From Pine View Farm

March, 2023 archive

Karen Karen-Like 0

Pizza with a side of hate.

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The Disinformation Superhighway 0

Snopes debunks nine deepfake photos (purporting to be) of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

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The Oathkeeper 0

Title:  MTG's Pledge of Allegiance.  Immage:  Marjorie Taylor Greene with her hand over her heart facing a flag bearing an arithmetic division symbol.

Click to view the original image.

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Lies and Lying Liars, Foxy Shady Dept. 0

Ari Melber documents the duplicity.

Via C&L, which has commentary.

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The Crypto Conundrum 0

If it’s not real in the first place, can you be penalized for stealing it?

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The Lake Effect 0

The Arizona Republic’s E. J. Montini thinks that failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate, Kari Lake, may have finally jumped the shark.

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QOTD 0

P. D. James:

Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.

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Recommended Viewing 0

If you have Netflix, check out the Murdaugh Murders.

It’s an excellent and moving documentary. There is no narrator; it’s told through the voices of those who were there compiled from interviews and live footage.

It’s also timely. The verdict just came down.

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And Now for a Musical Interlude 0

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Vaccine Nation, Boebert Is the New Gohmert Dept. 0

Also, Farron makes an excellent point about the “lab leak” theory that has been bruited about for the past week or so.

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Foxy Shady, Reprise 0

Froma Harrop argues that the most distressing thing about Fox News’s willingness to abet Donald Trump’s big lie is that it’s all about the Benjamins.

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Indoctrination Nation, Reprise 0

Image:  Man in Pilgrim garb sitting atop a triceratops.  Caption:  Great Moments in GOP Revisionist History:  December 21, 1620.  The Pilgrims arrive on the completely unoccupied continent of North America and begin teaching the dinosaurs about the dangers of critical race theory.

Click for the original image.

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The Seditionist Caucus 0

Thom argues that racism is and has long been a misdirection play.

And methinks he argues his point well.

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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0

Yet another random act of politeness:

According to New Orleans police, the child was with his father and an “acquaintance” outside a home in the 40 block of Westpark Court when the acquaintance’s gun accidentally discharged wounding the child.

(snip)

Police say the 3-year-old suffered a graze gunshot wound.

Who could have predicted that “responsible gun ownership” would lead to something like this happening over and over again almost every day?

(Well, pretty much anyone who wasn’t blinded by his or her fetish for portable phalluses . . . .)

(Slightly edited for clarity.)

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Foxy Shady 0

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Gene Collier dissects the double-talk.

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QOTD 0

C. Wright Mills:

People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.

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“DeSantis World” 0

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Republican Family Values . . . 0

. . . are a most malleable thing.

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One Coin, Two Sides? 0

In a thoughtful article which I saw at The Roanoke Times, Richard Kyte muses on the implications of ChatGPT and its clones. Suffice to say, he has a few questions.

A snippet:

Consider the stated aim of the company that developed ChatGPT: “OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)–by when we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform human at most economically valuable work–benefits all of humanity.”

Imagine all the things that implies, all the ways in which human beings put words and images together. And then imagine that much of that is done by some kind of entity that has no self-awareness, no personhood, but is capable of precisely imitating the full range of expressive activites that, up to this point in world’s existence, have been the exclusvie province of human being.

While on the topic, methinks this article from Psychology Today Blogs on deepfakes (in this case, deepfake porn) is also relevant. AI and deepfakes seems to me two sides of the same coin.

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The Graham Cracker Has a Notion of Immigrants 0

Republicans play the race card because it’s the only card they have left. Otherwise, they got nothing other than their fealty to the robber barons of our New Gilded Age.

The Republican Party of my youth–the party that could include persons of integrity, such as Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, and Everett Dirksen–no longer exists.

Richard Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy is all that remains of it.

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