CSotD: And Now, Maybe, the News
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Let’s start with something to brighten your day, and how nice that Arctic Circle has, by happenstance, a cartoon to go along with what is essentially more analysis than breaking news.
You may recall that, some time ago, Disney announced a deal with Sora, the AI slop-maker, under which fans would be permitted to make short movies using trademarked Disney characters. And if you’re thinking, “Yeah, whatever happened to that?” here’s an article from 404 that will tell you, and, if it doesn’t make you laugh, it should at least bring a contented smile.
Sora fall down go BOOOM! and took a whole lot of Disney investment with it. Turns out that AI is mostly good for making phony animal videos and fake porn and it isn’t really even all that good at doing either of those. As for making actual movies, well, it wasn’t any good at all at doing that.
Poor Disney. They’d been hoping to lay off a lot of animators, but the only person they seem to have fired so far is Taylor Frankie Paul, and that also cost them a bundle.
As for the above comic strip, I don’t think anyone’s been getting bonuses at Disney these days.
Juxtaposition of the Day
There is not a lot of joy in Silicon Valley, either, now that a jury, after nine days of deliberation, came up with a series of guilty verdicts on charges that Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and Google (YouTube) were actively working to make the Internet specifically addictive and turning kids into robotic consumers.
In that case, the jury recommended a combined fine of $6 million, but that’s only for the damage their engineering inflicted on the 20-year-old in the case. There may be additional fines added in the form of punitive damages.
It’s important to recognize that large jury awards are frequently trimmed down on appeal, but it’s also important to recognize that the reasoning that succeeded in this case can be applied to any number of pending and future cases in which young people have experienced problems thanks to addictive programming.
Joy of Tech notes the similarity between the defenses of the tech industry and the defenses of the tobacco industry, and they’re not the only observers who have connected the two and suggested a similar downturn of fates.
And I know lots of kids can enjoy the online world without harm, and that your uncle smoked two packs a day and lived to be 103. And there are drunk drivers who arrive home safely, too, and people who shoot heroin and don’t become addicted, but that’s not how laws work, and it’s not how causality works.
This is a big deal.
And so is this: That’s a chart showing a very large rise in the trading of oil futures in the minutes before Dear Leader announced a halt in his announced plans to attack Iran’s power systems. Paul Krugman has a solid explanation of it all, but I rather like Miles Taylor’s headline, “It’s almost like they want to go to prison.”
Taylor, who worked in the first Trump White House, adds the subtitle
An “epidemic” of insider trading. Stolen classified documents. Sham investigations. Trump and his henchmen are tempting fate — and building a paper trail.
He builds a long-term case along those lines, and does it with the same fury he exhibited in 2018 when he wrote the famous “Anonymous” op-ed piece from inside the administration. It seems this isn’t the only apparent insider trade linked to Dear Leader, and Taylor lays it out.
However, the Trumps and their friends may feel they’re not headed for prison at all. As Robert Reich reports, (h/t Suke)
Margaret Ryan, the top enforcement official at the Securities and Exchange Commission — the agency tasked with investigating insider trading and other illegal activities in financial markets — abruptly resigned last week, after just six months on the job.
Reportedly, Ryan wanted to be more aggressive in pursuing charges of fraud and other misconduct, including against Trump’s inner circle. But the SEC’s chairman, Paul Atkins, and other Republican appointees to the commission wouldn’t let her.
Reich has more charts documenting the suspicious sales, and more reasoning about why you ought to be upset. And, really, when Krugman and Reich and Taylor are all shouting “Fraud!” and “Crime!” it seems worth looking into.
Taylor sounds like Lenny Briscoe when he suggests that whoever steps forward to lay it out like John Dean will fare a lot better than the ones who wait to be caught.
Which is true, but Dean testified in front of the Senate Watergate Committee, which consisted of four Democrats and three Republicans. 48 years later, when a select committee was formed to investigate an attempted, violent coup, only two Republicans agreed to sit on it, and they’re both out of politics today as a result.
Nice try, but the only ones despairing are the ones without connections.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Thank god for cartoonists who do their homework and act as journalists.
But while our previous topics today have been good news about the system working as it should, this is a story of cover-up. Much as Goris makes it all seem obvious, Zyglis points out how Trump and his cronies are being protected by the same loyalty that locks in votes for whatever the Party tell them matters, and locked out participation in the Jan 6 inquiries.
I don’t think we can count on the Securities and Exchange Committee doing its job and I doubt we’ll see the Republican Party step forward and fulfill their civic duty.
I hope, however, that we can count on people showing up for Saturday’s No King rallies, and then again for the midterm elections in November. The people, united, can never be defeated.
To keep morale high and anger properly stoked, we should remind the cartoonists that all the columns and news reports and SubStacks won’t matter, and that they should, rather, remember the words of Boss Tweed:
I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles; my constituents don’t know
how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures.
Keep the faith.
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