"If yer wants to see me dining-room or step into me parlour,Or me orfice where I contracts all my biz;If yer wants to see me bedroom, or the place we calls the larder,Why, you've only got to stop just where you is."
A widely shared image of federal agents surrounding ICU nurse Alex Pretti as one agent holds a gun to the back of his head appears as real as it does horrific.But a closer look at the photo reveals a headless agent. Such bodily distortion is a red flag that an image used artificial intelligence. In this case, AI enhanced a low-quality screenshot of a bystander video, digital forensic experts said.It’s the latest altered imagery from Minneapolis to make the rounds online during the federal government’s immigration enforcement surge. Other digitally manipulated images circulated after Renee Good’s killing by a federal agent. The White House also shared a fake image of activist and attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong, edited to make it appear that she was crying during her recent arrest for disrupting a church service. Video from the arrest showed there were no tears.AI-enhanced and manipulated images are a new obstacle in the court of public opinion. Their proliferation online is eroding trust and inflaming divisions...The AI image of Pretti’s killing is more nuanced than many, Farid said, because it combines something real with hallucinated elements.In court, the edited image would never be admissible as evidence. But in the court of public opinion, an image that is based in truth but fabricated can make for difficult debates.If someone calls out a friend for sharing the AI-generated image of Pretti and says, “This is fake,” for example, someone can argue that the person is siding with federal agents when really the person is only pointing out the image is digitally altered...“The real poison here is not AI, it’s social media,” he said. “AI is just supercharging it. But if people could make these fake images and fake videos and there was no delivery mechanism, I mean, honestly, who cares? The problem is not the content itself. The problem is that these social media platforms eagerly absorb it and amplify it because it’s good for business.”..At the very least, he advises people to slow down, think critically and look closely at images before spreading misinformation. He said images are made in an instant, often to provoke strong reactions and sow discord.
Everyone knows it’s hard to get college students to do the reading—remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies. “I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “But students will not do it.”I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones...At Indiana University, where Erpelding worked until 2024, professors could track whether students watched films on the campus’s internal streaming platform. Fewer than 50 percent would even start the movies, he said, and only about 20 percent made it to the end. (Recall that these are students who chose to take a film class.) Even when students stream the entire film, it’s not clear how closely they watch it. Some are surely folding laundry or scrolling Instagram, or both, while the movie plays...In a multiple-choice question on a recent final exam, Jeff Smith, a film professor at UW Madison, asked what happens at the end of the Truffaut film Jules and Jim. More than half of the class picked one of the wrong options, saying that characters hide from the Nazis (the film takes place during World War I) or get drunk with Ernest Hemingway (who does not appear in the movie).
Newsweek has contacted the White House and Transport Canada, which is responsible for Canadian certification, for comment via email. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) declined to comment, referring questions to the White House. It is the responsibility of the FAA to certify planes in the United States. The FAA can revoke aircraft certification if it is no longer in an airworthy condition, according to its website, but it remains unclear if it can do so for economic reasons...John Gradek, who teaches aviation management at McGill University, told Newsweek that it is unprecedented for a government to cancel the certification of an aircraft for trade reasons.He said: "Such action is typically used to ground aircraft that have been deemed unsafe to operate by the regulatory bodies. This action by President Trump is purely for commercial reasons, that Gulfstream would like to reduce competition for its Gulfstream- series general aviation aircraft by eliminating Bombardier Global Express aircraft from sales in the U.S. In his zeal to further protect the U.S. aircraft market, his stated intention to decertify all Canadian-built aircraft will have a significant impact on the domestic U.S. air travel market. There are over 1,000 Canadian-built commercial passenger aircraft in operation on any given day, a not insignificant number that would severely curtail services to/from regional airports throughout the U.S."
"As far as our weather, I told the man who came to clear our relatively short driveway and spent FIVE hours doing only 70% of it, "I'm from Minnesota and I have never seen anything like this."Saturday night past we had four inches of snow. Sunday at 1:00 we started 17 consecutive hours of freezing rain. End result was 4+ inches of frozen solid ice anchored to the sidewalks, streets, driveways, and ground everywhere. I've said for many years that 1/2 inch of ice is worse than a foot of snow, but this was 4 full inches of frozen solid (not just the top) ice. My yard is so slick it's truly like a skating rink that has just been Zambonied! We are still digging out. No mail delivery until we clear access to our mailboxes, and today -- finally after 5 days -- I was able to pickaxe out that ice. Flat out brutal, and being a Gopher was of no use. Amazing. Schools still closed, of course, since buses can't go anywhere."
Antonio Rotta is notable for his mythological subjects and genre paintings. He was a student at the Accademia di Belli Arti in Venice and was one of the first classical genre painters. His disciplined training in academic schooling, and the use of commonplace subjects made his oeuvre very popular during his lifetime. His work was exhibited in Europe and the United States. He won a medal at the Paris Salon, 1878.Via Miss Folly, where this is entitled The Old Man and his Best Friend? (I don't know if that's the artist's title for the piece).
As reported in The Atlantic:
Heinrich Himmler and other Third Reich occultists in the 1930s latched onto the strange idea that the Aryan race was not the product of evolution but descended from semidivine beings who left the heavens and established a secret civilization on Earth, possibly beneath Central Asia. Himmler, the head of the SS, was so enthralled by the possibility of what he considered celestial proof of the superiority of the white race that he provided funding for an SS expedition to Tibet in 1938 in the hope of locating his utopia, according to Black Sun, a 2001 history of Nazi occultism by the British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.Almost a century later, this idea of a lost Aryan civilization, called Agartha, has caught on again, this time with teenagers posting memes online. If you’re older than 25, you likely missed it. But over the past year, memes about Agartha—a mystical, underground city in the center of the Earth full of flaxen-haired, blue-eyed people—kept going viral and have become a staple of the youth internet...Agartha memes usually feature supercuts—a video of short clips—comprising UFOs in the Antarctic, pyramid-laden civilizations, digitally altered images of Charlie Kirk with blond hair and chiseled features, stereotypical Nordic-looking people, and sugar-free Monster Energy drinks in white cans... But all of the Agartha memes share in common the concept of the subterranean Aryan paradise that Himmler yearned for...Agartha was first developed as a mythical fantasy by French writers in the late 1800s but had no far-right associations at the time. After Himmler co-opted Agartha, neo-Nazis carried it and other Third Reich racist myths into the postwar era by creating a new philosophy and value system called “esoteric Hitlerism,” a fusion of racialist ideology and wacky mysticism. In the early 2020s, white supremacists turned those myths into internet propaganda...Sellner positioned the memes as something that could be taken in jest. “Irony is the glue that holds this whole meme-universe together. Anyone who takes things deadly seriously or gets triggered has lost,” he wrote. This is the tone that a lot of people online have taken regarding the Agartha memes. No matter the underlying content, you’re not supposed to take the joke seriously, and if you do, the joke’s on you.It’s a well-worn tactic, but also a common excuse used to launder noxious content. It’s not ironic or satirical for ethno-nationalists to joke about a mythical ethno-state when that fantasy is reflective of their extreme beliefs.
Offering a startlingly candid view into the philosophy guiding vaccine recommendations under the Trump administration, the leader of the federal panel that recommends vaccines for Americans said shots against polio and measles — and perhaps all diseases — should be optional, offered only in consultation with a clinician.Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist who is chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said that he did have “concerns” that some children might die of measles or become paralyzed with polio as a result of a choice not to vaccinate. But, he said, “I also am saddened when people die of alcoholic diseases,”..
In the case of an infectious disease, a personal choice to decline a vaccine may also affect others, including infants who are too young to be vaccinated or people who are immunocompromised. But a person’s right to reject a vaccine supersedes those risks, Dr. Milhoan said.“If there is no choice, then informed consent is an illusion,” he said. “Without consent it is medical battery.”
So many people are probably wondering: what is the difference between freezing rain and sleet? I mean, they can’t be that different, right? Well, we picked something completely at random—and in no way related to police work—to showcase the difference between the two.
(B)ehind the violence in Minneapolis—captured in so many chilling photographs in recent weeks—is a different reality: a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest. You could see traces of it in the identical whistles the protesters used, in their chants, in their tactics, in the way they followed ICE agents but never actually blocked them from detaining people. Thousands of Minnesotans have been trained over the past year as legal observers and have taken part in lengthy role-playing exercises where they rehearse scenes exactly like the one I witnessed. They patrol neighborhoods day and night on foot and stay connected on encrypted apps such as Signal, in networks that were first formed after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.Again and again, I heard people say they were not protesters but protectors—of their communities, of their values, of the Constitution. Vice President Vance has decried the protests as “engineered chaos” produced by far-left activists working in tandem with local authorities. But the reality on the ground is both stranger and more interesting. The movement has grown much larger than the core of activists shown on TV newscasts, especially since the killing of Renee Good on January 7. And it lacks the sort of central direction that Vance and other administration officials seem to imagine.At times, Minneapolis reminded me of what I saw during the Arab Spring in 2011, a series of street clashes between protesters and police that quickly swelled into a much larger struggle against autocracy. As in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Minneapolis has seen a layered civic uprising where a vanguard of protesters has gained strength as many others who don’t share progressive convictions joined in feeling, if not always in person. I heard the same tones of outrage from parents, ministers, schoolteachers, and elderly residents of an affluent suburb...“Overall, this community has exercised enormous restraint,” Allison Sharkey, the executive director of the Lake Street Council, which represents many minority-owned businesses that have been hit hard by the ICE raids, told me. “But we have been pushed, probably intentionally, towards civil unrest.”..
I went upstairs to see breakout sessions where people were being trained for direct confrontations with ICE. Inside a classroom, several dozen people ranging in age from 14 to about 70 faced off against three trainers playing ICE agents, in a loud fracas that lasted several minutes. Afterward, the trainers offered the volunteers a critique. One gray-haired lady said she had found the exercise difficult, “not being a ‘Fuck you’ person.” Others got tips on how to brace themselves more effectively so that the agents could not easily knock them down...The nonprofit groups that run these training sessions are not organizing or directing the anti-ICE protests taking place in the Twin Cities. No one is. This is a leaderless movement—like the Arab Spring protests—that has emerged in a spontaneous and hyperlocal way...Inside the schools, many administrators have been making their own preparations over the past year. Amanda Bauer, a teacher at a Minneapolis elementary school that has a large portion of immigrant students, told me that administrators informed parents last fall about their emergency plans for ICE raids by phone or in person, because they were already concerned about leaving email chains that could be mined by a hostile government...Dan and Jane resisted the idea that they had become political. A better word, Jane said, was humanist. Their anger was unmistakable as they told me that the Trump administration was violating basic Christian principles. “It became clear very quickly that ICE is the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo boys. They’ve given them uniforms and let them run wild,” Dan said. He attended a legal-observer training—which happened to have been on the day Good was killed—and now the couple delivers groceries regularly to immigrant families in Minneapolis...A protester had laid a rose on a makeshift memorial to Good. As Knutson watched, an ICE agent took the rose, put it in his lapel, and then mockingly gave it to a female ICE agent. They both laughed. Knutson told me he had never been a protester. It seemed pointless, or just a way for people to expiate their sense of guilt. But when he saw those ICE agents laughing, something broke inside him. “I grab my keys, I grab a coat, and drive over,” Knutson told me. “I barely park my car and I’m running out screaming and crying, ‘You stole a fucking flower from a dead woman. Like, are any of you human anymore?’”...Many people are hiding indoors—so many that, in a city with a substantial minority population, I hardly saw any Black or Latino faces on the street.All this sheltering has created an economic crisis that has grown worse by the day. Many immigrant-owned businesses have seen their sales drop by as much as 80 percent, said Allison Sharkey, of the Lake Street Council. Large numbers have shut their doors entirely, fearing for themselves or their employees. Sharkey called it “an assault on our entire Main Street.”..
