Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

“Alexa, change the president.”

White supremacy is terrorism.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

The way to stop violence is to stop manufacturing the hatred that fuels it.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

When I was faster i was always behind.

Petty moves from a petty man.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

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God Help Me I’ve Been Watching The View

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Not by choice, but by accident.  In the current Planet Fitness I’m using, the bikes are in front of  the ABC screen, so I’ve seen a couple of episodes.  It’s interesting how all-in they are on hating Trump and electing Biden.  This includes the token Republican, Alyssa Farah Griffin, who was a former member of the Trump press staff.   She sorta-kinda disowned Trump at the end of his term but in the chickenshit way that every Republican who wants to stay a Republican does.  (The insurrection was bad, but he should have been censured, not impeached, we need to move on, blah blah blah.) Still, from the little I’ve seen, she isn’t pushing back on the danger of electing Trump at the moment.

VP Harris was on the show last week and I caught most of it.  She did well, as usual, but I was more interested in the talking points.  First, immigration — she pushed the important point that the Republicans don’t want to make a deal.  I thought she could have shit on Johnson harder, but you can’t have everything.  On abortion, again, a good message focusing on the danger to the health of women who need an abortion to save their lives or because they have a non-viable baby.  I don’t remember if she said “Donald Trump ended the right to abortion” but the Biden ad that is now airing (which I saw but on a different screen, can’t remember the network) says that, and it’s a good, direct and fundamentally true message.

I don’t know who watches The View but I’m guessing that most of them aren’t the average political junkie.  I was frankly surprised at the lack of punch-pulling and both-siderism there — if only the supposedly professional political press could do as well.

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Good News for People Who Care About Human Life

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This is a relief. Though it’s disgusting that 4 SC justices do not appear to care about human life.

Steve Vladeck names names.

h/t Dorothy Winsor for breaking the news in the previous thread.

ABC news

The Department of Homeland Security has also argued that the state’s activities interfered with clear federal supremacy in setting border enforcement policy.

The Supreme Court’s order did not elaborate on the decision. It means federal border agents can resume full control of the contested border area while litigation continues.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh said they would have denied the administration’s request to lift a lower court injunction that was blocking removal of the wire.

I have been seen a lot of talk over the past week comparing this disregard of federal supremacy to the actions that were in defiance of the ruling on desegregation all those years ago.  Happy to see the defiance generally called out in the legal proceedings, even if the filings didn’t mention the connection with desegregation.

Open thread.

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Ready or Not, Here I Come

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“Ready or not, here I come.”  That was from a children’s game.

Now, it’s the reality of AI.  So ready or not, here it comes.  With AI, we have a rocky road ahead.

If I were given the choice, I would probably stop the AI train because I think it can do more harm than good.  Feel free to tell me that I’m wrong.

The NYT gift link below takes you to a test of 10 images that you determine are either real or AI.  I wonder how well people can do with voices.

The most interesting thing in the article, to me, is that results showed that higher confidence in the person’s answer correlated with a higher chance of being wrong.  Yikes!

Anyway, take the quiz, or just read the article at the link.

(New York Times gift link)  h/t dnfree

Distinguishing between a real versus an A.I.-generated face has proved especially confounding.

Research published across multiple studies found that faces of white people created by A.I. systems were perceived as more realistic than genuine photographs of white people, a phenomenon called hyper-realism.

Researchers believe A.I. tools excel at producing hyper-realistic faces because they were trained on tens of thousands of images of real people. Those training datasets contained images of mostly white people, resulting in hyper-realistic white faces. (The over-reliance on images of white people to train A.I. is a known problem in the tech industry.)

The confusion among participants was less apparent among nonwhite faces, researchers found.

Participants were also asked to indicate how sure they were in their selections, and researchers found that higher confidence correlated with a higher chance of being wrong.

“We were very surprised to see the level of over-confidence that was coming through,” said Dr. Amy Dawel, an associate professor at Australian National University, who was an author on two of the studies.

“It points to the thinking styles that make us more vulnerable on the internet and more vulnerable to misinformation,” she added.

A.I. systems had been capable of producing photorealistic faces for years, though there were typically telltale signs that the images were not real. A.I. systems struggled to create ears that looked like mirror images of each other, for example, or eyes that looked in the same direction.

But as the systems have advanced, the tools have become better at creating faces.

The hyper-realistic faces used in the studies tended to be less distinctive, researchers said, and hewed so closely to average proportions that they failed to arouse suspicion among the participants. And when participants looked at real pictures of people, they seemed to fixate on features that drifted from average proportions — such as a misshapen ear or larger-than-average nose — considering them a sign of A.I. involvement.

What do you believe when you can’t believe your own eyes?

Open thread.

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That Was Weird

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DeSantis laughing awkwardly at Iowa event

Bill and I were watching sports on TV yesterday when word reached us that DeSantis had suspended his campaign. We high-fived as if celebrating a touchdown. Ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out what it means, if anything. But I keep coming back to this: Well, that was weird.

DeSantis and his epic flameout of a campaign are and were weird, but not in the stereotypical Florida sense of the word, e.g., weird like throwing a live gator through a drive-thru window.

Rather, DeSantis is a signpost in this weird moment in our political history, when buttoned-down Freedom Caucus-adjacent fascists are trying to co-opt lumpy Orange Sauron’s fake populism to accrue political power. Sometimes it works. J.D. Vance is now a U.S. Senator, for example.

And sometimes it doesn’t work, Ron DeSantis being the latest cautionary tale. But the thing is, he and J.D. and Senator Hawley, etc., are a type, and while it’s right and proper to celebrate when one of them flames out, I think we need an epic face-plant by their master to reduce the danger they pose to the republic to a manageable level.

For my money, David Roth at The Defector described Trump’s appeal and the type of scrawny, elitist fascist who hopes to leverage Orange Sauron for power as well as anyone ever has:

In place of conservatism’s worn nostrums about freedom-to and freedom-from, there’s just retributive violence and impunity; a gun brandished as an argument-ender at the supermarket or a truck accelerating toward a pod of protestors; the absolute right to turn in anyone who offends or just crowds you, and state agents standing by to do the dirty work from there. It is about who calls the cops on whom, and what they expect the cops to do when they arrive; its adherents are cop-callers and the self-deputized.

The challenge for the cynics and gremlins and adult libertarians running against Trump for the GOP nomination is that they also have to promise to do all this while, crucially, not being Trump himself—to sell the same rancid fantasy in a more compelling and presentable way than the dumpy golf priss that the fantasy’s adherents have made its hero and deliverer. How would one do that?

The ambitious aspiring genocidaires around Trump, who want to remake every institution around those vicious impulses, lack both Trump’s demented gravitas and his curdled charisma, but they have the parasitic instinct to know that he can get them where they want to go. They would still be around government if it weren’t for Trump, working in some vile congressman’s office or think tank and doing their level best to shovel as much hurt as possible onto the people they hate the most, but they would be nowhere near as close to being able to do it at the scale to which they aspire. They’re loyal to Trump in the same inextricable and fundamentally unreasoning way that a symptom might be considered loyal to a disease.

Erstwhile and once again Trump loyalist Ron DeSymptom ran a lousy campaign, but it was hamstrung from the beginning because the disease was also in the race. Voters who crave the disease — to extend the metaphor, let’s call it syphilis — aren’t going to vote for “genital lesions” when “syphilis” is right there on the same ballot. It really is that simple, I think.

Anyhoo, my hope is that his humiliating flop will end Ron DeSantis’s career in national politics forever. You never know, but I think that’s a real possibility because DeSantis is a peevish dick, and now that he’s stumbled, everyone is giving into the impulse to kick a fallen bully. Here’s a sample analysis in CNN:

Iowa revealed how ineffective his effort had been all along — his ground game, his message, his strategy, all exposed as a paper tiger and turning his candidacy into a punchline in Republican circles.

“Historic disaster,” said one veteran Republican fundraiser once hopeful of DeSantis’ chances. “JV team.”

Veteran GOP strategists Curt Anderson and Alex Castellanos called it the “Worst Republican Presidential Campaign Ever” in a blistering audit written for Politico that was devoured Friday by DeSantis allies and enemies alike.

Here’s Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell on the ignominious ending of DeSantis 2024:

It’s hard to overstate just how epic this collapse was.

Less than a year ago, Ron DeSantis was the next big thing. Wall Street loved him. So did the GOP faithful.

Polls suggested he was more popular among Republicans than Donald Trump. And just eight months ago, DeSantis had twice as much campaign cash.

But Ron DeSantis had a problem: Ron DeSantis.

The more he campaigned, the less people liked him — namely members of his own party. He was awkward, entitled and angry.

Anger is actually a quality some people crave in their politicians. But DeSantis was angry about weird things — like Disney World…

And by the time DeSantis tucked his tail and ate his own words Sunday, endorsing the very man he’d spent weeks debasing, he’d managed to do something his supporters never imagined — damage his own brand.

See, many politicians mount their first campaign for president without really expecting to win. Instead, they just want to introduce themselves to voters and boost their name ID for the next time. But DeSantis managed to leave the race worse than he started.

The Miami Herald editorial board noticed too (via HuffPo):

“It’s not just that he was steamrolled by Donald Trump,” the newspaper wrote. “DeSantis never appeared to want to save the GOP. He was more interested in making it a more ravenous, angrier and intolerant party. That worked for Trump, but didn’t work for the governor with all the charisma of burned toast.”

But while DeSantis’ campaign may be over, the damage he has done to Florida remains:

“Without his political ambitions, there likely wouldn’t be ‘Don’t say gay,’ woke wars and the waste of state resources to fight meaningless battles against drag queen bars. These were efforts to appeal to Trump’s base but his supporters refused to leave the former president, especially after he was indicted.”

The newspaper said DeSantis could’ve made a play for a “more reasonable” form of conservatism to appeal to a broader range of Americans.

“Instead, he banked on exploiting divisions in our country. As he bows out, DeSantis leaves the Republican Party exactly as he found it, under Trump’s dominance,” the newspaper said.

Yep. And now he’s coming back to his day job, God help us. DeSantis ended his campaign on the same glitch-ridden platform where he launched it — the former Twitter — and his speech concluded with ominous words for those of us in the Sunshine State:

While this campaign has ended, the mission continues. Down here in Florida, we will continue to show the country how to lead.

We’ll see about that. Now that DeSantis has been exposed as a paper tiger, I doubt the corrupt oafs in the statehouse will keep sticking their necks out for him. With any luck, maybe some of the votes they took to bolster his disastrous campaign will come back to bite them on the ass. Maybe better people will emerge.

But no matter what happens in Florida, the Republican Party’s drive to extend Trump’s vicious campaign of dominance and retribution will go on, and there are dozens if not hundreds of DeSantis-like fascist creeps waiting in the wings for their shot. The only thing that can end the whole nauseating Trump circus is us showing up in droves in November, leaving nothing left for the hyper-ambitious sadists to inherit.

Open thread.

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Monday Morning Open Thread: New Week, Same Goals

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Remember, social media folks: Sharing is caring!

Our ‘kids’ are okay…

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Sunday Night Open Thread: Not So Swifties

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Commentor Scout211 shared this yesterday — from USAToday Sports, “The thin-skinned men triggered by Taylor Swift’s presence at NFL games need to get a grip”:

The multiple Grammy winner was all over social media ahead of Saturday’s game, the NFL’s main accounts included. Got prominent play during the game, too, with NBC’s crew panning to them in a suite, cheering big plays. When the musical superstar was shown on the Jumbotron, fans in the stadium went into a frenzy.

Yet Eminem’s presence at the Detroit Lions playoff game last weekend didn’t prompt the overheated vitriol that Taylor Swift’s appearances at Kansas City Chiefs games do…

It’s funny — and by funny I mean tiresome and lazy — how a high-profile female fan wrecks the game, while the prominent visibility of male celebrities or team owners at sporting events is accepted without complaint. Celebrated, even. Jerry Jones gets no shortage of airtime even when people aren’t trying to decipher his reactions to his team’s latest playoff meltdown. Matthew McConaughey’s presence at University of Texas games is considered kitschy and fun. Jack Nicholson was as central a figure in the Lakers’ Showtime era as Magic and Kareem.

But when Swift dares intrude on the NFL, a segment of people lose their ever-loving minds.

Swift has been called “Yoko Ono,” accused of having a negative impact on boyfriend Travis Kelce and, by extension, the Chiefs. She’s been dismissed as a bandwagon-hopper. And in the most ludicrous criticism of all, there are some who’ve suggested she’s using Kelce and the NFL to boost her own profile.

Yes, because the most famous woman on the planet, whose $1 billion-plus Eras Tour helped fuel U.S. consumer spending last year, needs the help.

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War for Ukraine Day 697: Ukraine Appears to Strike Into Russian Occupied Donetsk Oblast

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The crest of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. A wine colored cross on a silver shield with the gold Uktainian Tryzub in the center on a circular blue medallion. A pair of silver maces and an upright sword are between the blue medallion and the wine colored cross.

Just a brief housekeeping note before we get started. JR in WVA and I used to email on occasion. I knew he was ill, hadn’t heard from him in several months, and between things going weird for me in the Fall of 2023 and not wanting to bother him, I let the contact lapse. I should not have done so. I was very sorry to read Watergirl’s post earlier. I want to extend my condolences to his family. May his memory be a blessing.

The Ukrainians appear to have hit back at recent Russian bombardment of Ukrainian civilian targets in a reciprocal strike on Russian occupied Donetsk Oblast:

Reuters has the details.

Jan 21 (Reuters) – Twenty-seven people were killed and 25 injured when Ukrainian forces shelled the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, Denis Pushilin, the Russian-appointed head of the Donetsk region, said on Sunday.

According to Alexei Kulemzin, the city’s Russian-installed mayor, Ukrainian forces bombarded a busy area where shops and a market are located. Pushilin said the city was shelled by Ukrainian artillery.
Reuters photographs and video taken at the scene showed crying people, some of whom said they had lost relatives, and bodies lying on blood-soaked snow near one of the city’s markets.

Pushilin announced a day of mourning on Monday in the Donetsk People’s Republic, the name given to the part of the region Russia says it has annexed.

In his nightly video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy did not address the attack but said that in a single day, Russia had shelled more than 100 cities, towns and villages in nine regions in Ukraine, and that the attacks in Donetsk region had been “particularly severe.”

Ukraine’s forces in the Tavria, or southern zone, said in a Facebook post that soldiers under its command were not responsible. “Donetsk is Ukraine!” it said. “Russia will have to answer for taking lives of Ukrainians.”

Pushilin said 18 of the injured were hospitalised and seven being treated as outpatients.
In Moscow, the Russian Foreign Ministry called the attack “a barbaric act of terrorism” by Ukraine that was carried out “with the use of weapons supplied by the West”.

“The Russian side categorically condemns this treacherous strike against the civilian population,” a ministry statement said.

Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost two years ago, has voiced outrage in the past when Ukrainian attacks have killed civilians in Donetsk and other areas. Russia’s own campaign of air strikes and heavy shelling, however, has killed thousands of Ukrainian civilians.

The governor of the Ukrainian-controlled part of the region, Vadym Filashkin, said Russian attacks killed at least two people at two locations west of the city of Donetsk on Sunday.

At Kurakhove, about 45 km (28 miles) from Donetsk, shelling killed a 31-year-old man and injured another person, while a 62-year-old man was killed and a 70-year-old man injured at Krasnohorivka between Donetsk and Kurakhove, he said.

“I call on everyone who remains in Donetsk: evacuate!” Filashkin said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.

Donetsk is one of four regions in Ukraine’s east and south that Russia claimed to have annexed in late 2022 in a move condemned as illegal by most countries at the U.N. General Assembly. Russia does not fully control any of the four regions.

Today’s strike, provided it is actually verified as an Ukrainian one, comes on the heels of the Ukrainian strikes deep into Russia over the past several days. Including, perhaps, today.

Leningrad Oblast, Russia:

More on those after the jump.

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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