Film review: Scoop (2024)

Back in 2019, Prince Andrew agreed to an interview with the BBC news program Newsnight in an effort to tell his side of the story about his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who had just killed himself in prison, and the allegations that Andrew had had sex with Virginia Giuffre, one of the many underage girls who were a constant presence in Epstein’s world.

Apparently Andrew was very pleased with how the interview had gone and felt that he had performed brilliantly. But it was widely viewed as a train wreck and a few days later, Andrew had been forced to relinquish his official duties and has not regained them since. It is thought that the interview is what persuaded Giuffre to sue Andrew, a case that was settled out of court in 2022, reportedly for around $16 million.
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What exactly is the problem with TikTok?

In a rare display of bipartisanship, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to force ByteDance, the owner of the social media app TikTok, to either sell it to a US buyer or face tough restrictions on its ability to operate in the US.

The vote was a landslide, with 352 Congress members voting in favor and only 65 against. The bill, which was fast-tracked to a vote after being unanimously approved by a committee last week, gives China-based ByteDance 165 days to divest from TikTok. If it did not, app stores including the Apple App store and Google Play would be legally barred from hosting TikTok or providing web hosting services to ByteDance-controlled applications.
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The vote in the House represents the most concrete threat to TikTok in an ongoing political battle over allegations the China-based company could collect sensitive user data and politically censor content. TikTok has repeatedly stated it has not and would not share US user data with the Chinese government.

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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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Bob Edwards (1947-2024)

The former long-running host of NPR’s Morning Edition radio news program died yesterday. He hosted that show from its inception in 1979 until 2004. He was an excellent host and I was one of the vast number of regular listeners who was outraged by the way he was summarily replaced. Although he was only 57 when he left, it appeared that the network wanted new voices who could also do field reports, rather than just be a studio-based anchor.
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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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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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Who has the time?

The trial in the defamation case brought by E. Jena Carroll against serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) resumed today after a two day break because one of the jurors had worried that they had Covid. SSAT is in the courtroom.

I read that last night SSAT had posted 35 times about the trial on his social media site and it made me wonder how he finds the time to do all that. True, a social media post is not that long but his are pretty long. The ones I’ve read sound like stream-of-consciousness ramblings (who knew that SSAT was an aficionado of James Joyce?) that seem to lack any careful thought or even proofreading, so that reduces the time. But still it must have taken several hours.

More interestingly, who reads all of them? Journalists presumably who have drawn the short straw of having to monitor his every utterance. But apart from them, even the most ardent MAGA supporter must get weary of their phones dinging continuously with alerts about his repetitive posts. Do they read all of them?

It appears that SSAT took the stand and his testimony lasted just a few minutes, with Carroll’s attorney asking just two simple questions that elicited ‘Yes’ answers. It may be that she did not want to give SSAT the opportunity to make a speech.

John Pilger (1939-2023)

The Australian journalist and documentarian died last week at the age of 83. He was tireless in his efforts to expose the crimes of the powerful against the powerless.

I first became aware of him in 1979 when I was in graduate school in the US. The film The Deer Hunter that dealt with the story of three friends form rural Pennsylvania who get sent to Vietnam during that brutal invasion of that country by the US that saw millions of Vietnamese killed and their country ruined by massive bombardment and the deliberate destruction of villages and the countryside. The film came out to great acclaim and went on to win five Academy Awards including best picture, best director (Michael Cimino) and best supporting actor (Christopher Walken) with further nominations for best actor (Robert De Niro) and best actress (Meryl Streep).

I went to see it and was appalled at the utterly racist way that the Vietnamese were portrayed, like bloodthirsty savages who delighted in torturing and killing. It was clear to me that the film was trying to make Americans feel good about the war that they had humiliatingly lost just four years earlier despite throwing their sophisticated weaponry (short of nuclear weapons) at a much poorer country.
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Annoying article headers

I spends quite a bit of time on the internet, frequenting many news and opinion sites. Most of these are in a magazine format where the home page has a whole lot of headlines that contain links to articles. Since these sites depend upon traffic to get advertising revenues, they necessarily try to use headers to get readers curious and thus lure readers to click on the link and read the article. That is fine, as long as the header provides some information that gives me a reasonable expectation of what the article contains. But not all of them do. Over time, I have developed a kind of filtering reflex that tells me whether I should click or not.
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Susanna Gibson speaks out

Just before the elections in November, I posted about Susanna Gibson, a nurse practitioner running for a seat in the Virginia House of Representatives. She and her husband had in the past live-streamed sex acts. It was all perfectly legal but some Republican operative had obtained the video and shopped it around to media outlets and the Washington Post had published it. Then flyers with that information were mailed out by the Republican party to voters in that district. To their credit, most of the Democratic party rallied around her but in the end she lost a close race 17,878 to 16,912, a margin of just 966 or 2.8%. The fact that it was so close means that she might well have won otherwise.

Gibson has given an interview about the whole affair and about what people need to realize about the whole online experience.

I think a big underlying factor that really needs to be addressed, and our society needs to start being educated on, is there is this devaluation and misunderstanding of consent, especially when we’re talking about digital privacy. Content that is initially made in a consensual context, which is then distributed in a non-consensual context digitally, is a crime. Just because someone consented to share something in one particular context doesn’t mean that it is or should be fair game for the whole world to see.

Choosing to share content, online or in whatever medium, with select people with the understanding that it will disappear and can only be seen by those present at the time — when we’re talking live streaming, webcamming and Skype — that is a far cry from consenting for that content to be recorded and then broadly disseminated. And there is case law precedent confirming this.

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