Is This Real? Dare I Dream?

Our bloges having been laid low for an outrageous amount of time by one scam email, do I dare to dream that it’s over?  I awaken to find freethoughtblogs dotcom loading… Perhaps it is a fluke, and our woes are merely waiting in the eaves to pounce again.  Time will tell, but for the moment, oh…  sweet freedom!

edit to add:  Since the last time you saw me, not much to report.  I had a few half-interesting dreams and lost most of them to the alarm clock.  Been workin’ overtime.  House is still a mess from moving in months ago.  We got an ant infestation and seem to have successfully quelled it, for now.  And… I’ve had some random thoughts and forgot them before I had a chance to share.  This blog was my random thought collector.  I was lost without it, apparently.

edit to add:  In one of those dreams I got to be a ciswoman having gaydy sex, tribadism-style.  Nice, but there’s always some BS going on, it’s never what you’d conceive of in your waking hours as “goals.”  In the other dream there was some kinda battle royale kill-or-be-killed situation with different people or small factions trying to eliminate each other for the right to survive.  The more overtly baddy guys were about to get the rest of us when the “good guys” decided hey, why are we being good?  No solidarity, man.  I felt like there was some real good plot idea in there, something to do with the way the baddies were acting, that I could have used for a story.  Maybe it wasn’t as clever as it seemed in the early AM.

edit to add:  Oh yeah, one more thing that happened.  Not to be a starfucker on main or le problematique, but my boyfriend made elon musk’s ex-gf say “ooh” a couple of times.  Probably old news to people who hobnobbed with celebs on twitter before it became the xitter, but feels kinda wild to me, that sometimes you can interact with thems.
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Converting text into realistic video

When I was watching the documentary series Life On Our Planet, I was struck by how realistic the CGI was. The prehistoric animals wandering through nature seemed as if they were being actually filmed, with both them and background details finely portrayed. I wondered how much time and effort had gone into getting it to look like that.

Life on Our Planet takes advantage of modern CGI and photography techniques that mean film shot in natural habitats, footage of animals that are real but have been transferred to a studio and sequences conjured from scratch on a computer are nearly indistinguishable. Some of the extinct land-based animals digitally brought back to life look a little like they’re hovering across the ground as they walk, and there are a few scenes where implausible numbers of dinosaurs have gathered on the same landscape for a nice photo, but we largely move smoothly between then and now.

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This is the type of person Tucker, Trump etc sucks up to

Putin is not a nice person. He is a despot and a warmonger.

Today we saw another piece of evidence for this, as yet another of his critics was killed

Putin critic Alexei Navalny, 47, dies in Arctic Circle jail

Russia’s most significant opposition leader for the past decade, Alexei Navalny, has died in an Arctic Circle jail, the prison service has said.

It is highly likely he was killed directly, but even if the death wasn’t caused by a direct murder, it was still caused indirectly by Putin by sending him to this harsh prison. I don’t, however, believe for a second that he wasn’t murdered – it is not like it was the first attempt to kill him after all

Most of the Russian president’s critics have fled Russia, but Alexei Navalny returned in January 2021, after months of medical treatment. In August 2020 he was poisoned at the end of a trip to Siberia with a Novichok nerve agent.

Yet despite this, and the invasion of Ukraine, you have powerful people in the US singing Putin’s praise. You have so-called journalists interviewing him and Trump praising him, even encouraging him to attack US allies.

For the best dissection of Tucker Carlson’s interview of Putin, I highly recommend Knowledge Fight’s podcast episode on it.

Fight!

Please god, SHAVE

Matt Taibbi has learned that you can’t be friends with Elon Musk. He has posted some of the exchanges that he and Musk had after the failure of the #TwitterFiles nonsense. They are pretty much totally alienated from each other now.

“Elon, am I being shadowbanned?” the exchange begins. “We went on lockdown after discovering that Substack had stolen a massive amount of our data to prepopulate their Twitter rip-off,” Musk replied.

“Looks like there is still a blanket search ban. Should be fixed by tomorrow.” Musk added: “Going forward, tweets with Substack will not appear in For You unless it is paid advertising, just like FB/Insta/etc. They will appear in ‘Following.’”

Taibbi shot back with an exasperated response. “Elon, I’ve repeatedly declined to criticize you and have nothing to do with your beef with Substack,” he wrote. “Is there a reason why I’m being put in the middle of things? This really seems crazy.”

“You are dead to me,” Musk answered. “Please get off Twitter and just stay on Substack.”

Those two deserve each other.

Do you want to be the demon with the pitchfork, or the guys being pitchforked?

Another social media app has opened up — you can now freely join BlueSky without waiting for an invitation. It was founded by the guy who initially created Twitter, which ought to give us all pause, but they promise to give us customizable control over the algorithm. We’ll see. I’m on most of these new social media apps, so I have opinions…amorphous, poorly formed opinions, because I’ve been distracted by too many apps.

So far, I like Mastodon best. It’s a bit of a tangled mess with the swarms of servers out there, but once you get settled in, it’s nice, especially since you don’t feel like you’re enabling some hidden corporate beast somewhere. I get reasonable engagement, the interface works, there’s a substantial volume of traffic since I’m promiscuous about who I’ll follow.

BlueSky is nice and slick and feels most like the old Twitter. Membership has been throttled for a year, and now that it has opened up, it may turn into the worst of old Twitter as the Nazis rush in. One nice feature is that early adopters included lots of scientists, who have built a lot of beachheads to science content.

You might already be on Threads if you have an Instagram account — they seem to be fusing into an unholy amalgam of text and photos. It is a stepchild of the wicked Zuck, so that’s a strike against it, but on the plus side, I am seeing more writing here — people telling stories over multiple posts, and actually taking care to build a narrative. It’s growing on me for that reason.

Of course, Twitter still exists, but I will look down on you if you continue to use it. Leave now. There are good alternatives available. We’re looking at a ‘Fall of the House of Musk’ scenario over there, and soon enough it’s going to be nothing but a crevasse populated with gibbering lost souls. (Well, it’s always been something like that, but you know what I mean, it’ll get worse.)

My recommendation for the people I used to follow: jump ship to BlueSky. It’ll be most familiar, and you’ll find ready-made groups with similar interests already building communities. Just be prepared to leap away if it becomes another xitter. You can’t make strong attachments in a time of chaos.

Using outrageous statements to make a nice living

There are a large number of right wing people that one hears about who have a penchant for saying the most outrageous things. right wing media and use that as a route to financial success.

Take, for example, Candace Owens who is employed by the website The Daily Wire as a columnist. She started out as a political activist by criticizing the Republican party and serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) but then suddenly in 2017 she became a conservative and started attacking the usual targets of the extreme right wing. She is now a pro-Trump conspiracy-spouting election denier who seems to be a popular figure in right wing circles despite not saying anything worthwhile. She is not alone. The last decade has produced a regular stream of such people.
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This is some real super-villain shit, you know

Neuralink has begun human trials, we think. The problem is that all we know about it is an announcement made by head jackass Musk on Twitter, which isn’t exactly a reputable source. That doesn’t stop Nature from commenting on it. I’m not used to seeing rumors published in that journal, and if you think about it, this is basically a condemnation of the experiment.

…there is frustration about a lack of detailed information. There has been no confirmation that the trial has begun, beyond Musk’s tweet. The main source of public information on the trial is a study brochure inviting people to participate in it. But that lacks details such as where implantations are being done and the exact outcomes that the trial will assess, says Tim Denison, a neuroengineer at the University of Oxford, UK.

The trial is not registered at ClinicalTrials.gov, an online repository curated by the US National Institutes of Health. Many universities require that researchers register a trial and its protocol in a public repository of this type before study participants are enrolled. Additionally, many medical journals make such registration a condition of publication of results, in line with ethical principles designed to protect people who volunteer for clinical trials. Neuralink, which is headquartered in Fremont, California, did not respond to Nature’s request for comment on why it has not registered the trial with the site.

So…no transparency, no summary of the goals or methods of the experiment, and no ethical oversight. All anyone knows is that Elon Musk’s team sawed open someone’s skull and stuck some wires and electronics directly into their brain, for purposes unknown, and with little hope of seeing the outcome published in a reputable journal. OK.

Besides the science shenanigans, I’m also curious to know about what kind of NDAs and agreements to never ever sue Neuralink the patients/victims had to sign. There has got to be some wild legal gyrations going on, too.

Taylor Swift, revenge porn, and deepfakes

If there were ever a title to a post that could be considered pure clickbait, my title would fit the bill, since it blends three of the biggest news items currently going: Taylor Swift, porn, and AI. The media attention that Swift is getting both for her music and her relationship with a football player is astounding. I have not heard her music nor do I follow football but thanks to the ubiquity of the coverage of her in the news, I know that she is in a relationship with someone playing for the Kansas City Chiefs. Why this receives such massive coverage from even mainstream news outlets mystifies me.

But my post is really using those three things to argue that the current ability of anyone to so easily produce deepfakes using AI may well herald the demise of some truly ugly practices.

It turns out that someone had used Swift’s image to create a pornographic video that appeared on Twitter/X. The site took down the video and blocked searches on the singer’s name but not before the video had amassed a huge number of views.
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Ken Ham is sad that other denominations have gotten smarter

Poor man. Ken Ham is being left behind by other creationists, which is of course not his failing, but of all those other faithless Christians. So he’s going to tell us where they are going wrong.

Many things have changed since we started the biblical apologetics ministry that became Answers in Genesis, in our home in Australia in 1977. The culture has changed. But God’s Word has not changed and never will. Man’s word of about origins has continued to change in various ways over this time..
This Bible record of creation rules out the evolutionary philosophy which states that all forms of life have come into being by gradual, progressive evolution carried on by resident (natural) forces. It also rules out any evolutionary origin for the human race, since no form of evolution, including theistic evolution, can explain the origin of the male before the female, nor can it explain how a man could evolve into a woman. But the bible has never changed in its statement that God made two genders: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27)
While we were still living in Australia, I read a report in 1977, that the Assemblies of God denomination had adopted a “Doctrine of Creation” which stated the following:
“This Bible record of creation thus rules out the evolutionary philosophy which states that all forms of life have come into being by gradual, progressive evolution carried on by resident forces. It also rules out any evolutionary origin for the human race, since no theory of evolution, including theistic evolution, can explain the origin of the male before the female, nor can it explain how a man could evolve into a woman.

If you’re like me, your jaw dropped at that claim that …no form of evolution, including theistic evolution, can explain the origin of the male before the female, nor can it explain how a man could evolve into a woman. This is Ray Comfort levels of ignorance; we don’t argue that men evolved before women, or that the sexes evolved independently, or that men evolved into women. Those are creationist arguments. We all evolved together, our ancestors had male and female forms, and the first humans were the product of a gradual shift in populations. Anyone who tries to claim that evolution argues that the sexes evolved sequentially is abysmally ignorant, and this question about how women evolved from men is an example of a truly stupid question.

But why does Ham say the same thing twice? The first bit is quoting Answers In Genesis’s statement; the second is quoting the Assemblies of God statement, which AiG plagiarized. What he’s whining about, as he goes on, is that the Assemblies of God no longer claims that evolution can’t explain the origin of the male before the female, nor can it explain how a man could evolve into a woman. Assemblies of God has abandoned a stupid claim, while AiG still holds to that idea, therefore, to Ken Ham, Assemblies of God has abandoned the truth of scripture! Worse, nowadays they’re arguing for more tolerance on scientific matters, and reject the dogmatism that is the foundation of Ken Ham’s beliefs.

“As a result, equally devout Christian believers have formed very different opinions about the age of the earth, the age of humankind, and the ways in which God went about the creative processes. Given the limited information available in Scripture, it does not seem wise to be overly dogmatic about any particular creation theory. We urge all sincere and conscientious believers to adhere to what the Bible plainly teaches and to avoid divisiveness over debatable theories of creation.”

Uh-oh. That is a direct attack on Answers in Genesis. Ham is going to forever insist on promoting deeply wrong and ignorant ideas, and he’s still clinging to Ray Comfort’s misconceptions.

Trump ordered to pay Carroll $83 million

The jury in the trial took only about two hours to come back with a verdict that said that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) has to pay her $83 million. It consists of $7.3m in compensatory damages, $11m to repair her reputation, and $65m in punitive damages. He has, of course, said that he will appeal.

The punitive damages are to make SSAT shut up.

Even on Fox News, a rightwing network generally supportive of the former president, John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general, saw nothing but bad news.

“The whole point of these unprecedented damages is to tell Donald Trump to shut up,” Yoo said.“You could think of it this way: every time Donald Trump wants to insult [E] Jean Carroll, he’s gonna have to write a $40m check for each sentence. That’s how bad this is.

“I can’t believe his lawyers haven’t succeeded in just telling him, ‘Campaign for president, run for president, make your accusations about a two-tiered justice system. But leave this alone.’”

It looks like the antics of SSAT inside and outside the courtroom that so irritated the judge did not endear him to the jury either. Neither did the obnoxious behavior of his lawyer Alina Habba who seemed to think that her audience was the MAGA cult instead of the nine people in the jury box.

In a recent interview with some MAGA-friendly person, Habba was asked whether she would like to be pretty or smart. She instantly replied that she would like to be pretty because you can fake being smart. Well, maybe some people can fake being smart, but she is clearly not one of them. For example, on Monday, she told the judge that she was feeling unwell and had been exposed to people with Covid and asked that the proceedings for the next day be canceled. It was duly done. But then on Tuesday evening, she was seen at a victory party in New Hampshire following the primary election. Judges do not like lawyers lying to them and she is lucky that he did not reprimand her for that.

Observers were astounded at the level of her incompetence, down to basic knowledge of courtroom proceedings.

After the verdict, Habba sounded off to the media. She is mad because the judge did not allow her to re-litigate the issue of assault that the first jury had already decided.