Category Archives: Uncategorized

John Konrad on gCaptain has some definite opinions on the operation of the Port of Los Angeles, and where the dude in charge should be borrowing tactics:

The Marine Corps is not the only entity to latch onto [Air Force Colonel John] Boyd’s theories, the Toyota production system is heavily fashioned after his work, and so is the operations of Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook today.

What does this have to do with port congestion and logistics?

Well besides the fact that we are obviously playing the game of attrition – building bigger ships and sending them hey diddle diddle, right up the middle from China to Los Angeles – which always leads to trench warfare and ultimate defeat… there is more to this story.

The academic study of logistics is fairly new. In fact, one of the first master’s degree program in logistics was started by Dr. Shmuel Yahalom at SUNY Maritime College. Guess who else ended up teaching at this small and relatively unknown school. General Alfred Grey, USMC (Ret) who was commandant of the corps during the Gulf War, with Captain Anthony Piscitelli who wrote the book “The Marine Corps Way Of War” which details the adoption of Boyd’s theories.

One user of a tactic is a footnote. Multiple users across multiple domains is noteworthy. If you’re involved in a War of Attrition, you might want to read his post.

In case you’re wondering about North Korea’s capacity to vaccinate for Covid-19, 38 North has a report from two months ago. Money quote:

The DPRK is highly capable of implementing national vaccination programs. Their measles vaccine campaign in 2007 showed how quickly and efficiently they can get the job done. Provided they had time to prepare, i.e., ensure the integrity of the cold chain and have sufficient stock of consumables, the North Koreans could, in theory, vaccinate the entire population of 25 million people in less than 10 days for single injection vaccines, and in under two months for two-shot vaccines. These projections are based on ideal conditions, and the real-world experience would likely be much different.

They have manufacturing facilities, but development facilities are not mentioned. Given the spotty performance reported for the Russian and Chinese vaccines, I suspect the West would have to supply vaccine formulas.

And that would be the right thing to do, for our own safety.

Loadstar, via gCaptain, has a disturbing report:

Persistent and mounting congestion at US west coast ports has caused some shippers to seek the sanctuary of the east coast to speed cargo through the supply chain – but this avenue is also becoming increasingly problematic.

As congestion at Pacific gateways worsened, the shift to east coast ports gathered momentum, but now these are struggling with increasing congestion – halfway through last week there were 24 ships waiting for berths at the port of Savannah, and Maersk Line called the situation at Georgia “increasingly challenging”.

The number of vessels at anchorage in San Pedro Bay waiting for berths at Los Angeles and Long Beach climbed to around 70 last week, signalling ever-lengthening wait times. …

Much of the problem stems from issues beyond all the ports, namely a congested rail network and shortage of trucks to move boxes off the docks. According to one report, in Los Angeles there are 16 containers waiting for every available truck.

Which leaves me to wonder: The Biden Administration has been struggling to manage the influx of illegal immigrants, but each has to be checked and put through the immigration courts. How about training some of them to drive trucks? Pair them with experienced American drivers, offer incentives – still to be invented – and perhaps the trucking problem, if not the rail problem, could be ameliorated.

It’s worth considering, at least. The shortage of truck drivers is well-known, and anyone arguing that it’s illegal immigrants stealing jobs can be kicked in the teeth, metaphorically, with the stats about the truck driver shortage.

Confronted by some anti-vaxxer spouting off about religious exemptions like these folks?

President Biden’s vaccine mandate is being challenged in a lawsuit filed by four active-duty US Air Force officers, a Secret Service agent, a Border Patrol agent, and four other federal employees or contractors. The lawsuit claimed that “convicted serial killers who have been sentenced to death receive more respect” than citizens who are required to take vaccines.

The lawsuit alleges that the vaccine mandate forces service members, federal employees, and federal employees to “inject themselves with: (1) a non-FDA approved product; (2) against their will; and (3) without informed consent.” Plaintiffs seek a ruling that the vaccine mandates issued by Biden and the Department of Defense “violate the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of substantive due process” and “the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment.” (The Pfizer vaccine does have full FDA approval.) [Ars Technica]

Here’s my suggestion:

Please enumerate for me all lawful religious exemptions which directly endanger my health and life.

Let them sputter over that one for a while.

Telson:

The telson is the posterior-most division of the body of an arthropod. Depending on the definition, the telson is either considered to be the final segment of the arthropod body, or an additional division that is not a true segment on account of not arising in the embryo from teloblast areas as other segments.^[1] It never carries any appendages, but a forked “tail” called the caudal furca may be present. The shape and composition of the telson differs between arthropod groups. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Scorpions develop a sting in the tail before they are ready to use it,” James Urquhart, NewScientist (18 September 2021):

Songryong Li at Wuhan University in China and his colleagues studied two-day old Chinese scorpions (Mesobuthus martensii), which are translucent and still embryo-like, and found they already had venom stored in the end of their tail, or telson. However, their stinger was blunt and venom exit ducts were blocked, enabling the toxin to pool inside the tail.

Jennifer Rubin thinks Rep Liz Cheney (R-WY) might make a run for the Presidency, presenting the GOP with a chance to get out of the insane lane:

What is certain is that Trump will try to maintain the prospect of running in 2024 for as long as possible, both to stay in the limelight and make money as well as to position himself to characterize any prosecution as solely political. If he’s still hovering over the race in 2023, other Republicans may be frozen out of the contest (and deprived of donors) for fear of antagonizing the man whose wrath they fear. In that scenario, Cheney might be the only candidate facing Trump in a 2024 primary, at least for many months.

That’s all a long way off, but this much is clear: If Cheney can win in 2022, dealing a blow to the MAGA GOP, she might establish herself as the sole alternative on the right to four years of chaos, lawlessness, incompetence and corruption. That doesn’t mean by any stretch of the imagination that she would win that fight. But it would give Republicans one final off-ramp from the road to democracy’s demise. [WaPo]

She may attempt to run, but she won’t attract votes from the current GOP – assuming they haven’t imploded by 2024 – because she embodies a strong reproach to their terrible behavior and deeply immature political state of mind. That, in turn, is a reproach to every GOP voter that thinks God meant for Trump to win in 2020. It’d be deeply humiliating for them to vote for Cheney for President.

Her only chance is if the Democrats go too far left, as Andrew Sullivan occasionally mentions, and the Hispanics and Black communities choose to go with Cheney, instead. She has not, so far as I know, displayed any xenophobia, and I believe she apologized for earlier anti-gay attitudes.

But that seems like an unlikely result. Biden’s too experienced to let that get too far out of hand.

Only just now did we get around to watching the Thursday night The Late Show, and the musical performance section, which was Theo Croker with Wyclef-Jean and Jon Batiste, inspired a conversation for my Arts Editor and I.

A fine collection of aperitifs….

Gamera the Brave (2006) is another reboot of the Gamera franchise, symbolically represented by … killing off Gamera.

In this return to the perspective of the children and “Gamera, friend to all children,” Gamera wins a battle with several Gyaos by committing a rather violent version of suicide, literally blowing up.

Years later, a boy named Katsuya, attracted by a flash of light on an island in the bay, finds an egg in a crystal holder, and inside the egg is a beautiful little turtle, thus completing the symbolic message of the reboot. He, his sickly neighbor Mai, and his friends conceal the baby turtle, named Toto, from his father, a ramen noodle shop owner named Kousuke who witnessed the gallant suicide of Gamera, because Kousuke has forbidden pets. This becomes a bit of a problem when Toto’s growth rate accelerates beyond belief. And he can hover.

But, damn, he’s cute. She’s cute. Whatever. Loved the CGI.

And meanwhile there are ships disappearing in the ocean. And survivors are being sucked under. Followed by lip-smacking. Well, not really – something worse. A big shark? A monstrous squid? A demented God?

When Mai must head off to the hospital for surgery on her heart, Katsuya gifts her the crystal for luck, and off she goes, just in time to miss the first clash of a half-grown Toto, which looks a lot like a guy in a rubber suit, with the kaiju Zedus. Toto interrupts Zedus as it’s munching on inhabitants of Katsuya’s little city in a most upsetting scene – I mean, if I were a ten year old I’d be upset – but cannot destroy Zedus, and must limp away, badly injured, which leads to his capture by government officials, intent on learning about him. They also bandage him up and infuse him with some mystical liquids.

Kept incapacitated, Toto is nearly destroyed when Zedus discovers him penned in a sports stadium, but Toto recovers his senses and, breaking free, resumes the free-for-all with Zedus. Mia survives her successful surgery, but is bothered by dreams about the crystal. Soon enough, the children of the city form a relay team to get the crystal from Mai to Toto (who is caught in a building in a scene reminiscent of Pacific Rim (2013)), which revives Toto/Gamera enough to finish off Zedus in a mind-blowing finale.

Sorry about the pun.

As ridiculous as it sounds, this is not a half-bad effort. Sure, the science is delusional, but the characters are actually well-drawn and react in plausible ways, the CGI is good, the guys in rubber suits – who may have been CGI for all I know – are quite traditional in the Gamera genre, and Gamera’s return to a slightly comic appearance, if not behavior, may be welcome to the target audience. The plot? The plot is infused with the important life lesson Never give up.

I’ll drink to that.

The joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission to Mercury (and deep into the Sun’s gravity field) did another flyby and snapped some pics. Here’s the only one they seem to be releasing, annotated:

I recently read that there are remarkably few boulders on the surface of Mercury, reason unknown. And, beyond WOW!, that’s about all I can contribute.

The breaching of Epik by the Anonymous hacker group has caused quite a stir in the political community, as Epik was responsible for hosting a number of conservative and far-right websites.

However, this daily dot report, if accurate (I’m not sitting through a four hour long video conference!), is really a bit of a jolt:

Epik CEO Rob Monster, who did not respond to requests for comment from the Daily Dot, would go on to hold a more than four hour long live video conference online to address the initial hack. The meeting would see Monster break out into prayer numerous times, make attempts to vanquish demons, and warn viewers that their hard drives could burst into flames due to “curses” placed on the hacked data.

Curses? Really?

A while back I talked about alternate models of reality, as in the competition between the dominant model of reason, and the alternate of, well, miracles. It appears to me that Rob Monster’s (RM) model of reality is not much like mine.

Why does this matter? Absent reports of hard drives magically bursting into flames, not only are the models divergent, it’s also clear that he and his team, because they do not have the same depth of understanding of reality as I prefer to have in people with whom I work. Rather than take security seriously, RM and his team place curses on data (pre- or post- hack … I have to ask, I really do). Hey, in their minds they may think they’re just as serious, or even more so, than I, but there’s an objective metric for this, isn’t there?

Objective reality.

Do the hard drives burst into flame when someone tries to illicitly use the data? Not that I’ve heard. Does proactive security work? Not only does my common-sense suggest it will, but so does the experience of security professionals. Not that it’s easy to do – it’s really not that easy – but it works.

So if I had the opportunity to use a service provided by RM and his team, even at a large discount, I would decline the opportunity. Alternate models of reality not only endanger lives, but also provide services inferior to that of those services based on other models of reality.

And social evolution will – eventually – remove or modify those inferior models.

Yes, I know, I know – this thing seems to go on forever. It’s that very length which contributes to the dangerousness of the mail. But here’s the next pic:

Unlike the last pic, which did a lot of heavy lifting, this one is designed to simply inflate outrage, thus deflecting & destroying analytical thought. But it’s important to note that this is the type of sub-message which can function acceptably on its own, as previous generations of Americans developed, to a degree, the ability to ignore, to tolerate the offensive expression.

After all, as a nation of many creeds, philosophies, and religions, friction is an inevitable result of the machine to which we are constituent parts. The philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre is not a comfortable structure for many Americans, nor is the strictures of the Catholic Church. In other countries, deadly clashes over creeds, philosophies, and religions are a daily occurrence, but in the United States we all agree to abide by secular law, and that associated dogma only applies to those who agree to abide by it.

So, on its own, this is a relatively inoffensive mockery of those who insist that being offended is a mortal sin.

But in context, that context being the entire mail under analysis, it plays a role of inflating emotional outrage, and thus deflecting the analysis which might otherwise show this mail is a shameless attempt to manipulate those of a conservative temperament.

And enrage the conservative against the composer of that email.

Clay Wirestone of the Kansas Reflector calls it as he sees it:

When the original medicine shows were popular, let’s say 1890, the average U.S. life expectancy was 44 years. Diseases struck children and adults down in their prime, with doctors helpless to intervene. Prayer and booze were all they had.

In the 130 years since, our life expectancy has shot up to nearly 79 years. Once-fatal diseases have been all but eliminated — thanks to vaccinations and other treatments — and we enjoy a standard of living our forebears could only dream about.

Which brings us one high-profile guest of this medicine show. In 1890, he might have been called the “professor,” the storyteller who knit the whole evening together.

Today, we simply call him Kris Kobach, former Kansas secretary of state and current candidate for attorney general. Defeated in runs for governor and U.S. Senate, Kobach knows all about failing upward, about taking a losing situation and making it sound preordained. Like the professors of old, he gets the grift.

Modern medicine has gotten most of the crowd to where they are, and, by gum, they’re not going to take it anymore!

While China has banned decentralized cryptocurrencies, other countries are exhibiting a more positive interest, as NewScientist (18 September 2021) reports:

El Salvador has officially adopted bitcoin as legal tender. Draft legislation may soon lead Panama down the same path, while China, the US and the UK are investigating launching their own cryptocurrencies. Here’s what you need to know.

Why are countries adopting bitcoin?

President Nayib Bukele hopes bitcoin will alleviate El Salvador’s prickliest economic problems: citizens sending money home from abroad account for up to a fifth of the country’s GDP, but they have to pay high transaction costs, and 70 per cent of people have no bank account. Bitcoin enables quick, cheap payments across borders, and doesn’t require banks.

Cryptocurrency is a spawn of the digital age, which makes it a challenge to use by those not connected to the Internet:

While many in El Salvador were posting their successful bitcoin purchases on social media, others were marching in the street in protest.

And the markets are spooked. The Financial Times reports that the yield on long-term Salvadoran bonds rose from 8.5 per cent in June prior to the bitcoin announcement to 11 per cent, meaning confidence in the state’s finances has dropped,

And bitcoin’s volatility makes it a dubious choice over the long term, if that volatility continues, as the article notes. But I don’t doubt there will be continued experimentation, as the advantages, imagined or real, can be alluring. Get ready for a new acronym: CBDC –

But we are likely to see central banks around the world launching their own digital currencies, combining benefits of cryptocurrencies and traditional money. Financial consulting firm PwC published a report earlier this year on these so-called Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). The report claimed that 60 governments are currently working on one, and that 88 per cent are basing them on blockchains, the technology behind bitcoin, though not all CBDCs will be cryptocurrencies.

CBDC obviates two features of bitcoin, which is lack of central bank control and, therefore, algorithmic control of the amount of legal tender. While these features are advertised as positives, they strike me as potential negatives – and, by erasing them, we may see CBDCs succeed.

Oneiric:

of, relating to, or suggestive of dreams [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Karmalink review: An intriguing mix of Buddhism and nanotech,” Davide Abbatescianni, NewScientist (18 September 2021):

To record Leng Heng’s dreams and discover the secrets of his past lives, Srey Leak steals Leng Heng’s sister’s AUGR (short for “augmented reality”), a sort of forehead microchip that works through the injection of special “nanobugs”. During his oneiric explorations, Leng Heng meets Vattanak Sovann (Sahajak Boonthanakit), a neuroscientist and the inventor of the Connectome, a mysterious device containing “a digital replica of one’s consciousness” that can open “a path to enlightenment” through neural connections with the user’s past lives.

From Steve Benen on Maddowblog:

* The end of an error: “Pat Robertson, who turned a tiny Virginia television station into a global religious broadcasting network, is stepping down after a half-century running the ‘700 Club’ on daily TV, the Christian Broadcasting Network announced on Friday. Robertson, 91, said in a statement that he hosted the network’s flagship program for the last time on Friday, and that his son Gordon Peterson will take over the weekday show starting on Monday.”

Oh, sure, I could argue he got it right … but what fun would that be?

Trompe-l’œil:

Trompe-l’œil (/trɒmpˈlɔɪ/ tromp LOY, French: [tʁɔ̃p lœj]; French for ‘deceive the eye’) is an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions. Forced perspective is a comparable illusion in architecture. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “How did this teenager’s drawing of his knee wind up in a Jasper Johns painting at the Whitney?” Geoff Edgers, WaPo:

On May 25, [17 year old student Jéan-Marc] Togodgue, [Rita] Delgado and [Jeff] Ruskin took [artist Jasper Johns] up on that offer and made the short drive down Route 41 to the artist’s nearly 170-acre estate. They were met by Johns, assistant Maureen Pskowski and Conley Rollins, a former Goldman Sachs asset manager who now owns an inn and often serves as an unofficial representative of the artist. Togodgue stared at “Slice” and his drawing, which appeared to be taped to the canvas. Then he looked closer. It was a perfectly executed trompe l’œil; the tape was actually paint. Johns had also reproduced the image exactly, right down to the Jéan-Marc signature, a creation as distinctive as a graffiti artist’s tag.

Or at least so I hope! Paul Fidalgo’s round-up of the news includes this shocker:

North Carolina’s hospital just had to fire about 175 employees for vaccine refusal.

Either that or North Carolina’s far more backward than I ever thought.

During this legislative foofooraw (or however that’s spelled) over the debt ceiling, I’ve been watching the right trying to resurrect the meme of the free-spending (once known as “tax and spend,” which I have since tried to explain is a good thing) Democrats, to be presumably followed by the laughable assertion that the Republicans are financially circumspect.

Yes, for those of paying attention over the last 25 years, this is a moment to pause and laugh out loud.

So here’s Erick Erickson joining the push:

Reconciliation will eventually happen. Democrats have to raise the debt ceiling to pay for all their spending.

Looking at it closely, it’s clear that this is wrong on a couple of levels.

1. Raising the debt ceiling ultimately pays for nothing. The proper way to think about this is that it transfers the right to receive funds from the immediate supplier of a service, such as a road construction company, to a lender, such as an investor in Treasury Bills, by using funds provided by the lender to pay the supplier. Nothing is paid in terms of the government disbursing tax money to recipients. Only a promise to pay has been extended to an entity that can afford to not be paid in exchange for an interest rate on the lent money.
2. The fact that the debt ceiling needs to be raised isn’t the exclusively the “fault” of either party. Keep in mind this is not a ceiling on annual deficits, but on the cumulative debt. Each party, and sometimes both (“bipartisan”) has taken action, mostly through legislation, to spend money on providing services and direct payments, ranging from Defense to Welfare, and those actions, when not paid for by raising taxes, shifting funding, raising fees, or abolishing other services, must then be “paid for” by borrowing money and paying suppliers or recipients using the borrowed funds. See 1.
3. 

   Source: St. Louis Fed.

   So when Erickson derisively says “pay for all their spending,” it’s not entirely honest. Let’s take a single example out of his hide. The Tax Reform Bill of 2017, despite some hysterical (or hysterically funny) claims that it’s a historic achievement and that it worked, it did not work, as we can see on the right. Annual deficits are growing at an appalling rate, because the Republicans refused to pay for their corporate tax cuts in any way, believing with starry eyes that their political religious tenet of the Laffer Curve would replace the funds lost through tax cuts with funds generated by new economic activity enabled by the tax cuts. As both Democrats and third-party economists predicted, It Didn’t Happen. That gap in funds resulted in the Federal debt jumping upwards, with no end in sight, as the annual deficits accrued into the debt. Worse yet, when Democrats proposed raising taxes that had been dropped – you know, the responsible action – the Republicans in the Senate pretended to have a stroke and drop right there on the floor. Even when your Signature Legislation is an Out and Out Failure, you can’t let it be rolled back. Even fourth-rate politicians insist on being proud of their work, especially when it’s a failure.

4. That all translates to Republicans have contributed substantially, maybe even more than Democrats, to this mess, and they refuse to clean it up by a bipartisan effort to raise taxes.
5. The errancy of the word “fault” in this context deserves its own rant, from which I’ll desist at the present time.

But because Erickson will benefit by misleading his audience – by making them feel better for being conservatives, rather than miserably incompetent at governance – he walks down that road to his own personal Hell.

And it’s really too bad. I rather liked this point:

Now the progressives will kill the bipartisan infrastructure plan, which included some of what they wanted, because it is not enough. They will take no wins unless they can have all the wins. Zealots always prefer to live in hell if they can’t get Heaven exactly as they want it.

Erickson might not like the idea that McConnell, et al, are exactly the same as the progressives he’s criticizing – but it’s true. The current extremist Senator, which includes McConnell and most of the Senate GOP, does not and can not compromise, because that would violate the sacred requirements of being a Godly Senator. It would imply that they can be wrong, that, just maybe, God isn’t on their side.

And that’s just too appalling for the Republicans and, indeed, any zealot. But Erickson rather wrecks this good point by being misleading in other points, and is thus difficult to take seriously.

And if you’re puzzling over why the Democrats claim this is the Republicans’ fault, this is why. And it’s by and large accurate.

Continuing coverage on the battle of the Models of Reality, Brainwrap on Daily Kos has some data presentations that don’t help the alternative model of reality:

It’s not difficult to see that living in counties that didn’t vote for the former President is a lot safer than living in Trump-preferring counties. The ratio of highest to lowest death rate is roughly 5.5, which is not small.

But is it large enough to get the attention of the alternative model of reality crowd?

That’ll depend on their location. Those who live in the blue counties may not notice the difference in death rates, unless they have extensive contacts with red counties. Red county inhabitants may notice extra deaths occurring, but, depending on their “faith” in their model of reality, they may or may not be shaken out of their complacency.

And I don’t speak only of strength of faith; the quality of what they believe about their model may leave it an unshakable edifice. If they think this is just God bringing the faithful home, well, that’s that. Death cults are notoriously difficult to discourage.

But for those who are not in a death cult, it all depends on their exposure to tragedy. If they can visit the local hospital and realize it’s tremendously overworked, then they may realize their model of reality is inferior to the dominant mode.

But will they be rational about it? It’s easier to shout Lies! than to admit a mistake. Right up until you’re the one in the overcrowded ICU, hoping to breath, hoping to survive.

This quiet thread may resurge with this NewScientist (18 September 2021, paywall) report of A US military robot ship has fired a large missile for the first time:

The US Department of Defense has released footage of an uncrewed ship firing a large missile, in a demonstration of its Ghost Fleet Overlord programme, an initiative to develop robot vessels that can operate alongside crewed warships.

Previous Ghost Fleet operations have focused on endurance missions without human assistance, including the first uncrewed transit of the Panama Canal, but the firing is the first indication that the vessels will be armed.

The SM-6 weapon used in the demonstration is a 1500-kilogram missile travelling at Mach 3.5 with a range of over 240 kilometres, fired from a modular launcher on the ship, the USV Ranger. Although the missile was launched without a human on board, US policy requires that the target selection and order to fire would be controlled by a person. The demonstration isn’t the first launch of a missile from a robot boat, but the SM-6 is about 100 times larger than the missile used in an Israeli test in 2017.

Here’s that video:

See the game-changing, cross-domain, cross-service concepts the Strategic Capabilities Office and @USNavy are rapidly developing: an SM-6 launched from a modular launcher off of USV Ranger. Such innovation drives the future of joint capabilities. #DoDInnovates pic.twitter.com/yCG57lFcNW

— Department of Defense 🇺🇸 (@DeptofDefense) September 3, 2021

An analyst suggests a possible weakness:

[Sidharth Kaushal of Royal United Services Institute] notes that, given current limitations of sensors and artificial intelligence, the new vessels will work with rather than replace crewed vessels, but he says there could be a greater risk of them being attacked in peacetime.

“They may become targets for sub-threshold aggression, given that damaging or destroying them involves no loss of life,” says Kaushal. He points to a 2016 incident in which China seized a small US unmanned underwater research craft.

More provocations – are they more dangerous, or are they a relatively safe way for the Big Powers to poke at each other and evaluate responses? The Cold War was notorious for such tactics, but with live people in the planes and ships; if lives are not at risk, this may be a good thing.

Maybe.

In case you were looking at a picture of a face and wondering if it’s a deepfake, the tools for creating deepfakes still have their weaknesses. Here’s one:

Creating a fake persona online with a computer-generated face is easier than ever before, but there is a simple way to catch these phony pictures – look at the eyes. The inability of artificial intelligence to draw circular pupils gives away whether or not a face comes from a real photograph.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) – a type of AI that can generate images from a simple prompt – can produce realistic-looking faces. Because they are made through a process of continual changes, they are less likely to be caught out as fake through simple checks like reverse image searches, which identify the reuse of existing people’s images on fake profiles.

But they do have a tell. The pupils of GAN-generated faces aren’t perfectly round or elliptical, unlike real ones. Real pupils are also symmetrical to one another. Computer-created pupils often have bumpy edges, or they are asymmetrical. [NewScientist (18 September 2021, paywall)]

Somebody will find a way to fix that, probably by upgrading the critiquing program to detect the eye problem and downgrade its results based on it. If I understand GANs properly.

My marathon of deconstructing the toxic message’s pictures continues with this:

Taken out of context, sure. But in the context of the mail it was sent in, as well as the incessant, unsupported claims of a former President who cannot believe he lost his reelection bid?

Not so much.

This is a classic example of how the Big Lie works: the perpetrator invokes a negative emotion in the target audience, and then, while the audience is wallowing in this emotional reaction, slides the Big Lie out and into the target’s consciousness. The audience is receptive: angry, due to the implicit reference to the election lost by the former President, yet superior, as it’s been invited to admire and share in the analogy of murder to election fraud. And while all this emotion is building up, the Big Lie is hinted at – election fraud. The former President has repeatedly claimed it. Various Republican officials have repeated it. Hell, just today Rep Gosar (R-AZ) repeated the lie in the form of the Maricopa County audit (or “fraudit”, as observers dubbed it) had found evidence of massive fraud. Meanwhile, those who found the time to read the report discovered it found a few more votes for Biden, and a few less for Trump. (Personally, I give no credence to this audit.)

This leads into some simple facts:

• In our legal system, there is an opportunity for the losers of an election to contest the results. Credible evidence must be brought, however; shrieking that a loss is unacceptable, that the election was stolen!, without credible evidence, is the tactics of a five year old, not that of an adult.
• The former President took advantage of that opportunity and filed more than sixty lawsuits. Not all alleged electoral fraud, but all those that did were rejected by judges – including Trump-appointed judges – and some used harsh language in their rejection. Indeed, all but one suit complaining about the distance observers must keep from vote counters were rejected.
• Some of the lawyers Trump used are now being punished for abuse of the legal system. This is an unusual step, and while some might think they can justify an accusation of autocracy on the part of the Biden Administration, the truth of the matter is that Trump-appointed judges rejected the suits, just as did judges appointed by other Presidents, as well as state level judges in conservative States. Taken as a coherent picture, the accusations of tyranny lose plausibility, while judgments accepting the idea that the meritless suits filed by Trump and his proxies was an abuse of the legal system gain in acceptability.

All that said, recipients of this email should be stirred up, should be angry.

They should be angry at those who abuse their faith in their fellow man. This was a critical part of an attempt to manipulate them, and they’re justified in being angry. But not at their fellow Americans, the Democrats, but at whoever wrote this mail, be it a fellow traveler or a national adversary.

They’re the enemy.

In the wake of the Arizona “fraudit” coming up empty for the former President, he ignored reality – that the final report indicated he had lost Maricopa County – and, without shame, falsely proclaimed his vindication.

And following in his footsteps is Rep Paul Gosar (R-AZ):

“It was a good start because we now know that fraud was there. Yeah, they made their case very well. The thing about it is that they weren’t given the tools to make a full disclosure,” Arizona GOP Representative Paul Gosar, a close ally of Trump, told reporters from the Undercurrent in Phoenix Friday afternoon, shortly after the audit was released to the Arizona Senate.

“My suggestion is that we actually have some hearings and look over this batch and set a new election for Biden and Trump before the end of the year,” he added.

He comes across as Trump’s little wannabe lapdog, doesn’t he? Full fantasy and all.

What he doesn’t seem to realize is that Trump would lose by a good five million more votes if we held this illicit election that he proposes.

Research and development of potential Covid-19 treatments continue apace:

At least three promising antivirals for covid are being tested in clinical trials, with results expected as soon as late fall or winter, said Carl Dieffenbach, director of the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is overseeing antiviral development.

“I think that we will have answers as to what these pills are capable of within the next several months,” Dieffenbach said.

The top contender is a medication from Merck & Co. and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics called molnupiravir, Dieffenbach said. This is the product being tested in the Kellys’ Seattle trial. Two others include a candidate from Pfizer, known as PF-07321332, and AT-527, an antiviral produced by Roche and Atea Pharmaceuticals. [CNN/health]

In view of my observations in this post, I suppose this reaction from possible study volunteer candidates is to be expected:

Participants must be unvaccinated and enrolled in the trial within five days of a positive covid test. Any given day, interns make 100 calls to newly covid-positive people in the Seattle area — and most say no.

“Just generally speaking, there’s a lot of mistrust about the scientific process,” Duke said. “And some of the people are saying kind of nasty things to the interns.”

The dominant model of reality must be resisted, or their model of reality – where testimonials and endorsements from authority figures reign supreme, rather than that bothersome scientific method – is discredited.

That might even discredit God.