The real choice before us

Joe Biden’s feisty State of the Union address may not have had any immediate impact on voters but it does seem to have had an impact on media coverage of his age. I notice much less chatter about it now, except in the right wing media world. I hope the real differences between him and his rival become more of the focus.

The power of metadata and the photo puzzle

I am not a very tech savvy person and so am constantly being surprised by what modern technology can do. Take for example, the current kerfuffle over the doctored photo released by the British royal family. I am amazed at what could be gleaned from the photo.

David McCoy, the imaging manager at the Guardian, said: “The first step in analysing this image is reading through the file’s embedded metadata to determine the photographic settings of the base camera image. In this case, we can see that a Canon 50mm f1.2 lens was used for this initial image, set to an aperture of f3.2, which will give moderately shallow depth of field.

That is pretty impressive, to me at least, but the article goes on to describe all the other things that were inferred.

The whole thing is a minor puzzle. I am not sure why the photo needed to be doctored at all and why, given their resources, they could not have hired a professional to do a better job that would not have aroused suspicions in the first place.

Michael Kosta of The Daily Show joked that he knew at once, even without any forensic analyses, that the photo had been doctored because you can never get three children to all smile at the same time for a photo.

Jon Stewart on who the ‘real’ Americans are

He discusses something that has also long irritated me, and that is the claims by GOP politicians that ‘real’ Americans are those that live in the middle parts of the country in rural areas, as if the vast majority who live in cities and the coastal areas count for less.

This is part of a more general pattern. GOP politicians seem to think it is perfectly acceptable to sneer at big cities and the diverse array of people who live in them as somehow being less worthy, while reacting with outrage if any Democratic politician even slightly disparages rural white America.

Katie Britt gets brutally roasted on SNL

Katie Britt has now essentially confirmed that the story that she told in her response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address was misleading in all the key details, as was exposed by journalist Jonathan Katz, though in typical MAGA fashion, still claims that it is ‘true’ in some unspecified sense.

Actor Scarlett Johansson did a brutally funny takedown of Britt on Saturday Night Live, capturing all her manic, hyper-dramatized mood swings.

Jonathan Pie on what is happening in the UK

I have not been following events there lately but according to Pie, 14 years of conservative rule has resulted in the drastic reduction of nearly all public services and the degradation of life for ordinary people in favor of giving tax cuts to millionaires and big business.

Prime minister Rishi Sunak seems determined to stay the course even though the government lost two by-elections to Labour on February 15th, where the seats had been held by Conservatives, and is heading into a general election within the year with low approval ratings.

But then another by-election on February 29th saw George Galloway, formerly of the Labour Party but now head of the Workers Party, win a seat that had been held by Labour, with a vote share of 40%.. The race for that election was messy, to put it mildly, with the Labour Party withdrawing support for its own candidate, resulting in him coming in 4th, getting just around 8% of the vote. An independent candidate came second to Galloway with 21%, and the Conservative candidate came third with 12%. Given the peculiar nature of this race, it is hard to say what the result implies for the coming general election.

John Oliver on the lack of ethics in the US Supreme Court

After examining the blatant violations of ethical norms by justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, and Neil Gorsuch, Oliver comes up with an idea to coax Thomas to leave the court by appealing to the one thing that seems to drive him: the desire to live like a very wealthy person who likes to drive around in a massive motor home. In public, Thomas talks about how he is battling the elites on behalf of ordinary people while in reality he loves to be the beneficiary of lavish vacations and gift from billionaires while ruling in ways that harm ordinary people. A really sleazy hypocrite.

Oliver offers him a contract where Thomas will be paid $1 million per year for the rest of his life and also get possession of a top-of-the-line motor home costing $2.5 million (that includes a bedroom with a king-size bed, 1 ½ bathrooms, and a full-size refrigerator) if he leaves the court. The offer is time limited in that Thomas has just 30 days from the date of the show (February 18th) to sign the contract. Oliver says that the money will come from him personally and that he has checked with lawyers and that, amazingly, making such an offer is legal.

I do not think that there is any chance that Thomas will accept the offer. Even though he loves to live the high life and would have no scruples about accepting it, like any person without a strong sense of ethics, he may suspect that others are like him and that the offer is not genuine and that if he makes moves towards accepting it, Oliver will unmask him, even though I think Oliver’s offer is genuine.