Better in their words…

Monologue on retaining sanity; Trump trial update; new election interference narrative; summer camp crackdowns; unscheduled airplane separations; Putin cleared; digital deepfakes and evidence; more.

Source: KEEPING CALM ☙ Saturday, April 27, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

😎😎 As some alert readers have observed in the comments, this week’s bunch of news may at times have seemed simply rotten with anxiety-aggravating brown spots. Some may wonder why I consistently encourage optimism in the face of what sometimes appears to be bad odds. But remember, we are only the latest generation to face an unpredictable world that seems to be spiraling into chaos, well-illustrated by this still-popular British World War II poster:

The light-hearted Business Insider article linked above described the quintessential British conviction that “keeping calm” helps properly stiffen one’s upper lip:

What that means is, “We may be suffering something of an invasion at the moment, but that’s no reason to start acting in a rash and hot-headed manner. We may be a subjugated nation — temporarily — but we are not about to start acting like savages.”

That’s all well and good, but calmness still feels difficult to grasp even though we were somewhat prepared for rough weather. We knew 2024 would be a different kind of year. We knew the deep state — or whoever is staging Joe Biden’s corpse in lifelike poses around the Oval Office — we knew they would pull out all the stops during this critical election season. We thought were all ready for new 100-year pandemics and climate lockdowns and scary eclipses.

Yet this year, already one-quarter over, continues surprising us. Setting aside teetering wars and rumors of wars, here at home our nerves are being jangled worse than cymbals during a Hari Krishna parade. We’ve been challenged by a speedy series of razor-sharp, rushing technological revolutions that are busily shredding society’s favorite underpants. Things like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, facial recognition, robotics, deepfakes and personal genetics, just to list a few, which are all whizzing straight at us faster than flying stage props in a bad 3D movie.

We aren’t the first generation to feel adrift amidst the rapid pace of technological change. In 1946, reflecting on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein somberly quipped, in his thick German accent, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes.”

(Extra credit: YouTube | Learn how to speak English like Einstein (6:37).)

Even earlier in 1918, as the world first made war with itself, people thought the invention of the tank — as poorly designed as were those first mechanized tanks — they might bring the world to an end. People imagined unstoppable tanks rolling over everything and everyone. And then they got a look at chemical weapons and trench warfare and lost all hope.

For those of us living in 2024, as we effort to keep calm in the face of historic change, conflict, and controversy, as the Hindenburg-like blimp of fascism once again floats menacingly toward America, let us recall Tom Wolfe’s famous 1965 observation — two years before I was born — that “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.”

Ka-boom.

Whenever I find myself thinking there has never been a stupider, more mendacious government than the one now allegedly headed and represented by its avatar, witless faux-president Biden, I actually feel better after recalling fond memories from elementary school, when they trained us in useful nuclear war survival skills. Namely, crawling beneath my writing desk. And that was it. I presume all the official war-planning geniuses back then believed our flimsy, mass-manufactured writing desks possessed super powers that could save the children so we could repopulate the Earth.

My advice is, do not crawl beneath your writing desk. Instead we should follow our British cousins’ example and keep calm and carry on. We’re only a quarter of the way through this Chinese Year of the Dragon. The zaniest year on record will assuredly get even zanier, as we approach the zenith of maximum madness during the first week of November.

So, stiff upper lip! Our best offense is a good defense, and the best defense is to ignore the efforts to emotionally manipulate us with fear and despair. So stay optimistic, it’s the very best way to resist.

Plus there’s been plenty of good news this year too. On to the roundup.

🔥 CNN ran a trial update story yesterday headlined, “Takeaways from Day 8 of the Donald Trump hush money trial.” Some of you will be very relieved that tabloid publisher David Pecker’s testimony finally climaxed yesterday.

I must now quickly apologize to readers who couldn’t handle the distasteful Pecker jokes. Please forgive me. But you must understand for a writer, this was literally irresistible. You just don’t get many opportunities like this one! The jokes write themselves. Not that it makes it okay, but even CNN couldn’t help itself:

Moving on! Two new witnesses testified briefly for the state yesterday. The first was Trump’s 34-year assistant, now retired, Rhona Graff. It appears her only role was to confirm that Trump had a contact in his phone book named “Stormy,” and that Rhona once saw the actress — I use that term loosely — at Trump Tower.

Yawn.

Yesterday’s second new witness was Michael Cohen’s First Republic banker Gary Farro. Farro couldn’t finish his testimony yesterday, but it seems his role will be to describe how attorney Michael Cohen took out a personal home equity line of credit to get the money to pay buy Stormy Daniels’ copyright and NDA.

This is a good time to observe that lawyers don’t usually leverage their own personal assets to pay clients’ bills for them. But on the other hand, convicted fraudster Michael Cohen is no normal lawyer. Who knows what kind of scam he may have been running.

Finally, the Court announced taking off another day of trial. It will take a break on Monday, making the second consecutive short week of trial only running for four week days instead of the full five. This is also highly unusual. Normally judges are very sensitive to getting the jurors back to their regular lives as fast as possible.

If I didn’t know better, I would think the judge was trying to drag things out.

🚀🚀 Second verse, same as the first! CNN Politics ran a Déjà vu story yesterday headlined, “Blinken tells CNN the US has seen evidence of China attempting to influence upcoming US elections.” Fresh off a painful and unproductive interview with President Xi Jinping, the State Department’s Antony Blinken is now out trolling the media that — not Russia, Russia, Russia this time — but now China is trying to influence the presidential elections. And, as you know, ‘election interference’ is a thousand times worse than the most deplorable excesses of the U.S. Civil War.

It was alarming news. You might ask, precisely how is China trying to influence the U.S. elections? Never mind! Stop asking dumb questions. Here’s all that CNN had to say on that subject:

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US has seen evidence of Chinese attempts to “influence and arguably interfere” with the upcoming US elections, despite an earlier commitment from leader Xi Jinping not to do so.

“We have seen, generally speaking, evidence of attempts to influence and arguably interfere, and we want to make sure that that’s cut off as quickly as possible,” Blinken said.

Generally speaking? Arguably interfering? Is arguably interfering the same thing as regular interfering?

Anyway, there you have it. The United States — corporately — has “seen evidence,” generally speaking, of unacceptable Chinese election interference.

I mean, arguable interference.

Apparently, it did not occur to any corporate media reporter attending Blinken’s press conference to ask what evidence? Just how bad is it? Is he saying China is using a fake alternate Facebook account called “JimboPatriot997” to post anti-Trump memes or something? Or what?

And … wouldn’t it help stop election interference to call it out? Like, if everybody knew what the Chinese were up to, it wouldn’t work anymore. Right?

Nope. Just put all those difficult questions out of your pretty little heads. It’s called strategic ambiguity. Even though we allegedly live in a representative republic in which public servants work for the citizens, you citizens don’t need to know whatever China is supposedly up to.

See, we want China to know that we know, but not to know how much we know. Even more important than stopping election interference is leaving everyone guessing. Why spoil the surprise. You can be sure they would never ever make something like this up just to score some points off the Chinese, trust them.

Relax, and let the elites handle this awful, arguable, generalized Chinese election interference problem for you.

🔥🔥 Click Orlando ran a local interest story yesterday headlined, “UF sets student protest boundaries, threatens 3-year ban for rulebreakers.” The sub-headline explained, “Students allowed only to engage in speech, express viewpoints and hold signs.” In other words, no summer camping.

Florida’s largest public university is located right in my home town. Local sources advised me that campus police woke the protestors up every thirty minutes throughout the night last night. The protestors appeared a little bleary-eyed this morning.

The University of Florida also handed out flyers to protestors yesterday, with three categories of permitted activity and fourteen categories of prohibited conduct:

Plus, any UF staff who break the rules will be “separated from employment,” which is a neat euphemism for terminated with prejudice.

Florida’s approach is one that all universities should follow, preserving the right to lawful First Amendment speech but also stopping the campus from becoming an angry circus that no one would pay to see.

✈️✈️ NBC New York ran a surprising story yesterday headlined,  “Emergency slide detaches from Delta flight forcing return to JFK.” Yep, another part fell off another plane and yep, it was a Boeing. I blame China.

According to the limited information provided, shortly after takeoff the plane’s emergency landing slide “experienced an unscheduled separation from the aircraft” while the plane was in the air.

It all sounds rather dramatic and unsettling. In addition to slides located at each door, some larger aircraft also have emergency evacuation slides that deploy from the wings. The wing slides are used during emergency evacuations when the plane lands caddywampus, tilted or on its side, making the door slides less helpful.

Fortunately, the alert pilots safely and immediately returned to JFK where they landed the plane without anything else falling off.

I’ll end this segment with this Bloomberg headline from last week:

So.

🚀🚀 Mystery solved! The Wall Street Journal ran an exclusive story yesterday headlined, “Putin Didn’t Directly Order Alexei Navalny’s February Death, U.S. Spy Agencies Find.” Uh oh.

Whoopsies! To tee up this story about how badly the government and corporate media lies, disinforms, and misinforms us, behold February’s headline from ABC News:

With that in mind, here’s how the Journal’s article yesterday began:

Alexei Navalny’s February death in an Arctic penal colony prompted a new wave of sanctions targeting Russia’s economy, upended delicate negotiations to exchange prisoners between Russia and the West, and left Russia’s limited opposition in disarray.

U.S. intelligence agencies have determined that Putin likely didn’t order Navalny to be killed at the notoriously brutal prison camp in February, people familiar with the matter said, a finding that deepens the mystery about the circumstances of his death.

“Make no mistake. Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death,” Biden said after the world learned of the death.

But the U.S. now believes the timing of his demise wasn’t intended by Putin. 

Well. Now they tell us. Alert readers will recall that back when this story first broke, I challenged Biden’s diagnosis, instead suggesting Navalny’s death sounded more like a jab injury. On February 16th, the Russians reported that Navalny fell unconscious after a walk at the penal colony where he was serving time. Medics tried to revive him, but that failed, and Navalny died.

It sounded all too familiar to me.

But about ten thousand articles then appeared in duplicitous corporate media directly and now, falsely, accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering a hit on Navalny. Of course Putin did it. It was obvious.

But now, not so much. Lawsuits may follow. Should Joe Biden have immunityfrom a defamation lawsuit by Putin? What about all the news agencies?

The new intelligence assessment leaves open the possibility that Putin might have still been involved somehow. You never know. But Biden’s statements and the original media reports all lacked that nuance.

Were the media’s unqualified assassination claims misinformation? What do you think?

🔥🔥 Finally, some great news this week illustrated my theme that AI — and especially digital deepfakes — will ultimately upend most of what we currently rely on as evidence in our court system. Breitbart ran the remarkable, only-in-2024 story under the headline, “Police: Maryland High School Athletic Director Arrested for Framing Principal as Racist Using AI.”

What happened was in December and January, Pikesville Athletic Director Dazhon “D.J.” Darien searched the internet for AI tools. Investigators later figured out the unclever educator used the tools to make a fake vocal recording using school computers. He took a voice sample from Principal Eric Eiswert and made a fake recording of Eric ranting in a highly-offensive racist and antisemitic manner.

D.J. then emailed the fake recording — using his own school email account — to another teacher, Shaena Ravenell, who sent it to media and the NAACP.

When the recording same out, the Baltimore school district promptly fired Principal Eiswert, who was subjected to intense public backlash, death threats, and so on. To this day, Eric has police guarding his home due to the harassment and threats against his family. The entire school was upended in controversy. PHS had to increase its police presence on campus to keep order.

But after an investigation, on Wednesday police issued a warrant for D.J.’s arrest. D.J. tried to flee, but he was caught Thursday morning at BWI Airport while trying to board a flight to Houston. Bizarrely, the reason D.J. was caught was because he was trying to check his gun, and airport security ran a routine search and saw the outstanding warrant.

“We now have conclusive evidence that the recording was not authentic,” Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough announced during a Thursday press briefing. “It’s been determined the recording was generated through the use of artificial intelligence technology.”

Principal Eric’s voice in the fake audio said horrible things like, “ungrateful black kids who can’t test their way out of a paper bag,” and “If I have to get one more complaint from one more Jew in this community, I’m going to join the other side.” D.J. even put a reference to himself in, having the fake recording say Eric wanted to fire D.J. and “drag his black ass out of here one way or another.”

D.J. was charged with disrupting school activities, theft, retaliation against a witness, and stalking. That sounds like only the beginning of his problems.

The innocent principal is now vindicated. The racist criminal athletic director is being properly punished. But the case raises profound questions about AI intruding into civil and criminal lawsuits.

State Attorney Scott Shellenberger told reporters this was the first case he knew of involving an AI-faked audio recording, and maybe the first of its kind in the entire nation. ”It seems very clear to me that we may need to make our way down to Annapolis in the legislature next year to make some adaptions to bring the law up to date with the technology that was being used,” he said.

Indeed. I agree with Shellenberger. If it’s not worse than useless already, digital evidence will soon be nothing but a distraction in court. Think about security camera video, for example. Given readily-available technology that a moron like D.J. can get hold of, how can anyone realistically prove that any digital security recording is real?

I saw this problem coming. Over the last four years, I’ve represented clients in at least six cases where my clients claimed their signature on a fake contract was copied from other documents and pasted onto the PDF. So far, judges have struggled with how to handle those types of claims but we’ve worked it out.

I could prove that kind of digital forgery occurred by finding the source document the signature was lifted from. Then it’s just a matter of showing the judge how the original signature perfectly matches the one on the allegedly fake contract. It works well when you are lucky enough to locate the original signature on the document the fraudsters lifted it from.

But now, AI can take the source signature and make a new, realistic looking copy that doesn’t perfectly match the original. I have no idea how we’ll prove those are fakes. And that’s just for signatures. I’m expecting to see fake signatures offered along with things like fake telephone recordings discussing the contract or even fake videos of the signing.

AI will inevitably blow a Titanic-sized hole in the law of digital evidence — which is most of the evidence people are admitting these days. Having given it a lot of thought, I suspect analog media might make a comeback. Things like rolls of film and super-8 video cassettes are much harder to fake than digital evidence. Buy stock in Kodak.* (* Not investment advice.)

And witness testimony will probably completely eclipse digital evidence. Back to Biblical standards. (Old Testament law required two eyewitnesses to sustain any prosecution.)

It’s a brave new world. I meant it when I said this story was good news. The outcome could easily have gone the other way, and this poor, innocent principal could have been railroaded on false hate crimes. But the prosecutors and investigators kept an open mind, and they tracked down the real crime.

And the best news is that, when digital evidence goes out the window, it will seriously hamstring the surveillance state.

Stay tuned, stay optimistic, and most of all, keep calm and carry on.

Have a wonderful weekend! Come back here Monday for an old-fashioned analog roundup as we start a new week off right and tick off another month.

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