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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How dangerous are deepfakes?

We have got used to the existence of ‘deepfakes’, computer generated images and videos that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing. This has caused some serious concerns about the possibility of deepfakes becoming a powerful tool for disinformation and mischief, especially in the political arena, since it is possible to have people seem to say and do things that are damaging to themselves with the viewer being none the wiser that they have been conned.

But how dangerous is this?

In the November 20, 2023 issue ofThe New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr reviews some recent books that look at the dangers posed by deepfakes and concludes that the fears may be overblown, and that even when deepfakes are explicitly political, most of it is used for parody and otherwise humorous purposes, and not meant to convince us that we are watching the real thing,

Fakery in the visual realm goes back to the earliest days of photography, where a lot of editing was done in darkroooms to get the effect sought.

In “Faking It” (2012), Mia Fineman, a photography curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explains that early cameras had a hard time capturing landscapes—either the sky was washed out or the ground was hard to see. To compensate, photographers added clouds by hand, or they combined the sky from one negative with the land from another (which might be of a different location).
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From our vantage point, such manipulation seems audacious. Mathew Brady, the renowned Civil War photographer, inserted an extra officer into a portrait of William Tecumseh Sherman and his generals. Two haunting Civil War photos of men killed in action were, in fact, the same soldier—the photographer, Alexander Gardner, had lugged the decomposing corpse from one spot to another. Such expedients do not appear to have burdened many consciences. In 1904, the critic Sadakichi Hartmann noted that nearly every professional photographer employed the “trickeries of elimination, generalization, accentuation, or augmentation.” It wasn’t until the twentieth century that what Hartmann called “straight photography” became an ideal to strive for.

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The puzzle of why Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox

The defamation case filed by the Dominion voting machine company against Fox News was settled on Tuesday, April 18, 2023, the day when the trial was supposed to begin, for a whopping $787 million. That Fox wanted and needed to settle the case was evident since the discovery process had revealed all manner of highly damaging information that the upper echelons at Fox knew the serial sex abuser Donald Trump’s (SSAT) claims of election fraud and of Dominion’s involvement were without merit even as they publicly supported them.

Fox News’s most high-profile personality Tucker Carlson was abruptly fired on Monday, April 24, just six days later, reportedly on the direct orders of Rupert Murdoch, even though Murdoch reportedly liked Carlson and got on well with him on a personal level and he brought in good ratings and revenue for the network.
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Not the greatest idea in counter-programming

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) seems to take great pleasure in tormenting the Republican party, the very organization that he seeks to become the presidential nominee of. He refuses to commit to attending the first Republican National Committee (RNC) debate debate among the primary contenders to he held this coming Wednesday the 23rd from 9:00pm-11:00pm Eastern time on Fox News or whether, if he does decide to take part, whether he will sign the pledge to support the eventual nominee, whoever that is. At present, eight people have met the donor and polls threshold (Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Doug Burgum, SSAT, Mike Pence, and Chris Christie) and only the first five have signed the pledge. Late news has businessman Perry Johnson (who?) also qualifying for the debate.

It is clear that SSAT has nothing but contempt for the GOP as am independent political entity and thinks that he, as an individual, is the only one that matters and that the GOP’s role is to merely support him. He may well be right in that judgment.

There has been speculation that he will skip the debate but since he is loath to give up the spotlight, yesterday comes reports that he may agree to an interview with Tucker Carlson at the same time as the debate, as a form of counter-programming. Typically, he just drops this as a possibility, not really committing to it, and is likely to be ambivalent right up until almost the last moment, thus keeping everyone off-balance.
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