All 34 counts. Every single one. Guilty as sin. It didn’t even take the jury that long. It was just long enough – they requested enough evidence and clarity to make sure the were crossing their Ts and dotting their Is and couldn’t be accused of ignoring the facts… and they were done.
And here’s the thing. Because there is a thing.
This was hard to do. This was very hard to do… historically. It’s not a thing done in the US, regardless of how much it should be done. But…
…the biggest thing making it hard is the convention – the unwritten rule – of not holding a former president to the law. That’s the biggest thing. That’s why Ford was able to get away with pardoning Nixon – an incredibly damaging act – just for one example..
But if all you do, your entire political career..
…if all you do…
…is attack, spit upon, break down every convention, every common ground, every civility and every unwritten rule and as many written laws as you can manage, smash them against the ground and shit on them, all for your own advantage and for your own power…
…eventually…
…those unwritten rules are not such a big deal anymore to anyone. You’ve made sure of that. You’ve broken every one you can, tearing down all the rules, written and unwritten, smashing all the conventions and agreements and social contracts that make everything work and can never be really written too far into law because that’s not how it functions but that doesn’t make them not important.
So when this particular contract, this particular convention, this particular gentleman’s agreement gets thrown out, as it has been today?
It’s your own. damn. fault.
He made this possible. Hell, gor this jury – he made it easy. And it’s all on him.
For bonus points, it has an exemption preserving the right of the KKK to march around masked. Republican leadership refused to allow a floor vote to take that out, so passed it with the exemption intact.
But masking for medical purposes in public? That they’ll make illegal.
Welcome to MEGAMAP, wherein I quickly combine my map with the other two that I know are actively maintained, 2023 Seattle and April 2024 2 Line Eastside Connector. I expected it to take about 10 minutes, instead it took like an hour and a half and involved a lot more editing than I expected. But now it’s poster-sized! About 660mm/26″ squareish but not quite square. And north isn’t perfectly consistent because all three maps have their own separate ideas about what North is, but it’s within a few degrees so doesn’t actually matter in the least.
As far as I know, and I do know, this is the largest single print-type bike map in over a decade, since King County stopped maintaining its county-wide map.
Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map Version 1 – May 2024 is basically the same a RC2 but with an improved legend, some credits, and the full resolution version is finally available! It’s 24″ wide if you have the full version.
The purpose of this map is to connect the maintained City of Seattle Bike Map and the new to-be maintained 2 Line Bike Connector Eastside Map. So it’s all about connecting the connections to the other connections. I will be intending to maintain this one, hopefully with continued input from other people.
The map is uses material from King County GIS, the very outdated and somewhat inaccurate Kirkland Bike Map, satellite views via Google Maps, and important contributions from:
Erik H. on Facebook (Bothell) @sip (Shoreline) @MHowell (Tolt Pipeline Trail)
I’ve put it on Github for the moment because I already have an account there and it does versioning. I still need to figure out a license but it’ll be CC-credit or something like that. ^_^
The handle is cast iron or steel of some kind, despite being silver. The handle is also magnetic and heavy. The actual pan part, however, is aluminium, with no hint of magnetism, and also quite heavy – heavier than I feel it should be, like it has a slab of copper sandwiched inside layers of aluminium. There are three big thick bolts holding this thing together.
This is an object I feel like had to have been made with a purpose. I don’t know what that purpose was. And despite being a decent baker, I am no chef, and am merely an adequate cook in the sense of “I can follow directions correctly and produce the intended meal.”
So what the hell is this for?
Am I wrong about it having a special purpose? Is it in fact really cheap? Because it looks cheap. But it doesn’t feel cheap, and I think that’s important here.
Is it some sort of esoteric camping kit? Is that it? Feels way too heavy for that but it is nicely small.
What’m I missing here, Gastrodonians? Is this some sort of special #cooking implement? Or is it just a weird kind of cheap pan I’ve never seen before.
It’s weird. Particularly with this combination of materials and the confusing combination of crudity and heaviness.
I thought at first it was just stainless or something and maybe there’s a very thin layer of that on top but… I doubt it. There’s no magnetism on the pan part. With a set of very, very strong rare earth magnets there might be a hint of it on the smooth side, but maybe not. And definitely not on the very very clearly aluminium side.
Most importantly: it stays stuck with the voltage turned off. It’s stable for MONTHS. Reverse the polarity of the electrical flow and it unsticks. YES REALLY. This is some literal “Alessandro Volta playing around with bananas in a shed” science AND YET it WORKS and we DID NOT KNOW.
Sadly I think skin will be a fairly poor use; you’d have to go down multiple dermal layers before getting to tissue that I think might work, and even then, you’d be dealing with new layers of skin growing out and old layers being pushed off and dying.
Not the article, it’s fine. It’s the photos. Mostly the top one.
It looks fake.
There’s a credited photographer: Ann Hermes. She’s 100% real, a working professional, she’s done a lot of work for a lot of clients, she’s easy to find.
And I don’t know what happened – what tool caused it or what – but the lead photo shouts AI PHOTOGRAPHY at me.
There are a few reasons for it – the central figure’s facial and head hair is a big one, something about the antique touchtone telephone on the left really bugs me (proportions? size? I can’t tell?), the lighting just feels odd, and some letters are kinda fucked up) – but the details aren’t important. That’s not what bothers me.
What bothers me is that this is a most-likely real photo that’s making me think it’s an AI-generated fake. And it bothers me because…
…see…
if people are going to start using tools on real photos that make them look a little fake, particularly if the ways they look a little fake are the same way that AI-generated actual fakes look fake, then that’s incredibly bad.
So far we’ve been lucky enough in ’24 not to have to deal with really good fakes. We’ve mostly had trash fakes. But if the real photographers start to use tools that make their real photos look fake in the same way as AI renderings, then these AI renderings not being really good fakes stops mattering very much – if at all. We lose that little bit of edge we had against AI-driven disinformation.
I mean, maybe that’s not what happened here. Maybe his hair really is that kinda weirdly defined and she did some HDR tricks to bump up the definition and contrast not even using AI tools. Maybe she corrected some lens distortion and that’s why the phone looks funny. Maybe she boosted the black level a little to de-emphasise some dark areas – it’s tempting, I’ve done it, but you have to be careful with it or it looks weird. Maybe the light just was a little odd, and/or she set up some reflectors to make it that way because the scene was too high contrast otherwise. Or maybe she did it afterwards using ordinary levelling tools.
But however it happened – and whoever did it, be it the photographer, the layout artist, the web designer – it still came out setting off my AI alarms.
One of the ways they feel safe about passing this shit is watching NO! responses fall as they keep trying. So we have to keep it up, and that means every time.
Across All These Emptied Lines, Chapter 9: Not Since Monte Cristi
As a reader on Discord said, “stuff just keeps coming back today!” and, well, it is the first time I’ve managed anything in Of Gods and Monsters in a really long time.
I’m not confident this adds as much to the story as I’d like but it does add something, and it’s got decent length to it, so. 2620 words, this instalment rated T, series still of course rated M.
(Because they will bombard you with political mail, not because of nefariousness. If you don’t mind that, then sure, use your regular address.)
Sign it even if you’re not in Oklahoma, because if they’re going to hire a terrorist like LOTT from out of state, they can damn well hear from commenters from out of state too.
Fascism Watch for February 26, 2024: we’ve got to break through the wall
It’s amazing how quickly paranoid delusions can go from being paranoid delusions to being the black-letter reality on the ground, isn’t it?
I mean, I was mad about the Bush II administration making the Edgy Left actually correct in ways they’d never actually been correct before, via his torture regime, via adopting hideous domestic policies including mass surveillance (with Democratic complicity), and via the horror show of their war in Iraq. Unfortunately, they actually did.
But even then, there were limits. I was assuring my nervous friends that Bush II, despite all this, was functionally an old New England Republican when it came to matters of having a Republic, and that he would leave office on time and in an orderly fashion – as he did – just as I assured Republicans that Obama would do the same.
Now, obviously, all of that is out the window.
So I want to present a list of items which are very well documented facts, but would’ve been absolutely, patently insane 10 years ago. I mean, the kind of rantings that got you thrown out of every conversation and mocked for years afterwards – and which are all now verified as true. It’s mostly not a list of their social agenda, thought there’s a bit of that at the end; it’s mostly a list of their authoritarian agenda, and the lengths to which they are going in their attempt to claim absolute power forever.
I want to present them this way so that they are all in a single place, easily accessed, and from a wide variety of sources.
And I want you to convince your friends that all this absolute paranoid conspiracy-theory lunacy is no longer any of those things, but is instead actually absolutely real.
For most people, the Republican Party has become so authoritarian, so treasonous, and so despicable so quickly that the mere act of reporting their own words gets you classified as a conspiracy-theory-swallowing lunatic. This must end.
I have no doubt in my mind that many people most of you know absolutely refuse to believe that any of this is happening despite the fact that it’s all horribly real.
What I’ve been doing for years is trying to break through that wall of disbelief, and what everyone needs to do now is exactly the same thing. You get it; that’s great. But you’ve got to break through the wall of denial still held up by so many, many, many others.
You have to convince them that it’s real, and you have to convince them that it affects them, personally, because frankly, most people will vote for the Leopards Eating Faces Party if they think they’ll get something out of it and the leopards will only eat other peoples’ faces.
And it’s never just other peoples’ faces.
That reality will not be denied forever, but it can – and if the Republicans have their way, absolutely will – be denied until it’s too late.
Welcome to Part 5 of a series of posts focusing on the fundamentalist propaganda “He Gets Us” Superbowl ad of 2024.
I strongly recommend you read at least the first section of Part 1 before proceeding, if you have not already done so. It defines a variety of critically important terms, outlines the overarching purpose of this entire series of ads – this billion-with-a-B propaganda campaign – and the relevant religious-political beliefs of those who designed it.
If I could summarise Part 1’s first section in a paragraph, believe me – I would. I have tried, without success. That’s why I point people back to it, because to echo Dickens – without that knowledge, little of what follows will have full meaning for you.
The next three images comprise what I think of as the Intentional Racism Triptych.
On our left panel, we have slide seven. It features one of the least obviously AI manipulated or re-drawn images of the entire selection. It shows an idealised, even nostalgically-rendered oil field with a small number of scattered derricks, with no fracking equipment visible. The field itself is semi-arid to arid, with a mix of brush, tumbleweed, and other similar low scrub plants scattered about. In the distance lie tall hills, somewhere between what I’d call mountains and foothills, without snow. Above that, we have a very blue sky with a smattering of clouds.
In the middle distance sits the a car, the driver’s door open. Strangely in this context, it is a car and not a truck, a four-door sedan/saloon car out of the 1980s, evocative of an early-80s SAAB 900 but with internally inconsistent headrests. (I see you there, AI image generator. Hello!)
In the foreground, in the middle of a dirt road which looks very much like a thin-layer-of-sandy-dirt soundstage, our Saviour – the man who has already found Jesus, an older white man who is an oil field worker – washes the feet of our Sinner, a young Asian woman who is dressed mostly like a hippie in flowing patterned silks and bikini top, albeit more of a 90s hippie revival variant than the original. To her side lies a protest sign reading “CLEAN AIR NOW.”
This Saviour was brought to you by Exxon-Mobil, apparently. He’s where he’s supposed to be, doing “Real Man” work, in a “Real Man” place, bringing oil out of the ground for capitalism. The oil field is pristine, and there’s not a hint of pollution…
…which brings us to the sins of our Sinner. She’s dressed inappropriately for the location, and immodestly on top of that. She’s somewhere she shouldn’t be – and being Asian, that’s not limited to “a protestor in an oil field.” And on top of everything else: she’s a liar.
The air is visiblypristine. Her call for “CLEAN AIR NOW” is therefore a lie, a demand for something she already has – and is therefore an excuse to shut down oil production and hurt the “real man” doing the “real work” and the economy.
I know, I know, as I said, they have their own definitions of truth, and don’t care if something’s an objective lie – but that’s only for them. Definitionally, she’s not one of them, so if they can call her a liar, they will.
She might even be a Chinese communist, since – as goes without saying in their community – all environmentalists are lying communists anyway, and Chinese people are always suspect. Making her ambiguously east Asian – one might say “Chinese enough” – just adds the spice of fashionable racism to the recipe.
“Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?”
Now, because the most important image of a triptych is always the one in the centre, let’s skip ahead to the right image first: slide nine.
This image shows a quiet evening scene in a suburban neighbourhood built… it’s hard to say, but I’d guess as early as the late 1910s, and the early 1950s. As always, in the nostalgic and “better” past.
We see two houses, separated by a single narrow driveway, both with established greenery and lush lawns. Two mixed-gender couples are arranged in front of the right house, one on the left side of the frame, and one on the right.
The left couple is clearly Muslim. The hijab-wearing woman – our Sinner – is sitting in an old woven-ribbon-style folding lawn chair, her feet being washed, as the man stands attentively behind her.
The right couple’s man is white, intended to be sitting on some sort of gardening chair, but it’s an AI mess and doesn’t work right but that doesn’t matter. He holds a green apple with a bite taken out of it, which in this context has to be symbolic of something, but the obvious meanings don’t make a lot of sense in this context. His eyes are closed, which also seems to me like it has to mean something, but I’m honestly not getting it.
The woman – our Saviour – is just ambiguous enough to be white, or not, depending upon the viewer. The way she’s rendered, she’s got that Kinda Ethnic vibe that they like when they want not to use a white person but don’t want to make it clearly someone not white either. She’s not wearing a head covering of any kind, obviously, but could be a convert from Islam who married a white man. That would make her okay, fit to lead our Sinner out of her sin – which is, of course, being a Muslim and holding Islamic faith.
While religious conversion isn’t intrinsically racist, in this case, it obviously totally is. See everything from “Jews for Jesus” to the “Muslim Ban” that Trump is pledging to reinstate.
Finally, we move to our centre image, slide eight – by far the most overtly racist image of the set. I want to make that very clear, as I will be describing the intended racist message in explicit terms. That description of their message is fucking well not an endorsement of that message.
Read on only if you understand that last paragraph, because this one’s bad.
In this image, the thin veneer that is the top-level message of compassion, equality before god, and reconciliation has been ripped away; this particular slide is propaganda against refugees and asylum seekers from the south.
Our scene shows a bus full of people unloading passengers on a Chicago upper-middle-class white-picket-fence residential street in the very late evening. It’s essentially one of the Republican “migrant buses,” the kind DeSantis and Abbot have been using to send asylum seekers away from services to a blue state without coordination, notice, or compassion, often in the winter. This exportation of people – arguably kidnapping – serves a variety of purposes which have been discussed elsewhere. The driver is Christian – it’s not ambiguous, there’s a cross hanging above him – and unhappy.
In most of these images, the “saviour” and the “sinner” are on similar levels, physically. Often one is sitting and the other is kneeling on the ground, but there’s interaction to it, an acknowledgement of each other. They’re communicating, sometimes quite clearly. It’s part of the top-level intended message of reconciliation.
Not here, though.
I want to stress, this next sentence is how they know this will be read by their own people:
Here you have the angry dirty brown illegalSinner carrying her anchor baby at full height, looking away, with a mixture of anger and fear, while the white Saviour woman kneels on the ground, looking down, washing the Sinner’s feet. There is no sense of communication between them; our Sinner is ungrateful and unreceptive. Our Savour, the white Christian, is looking down, tense and unhappy, at clean water turning a dark, filthy brown as it washes from the Sinner’s foot back into the basin.
Please understand – the washing water is clear and clean in every other image where it is visible, no matter how dirty the feet are; after all, it represents in part the forgiveness of Jesus, so stays forever whole.
But not here.
That difference means it’s not the dirt on her feet spoiling the water: it’s her, herself, spoiling the water – the water of God’s forgiveness.
One might even say it’s meant to show a kind of poisoning of the water, instead of the blood.
This image is out-and-out racist hate propaganda, pretending – just barely – to be merely one more variation on the theme. Our Sinner’s sin is being here at all and not white, and she is not worthy of redemption.
Even the gay man in image twelve is treated better than this, and believe me, I still have things to say about that image.
I don’t know if I have any Christian followers reading this, but… this is… serious business blasphemy, right? Top level scream-it-to-the-heavens blasphemy against the core message of Jesus. Isn’t it?
superbowl jesus ad, part 4: a lie so blatant it must be true
Welcome to the fourth post of a series analysing the imagery from the billion-dollar “He Gets Us” propaganda campaign to recruit people into fundamentalist evangelism, focusing specifically on the ad run during the 2024 Superbowl.
I strongly urge you to read the first section of Part 1 before continuing, if you have not already done so. That first section explains the overall theological structure of the ad. Without understanding that structure, the terms “Sinner” and “Saviour” as used in this series will not make sense, but I don’t want to have to paste that explanation back in to each of these posts.
Caught up? Nice.
One of the more curious parts of this event has been the maker’s disclaimer stating that they absolutely did not use AI, that they hired a photographer – they even named someone – and that these images are photographs.
I suggest you revisit Part 3 of this series if you still give that any credence.
Personally, I’m willing to accept that a photographer played some role. I’m convinced that the images actually used were at very least heavily reworked with AI tools, if not re-created from whole cloth using the photographs as training material, but I admit that it’s possible that in some way a photographer was involved. Maybe in the rough drafts.
But why lie about it?
AI art is, obviously, huge right now. A lot of tech is super into it; several months ago, it would’ve got them a lot of attention if they’d made interesting images and said upfront that’s how they did it. Maybe they decided to hide it because the mood on AI has shifted so much. I don’t know.
But that’s not the important part. The important part – the important question – remains…
…why lie about it?
Particularly given how obvious it is that it’s a lie?
Even though they absolutely couldn’t get images that weren’t obviously at very least heavily AI altered, if not entirely AI rendered, they decided to lie about it. Why?
The answer is very simple: they can’t not lie. They actively can’t. They can’t avoid it.
I mean, sure, they could’ve told the truth here, but the more they feel that being honest about it would hurt them in some way – even just making them look bad – the less likely that becomes.
I wish it were because of PR. I really do. But it’s not. It’s because they have adopted a very different definition of truth.
For most of us, truth is weighed against observable, measurable reality – at least, where that’s possible. The truth of science, or more generally, the truth of empiricism.
Empiricism is the idea that you can observe the world, measure it, test against it, and accept that what happens reveals things about the world (and the universe). It means you can use those tests – that data – to make decisions about your life. To improve it, even. It’s core of the scientific method, amongst other things.
Babies are, in many ways, empiricists.
But that’s not how the fundamentalist evangelical movement defines truth.
Their truth is defined by God Said. If observable reality differs, then it’s reality that’s wrong, and it’s wrong because God Said.
Yes, really. That’s the key. Right there. God Said, so It Is. It’s that simple.
This is an example of a group using inherited wisdom as its metric of truth. It’s pretty common, historically, and before empiricism took off, it was absolutely the standard in Western thought. It’s core to both western conservatism and their flavour of authoritarianism, and built upon the idea that we are all living lesser, degenerate forms of an ideal way of living that we must constantly strive to recover. In their case it’s extremely literal, in that it’s the Fall of Man in the greater sense from the Garden of Eden, and the absolute, perfect, and utterly unchanging Word of God as represented in the Bible.
And believe me, they harp a lot on that perfect and unchanging part.
In practice, is any of this actually preserved across generations? Oh hell no. It’s basically two to three generations back, as modified to suit nostalgia, simplified re-renderings of memories from childhood and parental stories, and – of course – to serve white Christian cishet male dominance over others.
Don’t believe me? In the 90s, they didn’t really care about trans people. I’d see more hate-forward people try to tease those in authority forward on it and they’d be “That sounds very, uh, medical. Is it homosexual? Then whatever, we care about stopping the homosexuals.” Before the late 1960s, they didn’t even care all that much about abortion or birth control, because caring about those things was Papist, and they were way more concerned about race mixing.
However, they’ve decided hating trans people is eternal, so now, for them, it is. It’s always been true and therefore it’s always perfect and unchanging and God Said.
This next part’s really important to understanding what’s happening around us. I’m begging you, understand this. I’ve been trying to get people to understand it for twenty years.
If truth is measured against inherited wisdom, then the truth of a statement depends upon conformity to that inherited wisdom.
That stays true even if that inherited wisdom is in the form of a Perfect and Unchanging Word Of God that changes a lot every generation and a half. How much something supports your worldview – again, God’s Word – becomes the only measure of truth, regardless of anything reality might have to say about it.
This literally is how you get most flat earthers. This is how. Right here. This. They’ve decided that’s what God Said, so God Said, and that makes it real. I have seen this happen, someone already deep in that community going over the edge to flat-eartherism, because someone proved to him that the Bible says the earth is flat, and so, he said, “You’re right. The BIble does say the earth is flat. So it is.”
This definition of “truth” – this definition that has zero direct reliance upon observable reality – is also how they can so guilelessly set up lie factories to manufacture new types blood libel against their enemies.
It’s how they could say for decades that “homosexuals” were violent vicious evil mentally-ill psychopathic paedophiles who want to rape your children, give them AIDS, and turn them gay because it’s the only way we can reproduce. It’s how they can say the same sorts of things – often exactly the same things – about trans people now, along with all the other insanity they make up.
They are aware, of course, that whose who “haven’t found Jesus” have different definitions of truth. Their leadership in particular has always been highly aware of this.
The way they’ve gone about handling that hasn’t changed much in decades. First, get a couple of fundamentalist or socially-allied “sciencey” people to either cherry-pick or just straight-up fabricate data (the “make shit up” method) and publish papers that look like science, that look real to people who don’t know how their whole system works. Paul Cameron was a particularly famous foot soldier in this part of the war; look him up, if you want. He was a professional liar generating blood libel to get people killed.
Then set up some “sciencey” or “policy-ish” sounding sockpuppet groups, and have them generate a bunch of bullshit that sounds like research or analysis. The important part is that whatever they do has to be towards the goal of ‘proving’ the desired result, as opposed to studying the actual data and seeing where that leads them.
Footnote each other back and forth for a while, then generate some another layer of new sockpuppet organisations, referencing the first two. Then the first layer can start referencing the third, and your bullshit generator is up and running.
Eventually, you get enough noise that the credulous media starts hearing and parroting it and treating your bad-faith horseshit as legitimate, both-sidings it against reality for the horse race and the views.
That’s what they did against against lesbians and gay men people for decades. That’s what they’re doing to trans people now, with the absolute intent of going back to doing it against LGB people if they manage, in the end, to “ditch the T.”
If there was one thing in the world I wish I could do with this knowledge, it’s get it into the heads of journalists and in that way convince them to stop playing along. To stop meeting bad faith with good, to stop parroting bullshit because it’s “both sides.” Just fucking stop. I don’t care that they can lie to you with sincerity, they can lie with sincerity because they’ve decided God Said This Shit We Made Up, and because of that, actual reality doesn’t matter.
It’s not even that they don’t know. They know their methods are bullshit. They know their data is bad. And they don’t care, because their own data doesn’t matter, not even to them. The lie serves God – in that they’ve decided it serves their goals that they’ve ascribed to God – and that makes it true.
Even though it’s in every way a lie, a knowing lie, made in the most complete possible bad faith, that’s what they’ve decided.
So when it comes to lying about something as obvious as this AI art bullshit…
…they can no longer even tell they’re lying.
It’s better for them and their movement, they’ve apparently decided, for then to declare that this isn’t AI art. That it’s photography, as nonsensical as that is. So despite all the obvious bullshit of that statement – despite everything your own lying eyes tell you – that’s what they’ve decided is true.
So that’s what they rationalise, and that’s what they say.
If that sounds like everything you know and hate about MAGA, and everything you know about how Donald Trump works…