Santos soap opera comes to an end – maybe

The House of Representatives voted today to expel George Santos from the body by a vote of 311-114, well above the 290 votes needed, making him only the sixth person to be so treated. It did not help his case that two of the people he is alleged to have ripped off in his fraudulent credit card scheme were a fellow Republican congressperson and his mother. That is not how you win friends and influence people.

10 members either voted present or did not vote. 112 out of 222 Republicans and 2 out of 213 Democrats voted not to expel him. All four members of the Republican leadership team also voted not to expel him. After the vote, he refused to answer any questions and left in the style to which he has become accustomed, in a Jaguar SUV. There will now be a special election within 90 days to fill his seat.

Yesterday at a news conference Santos had leveled all manner of accusations against his fellow members and promised a scorched-Earth response if he were expelled. But that did not seem to sway enough of his colleagues to support him. He also said that he planned to continue in politics. It may have been bluster on his part, like so many of his other claims, or he may be saving it all for a tell-all book or a made-for-TV film. You can be certain that he will seek to monetize his 15 minutes of fame to help pay for his legal expenses to avoid prison time for all the frauds that he has been accused of committing.

Kissinger gets the send-off he deserves

Once again, we need a comedy show (The Daily Show‘s Michelle Wolf, Ronny Chieng, and Michael Kosta) to give us the unvarnished truth about this monster who just died, and other US war criminals.

The late Anthony Bourdain, the much traveled chef, also had the right take on Kissinger way back in 2001.

Henry Kissinger finally dies

The war criminal and terrible person has died at the age of 100. In general, I do not feel glad at the death of anyone but I will make an exception in this case. When I heard the news this morning, my reaction was “Finally!”.

Kissinger had a great deal of influence on policies that caused immense harm and suffering to millions of people all around the world. His winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, for arriving at a deal that began the process of the US disengaging from the fighting in Vietnam, was an utter disgrace since his policies had created much of the carnage in the country in the first place. He was part of repeated American interference in Latin America, especially Chile, where he supported the coup that overthrew the democratically elected president Salvador Allende and put in power the murderous General Pinochet. People are less aware of his role in enabling Indonesian leader General Suharto unleash a bloody massacre in East Timor. and he suffered absolutely no consequences for any of these because he did it to advance American interests.
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Jonathan Pie on David Cameron’s return to the British government

I had missed this earlier clip from Pie about the British prime minister’s surprise move to bring the former prime minster back into the cabinet as foreign secretary. But better late than never.

Cameron came from a highly privileged background and was a member of the infamous and highly exclusive Bullingdon Club at Oxford University, “known for its wealthy members, grand banquets, and bad behaviour, including vandalism of restaurants and students’ rooms.” Boris Johnson was also a member, as are other members of the British political establishment.

There are rumors that initiates had to go through a pretty disgusting ritual to be allowed in, that was cruel to pigs. While that may or may not be true, what is known is also pretty disgusting, that members of the club would trash restaurants where they ate and then threw money at the wait staff to cover the costs. They also reportedly burned £50 bank notes in front of homeless people.

You would already have to be an awful human being to even want to be a member of such a club.

How safe are self-driving cars?

I for one would really like to see self-driving cars become an everyday reality, as common as cars are now. It may surprise people that many such cars are already widely used in several cities as taxis. But there are key questions concerning safety and one would hope that the companies marketing these cars would be transparent about the ability of their cars to detect pedestrians and obstacles. But Sam Biddle writes that one major company is putting its cars out on the streets even though it seems to have two key vulnerabilities: an inability to see small children and large holes in the ground.
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The sports stadium grift

In the US, wealthy owners of professional sports teams have long practiced the art of extortion on the local citizens of the cities where they play. They demand that taxpayers pay for, or at least partly subsidize, brand new fancy stadiums that give them more revenue and threaten to move the team to another city if their demands are not met. They play on the fact that elected city officials fear facing the wrath of enraged fans if the city loses its team, and thus often are willing to agree to the terms. On the flip side, the cities seeking to attract a team are also willing to make deals that are generous to the owners. These deals rarely benefit the local population, who would have benefited more if the money had been spent on other things.
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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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Speak, George!

Fabulist George Santos seems resigned to the fact that following the release of the scathing report by the House ethics committee on his behavior, that he may be expelled from the House of Representatives even before he is convicted of any charges and before the expiration of his current term. But he seems determined to not go quietly into the night, as can be seen from his recent statement.

Santos said that members calling for his expulsion are basically throwing rocks in a glass house because of the baggage they carry as well, and if he is expelled from Congress, then he would expect that precedent to lead to other expulsions as well.

“Within the ranks of the United States Congress, there’s felons galore, there’s people with all sorts of sheisty backgrounds, and all of a sudden, George Santos is the Mary Magdalene of the United States Congress,” he said. “I don’t want to work with a bunch of hypocrites. It’s gross. I have colleagues who are more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyists that they’re going to screw and pretend like none of us know what’s going on and sell off the American people.”

“Not show up to vote because they’re too hungover or whatever the reason is, or not show up to vote at all and just give their card out like f***ing candy for someone else to vote for them. This s**t happens every single week. Where are the ethics investigations?” he continued.
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Santos made clear in the space that he will not resign and that he wants to see the House “set this precedent” and expel him from Congress based solely on the ethics report, saying that he will “stand for expulsion” to make the House take a vote on it.

“Start the new precedent that the moment anybody is accused of anything, I expect everybody to start being expelled. And that means there’s a s**t ton of members that should be getting expelled following my expulsion,” Santos said.
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Santos said he expected to be expelled from Congress because he “can do math” and count the votes.

“I know I’m going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor,” he said.

Maybe the only good thing that may out out of Santos’s brief tenure as a member of congress is if he exposes the seedy underbelly of the body. Of course, since his own credibility is close to zero, any targets of his criticism can simply dismiss his charges as yet more lies.

It is time to call out Trump’s derangement

There is no question that serial sex abuser Donald Trump’s (SSAT) rants at his rallies and on his social media account are becoming more frequent and vicious. It seems like he never stops attacking his opponents and some of his harshest vitriol is aimed at the law clerk assisting Judge Engoron in the New York City fraud trial. Why he picks on the hapless clerk is hard to understand. The latest one was unleashed at 2:00am on Thanksgiving morning, a time when most people are asleep.

“Happy Thanksgiving to ALL, including the Racist & Incompetent Attorney General of New York State,” Trump wrote Thursday morning at 2:03 AM. He also extended his holiday greetings to “the Radical Left Trump Hating Judge, a ‘Psycho,’ Arthur Engoron, who Criminally Defrauded the State of New York, & ME, by purposely Valuing my Assets at a “tiny” Fraction of what they are really worth.” Trump also once again mentioned Engoron law clerk Allison Greenfield by name, describing her as “Politically Biased & Corrupt.”

The 45th president of the United States also attacked President Joe Biden in his early morning rant, saying he “WEAPONIZED his Department of Injustice against his Political Opponent, & allowed our Country to go to HELL.” He concluded the post mentioning “all of the other Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Fascists, Marxists, Democrats, & RINOS, who are seriously looking to DESTROY OUR COUNTRY.”

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What privilege looks like

A video of a man, a former state department official and reportedly an advisor to president Obama, harassing a street vendor in New York City has gone viral.

The street vendor in Manhattan who was racially harangued about the Gaza conflict woke to huge lines of well-wishing customers on Wednesday as the the former state department official who was filmed berating him was arrested and charged with racial harassment and stalking as a hate crime.

Mohammed Hussein, 24, was back to work at the Q Halal Cart grill on Wednesday on the corner of Second Avenue and East 83rd Street, with lines of customers queuing for food in a sign of support.

Hussein has said he is still shaken by the encounters with Stuart Seldowitz, 64, who repeatedly harassed him with Islamophobic invective. Seldowitz called Hussein a “terrorist”, said 4,000 dead Palestinian children in Gaza “wasn’t enough”, called the Prophet Muhammad a “rapist” and told the vendor he’d be tortured “when they deport you back to Egypt”.The vendor repeatedly asked Seldowitz to leave him alone in the clips, to which Seldowitz was filmed replying: “Why should I go. Why should I go? Tell me why I should go? I’m standing here. I am an American. It’s a free country.”

Seldowitz was arrested and charged at the 19th precinct on the Upper East Side on Wednesday with one count of aggravated harassment of race or religion and four counts of stalking as a hate crime.
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After the videos were shared online and Seldowitz was publicly identified, the political lobbying firm he had consulted with said it had cut ties with him, and offered to represent Hussein. “I’ll represent the food vendor pro bono if he wants to bring a lawsuit,” Gotham Government Relations president David Schwartz said.

I watched the video and what struck me was how smug and self-satisfied Seldowitz looked throughout it all, smiling all the time, full of the confidence that in this encounter with an immigrant street vendor, he had all advantages of inequality. He spoke of how he could use his contacts in the state department and in Egypt to create trouble for the vendor and his parents.

I am not in general supportive of online viral shaming because it can be abused, with edited and misleading videos used against ordinary people. But in this case, Seldowitz seems to deserve it.