’t an outlier. It’s a signal of what happens when the best solution to suffering our society can come up with is elimination.
10 years of liberal mismanagement have landed canada in this hopeless mess. Toilet paper currency, a collapsed and useless health care system, tent cities everywhere, down the street and around the corner line ups at food banks and an education system that produces illiterate graduates. Maybe more unchecked immigration would help.
You are doing excellent , sacred work in bringing this to the world. Thank You
You enable us to make wise choices in a collapsing world, where plans are underway to totally control us.