The Public’s Domain

 

Police employees in Beverly Hills, California, have gotten the clever idea that they can effectively jam a live streaming broadcast of their activities by playing copyrighted music from their phones, thereby causing the automated filters of a platform such as Instagram to shut the video down for copyright infringement. The filters have been around for several years, and they can be either too aggressive or too timid unless monitored by a human being, presumably one with common sense.

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The RKO Radio Pictures transmitter logo that signaled the beginning of a motion picture from that studio from 1929 to 1957. This image is now in the public domain.

But monitoring and moderating by a human being comes after the fact; to shut down a video in real time, the filters have to be automated and act independently. The police employees have figured this out and are now counting on the filters being set too aggressively so that they can exploit the feature for the purpose of frustrating citizens’ rights to film them as they go about their public duties at the behest and expense of the public. This tangled mess will surely end up in the courts.

Meanwhile, at this time like no other before, technology bestows benefits on those who enjoy listening to radio programs from around the world, whether that involves copyrighted music or not. Internet streaming of radio broadcasts has been around for decades, but never has access been as easy for casual listeners or the choices as broad as they are now. Radio Garden is a Dutch non-profit project that makes picking out a radio station anywhere in the world to listen to as easy as spinning the globe and then jabbing a finger at a green dot somewhere on it. Let police employees everywhere know that they are in the public’s domain, and that copyright – as easy as access to copyrighted works may be – is not theirs to wield as a baton.

— Techly


The first clip here is from the 1963 Blake Edwards film, The Pink Panther. The second clip is from the 1964 film, A Shot in the Dark, also directed by Mr. Edwards. Both films starred Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau.

 

Listening to the Scientists

 

Dr. Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no credentials in the public health field, has found favor with the current president because as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force he says what the Egoist-in-Chief wants to hear when he listens to scientists. Dr. Atlas is not an idiot, in other words – he’s an ego masseuse, an important qualification as far as the current president is concerned.

 

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White House medical advisor Dr. Scott Atlas delivers his remarks during a press conference on September 16, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. Official White House photo by Tia Dufour.

What follows is a very short list of doctors and scientists, some better than others, to be sure, but all more or less qualified for the Man Baby’s pandemic science team.

Bill Nye 2017
Bill Nye, better known as Bill Nye the Science Guy, at the May, 2017, Montclair Film Festival in Montclair, New Jersey. Photo from the Montclair Film Festival.

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Phil McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil, in a stock photo.

Mehmet Oz - World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2012
Mehmet Oz, better known as Dr. Oz, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 27, 2012. Photo from World Economic Forum.

Robert Young Marcus Welby 1973
Robert Young as Dr. Marcus Welby in the television program Marcus Welby, M.D.. 1973 publicity photo from ABC Television.

DeForest Kelley, Dr. McCoy, Star Trek
DeForest Kelly as Dr. Leonard ‘Bones” McCoy in the television program Star Trek. 1970 publicity photo from NBC Television.

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Ted Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, seated at a desk covered with his books. 1957 photo by Al Ravenna for the New York World Telegram and Sun newspaper.

Lost in Space Jonathan Harris & Robot 1967
Jonathan Harris as Dr. Zachary Smith poses next to the Robot in the television program Lost in Space. 1967 publicity photo from CBS Television.

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Color lobby card for the 1931 black and white film Frankenstein, directed by James Whale and featuring Colin Clive as Dr. Victor Frankenstein and Boris Karloff as the Monster. Card from Universal Studios.

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A Dr. Evil impersonator at a Dell Computers presentation in January, 2007. Photo by Flickr user Edans.

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The Muppet Show characters Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his laboratory assistant, Beaker, at a March, 2007, event for the Muppet Mobile Lab. photo by Flickr user Dawn Endico.

Groucho Marx A Day at the Races
Groucho Marx as Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush in the 1937 film A Day at the Races, directed by Sam Wood and starring the Marx Brothers. Publicity photo by Ted Allan for MGM Studios.


In this scene from the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, directed by Stanley Kubrick, Peter Sellers plays both Dr. Strangelove and President Merkin Muffley, and George C. Scott plays General Buck Turgidson. The current president is not at all like President Muffley in his reasoned assessment of the options available to him in a crisis, but more closely resembles General Turgidson, whose simple-minded grasp of issues is limited to his primal and self-serving interests.
— Techly

 

Once Bitten, Twice Shy

 

In a surprising development, Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mark Warner (D-VA), and John McCain (R-AZ), recently introduced a bill, called the Honest Ads Act, that would impose the same types of regulations on internet political advertising that have long held sway over political ads in print, radio, and television. What’s surprising about it is why it took this long to regulate online political advertising, and that until now there hasn’t been regulation of the same sort as in other media. A reader of online news could be forgiven for having assumed that internet political ads were subject to regulations similar to what has existed in other media for decades, such as disclosure within the ad of who paid for it. Not so.

What took Congress this long? Congress has been behind the curve for years on technological developments, and so in this case the more relevant question is why are they acting now. The answer is presumed Russian interference in last year’s presidential election, and specifically the placement of advertisements as well as so-called news stories on social media sites that the Russians allegedly intended to influence the election results. All that has yet to be sorted out in ongoing investigations, but in the meantime it will be a positive development to have online political advertisers more openly accountable.


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A demonstrator in a Trump mask at one of the March for Truth rallies that took place around the country on June 3, 2017. Photo by kellybdc.

Much has been made over the past year especially, because of the election, of the effect of “fake news” on the electorate, the majority of which now appears to get its news through social media feeds on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Those sites have made noises about doing a better job monitoring the reliability of news sources, but ultimately they cannot effect a major reduction in fake news without entangling themselves in issues of censorship, and consequently losing user trust even beyond the drop in trust they experience when another fake news story makes the rounds.

Forty and more years ago, when there were three national television news outlets and one or more print, radio, and television news outlets in every middling city or larger throughout the country, all of them reliant on a few news service gatekeepers such as the Associated Press, United Press International, and Reuters, the daily news reached a consensus that most people plugged into. There were drawbacks to such centralization, of course, but in general there existed a set of generally agreed upon facts from which disputants could diverge.

Now the news has atomized to the point that someone with a large Facebook following can spread a story with no basis in fact, and those followers will spread the story some more. There are no editors sitting on the story until it is verified. The engineers at Facebook and Twitter are not interested in the job, nor do they seem to think it should be their job. Their job is to watch what their customers watch so that they can boost their company’s revenue by effectively targeting advertising based on those results.

It is as if a newspaper’s staff printed almost everything that came across their desks, with little or no editorial judgment on the contents, and focused most of their energies on the advertisements. A newspaper could not do that because of physical limitations on paper, ink, and space, but an online news feed has no such limitations. A reader can scroll on forever, if so inclined. It’s a buffet that the social media sites are serving up, and it’s in their interest to try to specifically please each person they serve, a task made possible by the interactive nature of the web, where each user click is tabulated as a vote in favor.

From the 1976 film The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau shows the foolishness of making assumptions based on limited information.

There’s only a limited amount then that the news feed providers can and should do to monitor the reliability of the content they provide. Every little bit helps, which is why it’s good news that Congress is belatedly getting around to at least subjecting political advertisements to regulations that would alert interested readers to the provenance of online political advertisements, therefore allowing the readers to judge for themselves the veracity of the ads.

Ultimately people who read news online from a multitude of sources have to exercise critical thinking more than ever before in evaluating the reliability of what they are reading. The days of passively accepting the news in predigested form from trusted sources are over, and that’s all for the good really, but it also means being on guard and skeptical more than ever, much as people want to indulge their lazy tendencies toward confirmation bias, or believing what they want to be true.
― Techly

 

I Alone Can Fix It

 

Strange, megalomaniacal words from a potential head of state, who would become the 45th president of the United States after his 2016 campaign. Enough voters believed him, whatever “it” might have been in their own minds, to make him president in 2017. “It” was left open to interpretation in the election. Whatever “it” was, the strongman would fix “it.” That was good enough for a significant portion of the electorate to put him into office regardless of the will of the majority expressed through the popular vote.
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The fireball and developing mushroom cloud of the Castle Bravo thermonuclear weapon test over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands of the South Pacific on March 1, 1954. Photo by the United States Department of Energy.

Since the election of the 45th president, people have speculated on what will contribute to his ultimate demise, a speculation which seems natural considering the 45th president’s proclivity for self-destructive public pronouncements via Twitter and his other activities. The president’s critics have said he will be impeached, or that the Vice President and Cabinet will invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. These are all pipe dreams, because they imagine real political courage among high level members of the Republican Party, which is not about to manifest itself.

American psychologists will deliver pronouncements on the president’s mental state and people will call on that account for his removal, invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, but his removal will never happen as long as Republican leaders lack the will to effect it. Republicans hold majorities in the federal House and the Senate, as well as in State Legislatures and Governorships. To attempt the removal from office of a Republican president without their approval and active participation is pointless. Section 4 of the 25th Amendment is dependent every bit as much on political considerations as on physical and psychological evaluations of the president. Invoking it will be difficult, to say the least.

In the 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, directed by Stanley Kubrick, the president is portrayed as a mild-mannered, reasonable character surrounded by eccentric lunatics. What if the situation were different in that the head of state was the lunatic? In this scene, Peter Sellers plays Dr. Strangelove and President Merkin Muffley, and George C. Scott plays General “Buck” Turgidson.

Will the 45th president shoot himself in the foot? Quite likely, considering his past behavior. Will that be enough to secure his removal from office? That depends on the reactions of other Republicans in legislative offices and in the presidential administration, and while they may look to psychologists’ reports for corroborative evidence, ultimately they will base their case on legal and fiscal wrongdoing and their own political calculations, looking to a history in legal precedent that is cut and dried.
― Vita

 

Please Leave It at the Door

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

― Excerpt from The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887). This is the poem inscribed on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

 

Summertime is here in the United States, regardless of the timing astronomers would like to impose on it with their solstices and equinoxes. For many of us, summer starts with Memorial Day and ends on Labor Day. And for many of us, hot summer weather has us searching for a cooling alcoholic refresher that is light and may even have some beneficial vitamin C floating in it. Sangria!

 

Sangria is not a kind of wine, though one may get that impression from some bottled varieties at the grocery store. Sangria is in fact a wine punch, and that is what is packaged in the bottles. Most people prefer to make up their own Sangria by combining ingredients from the wine aisle at the grocery store, the produce section (especially citrus), and possibly the soda aisle. Some will make a side trip to the liquor store for brandy, cognac, or other spirits to add depth and punch to their Sangria. The possibilities with Sangria are enormous, and in summertime it seems the rules relax for a lot of things in life. Make a batch that suits you and keep it chilling in a pitcher in the refrigerator.
Ambersweet oranges
‘Ambersweet’ oranges, Citrus sinensis, a new cold-resistant variety; photo by the Agricultural Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
There are some problems here that you should be aware of in our times of racial purity, and you would do well to take note of them. Let’s take the last item first – refrigeration. You are probably okay there because while no single person can be acclaimed as the inventor of refrigeration, the numerous contributors all appear to have either Anglo-Saxon or Germanic heritage. So far, so good.

Looking at the liquor store offerings, we get into murkier territory. To begin with, alcohol as a word originates from Arabic, which is strange considering the Islamic prohibition of alcohol. Next, brandy and cognac come from France, so no good there considering the Frenchies reluctance to back us in our military adventures. Unlike the British, the snooty French ask too many uppity questions. If you want to spike your Sangria, stick with Kentucky Bourbon or Tennessee Mash, or maybe some backwoods Moonshine.

You ought to be okay with soda, but be careful of things like Canada Dry ginger ale and some of the Mexican sodas which are produced with Caribbean sugar cane instead of good old American high fructose corn syrup squeezed from – what else- corn, also known as maize. The Indians introduced us to maize, but let’s not get into all that. We have done them one better at least by introducing Roundup-ready corn into the food supply.

The citrus fruits you may want to include in your Sangria, well now there’s a puzzler. Oranges, while they are currently grown in Florida or California, originated in southern China or southeastern Asia. That’s a thorny problem. The same goes for lemons and limes, which also originated in the same area of the world populated by little yellow and brown people speaking gibberish, possibly anti-American.

If you are to remain racially pure then, there’s not much you can do with Sangria, regardless of the multitude of recipes available. Now we come to the base of the Sangria, which is by definition some sort of Spanish or Portuguese wine. Using anything else, like German wine, would not really be Sangria, at least not in spirit (so to speak). But while the Spanish are pure bred, unlike the Mexicans who are mostly an unholy mix of Spanish and Indian known as Mestizo, with their short stature, brown skin, and Otherness, the Spanish are still not entirely with us. They used to be better, when Generalissimo Francisco Franco was in charge. But since then, not so much. Their wines for Sangria are therefore suspect. Take that under advisement.

The amount of varieties out there serves no other purpose than to test your mettle. It’s hot. You’re sweaty after a long day outdoors. Sangria in its multitude of varieties generously contributed from around the world is not for you. If you were to enjoy it all, you would have to ask that the little brown and yellow skinned peoples leave it at your door, and then scuttle away quietly before the neighbors noticed. Maybe cold lager beer from central Europe is the answer to your summer sweats, if only it weren’t for the fact it’s history can be traced back to beginnings in the Middle East. Those devilish Wogs, at it again!
― Izzy