Today’s Lineup

AI’s impact on the 2024 election, the nightmare of being pregnant with complications in Texas, Nepo baby John Fisher, Pat Robertson’s legacy, Ron DeSantis and the history of cultural Marxism, former Navy Captain Crozier speaks about how he lost his career defending his sailors from COVID, U.S. spy agencies are buying our personal data, the history of the baseball cap, a proper €121,000 speeding fine, and how a four chord progression makes music great.

#1

AI’s Rapid Growth Threatens to Flood 2024 Campaigns With Fake Videos (Sabrina Siddiqui and Ryan Tracy, The Wall Street Journal)

“China invades Taiwan and migrants surge across the U.S.-Mexico border in a video depicting the aftermath of President Biden’s re-election. In a series of images, former President Donald Trump is pursued on foot and apprehended by uniformed police officers. Another photo shows the Pentagon engulfed in flames following an explosion.

The common denominator among these scenes? They are all fake. Rapidly evolving artificial intelligence is making it easier to generate sophisticated videos and images that can deceive viewers and spread misinformation, posing a major threat to political campaigns as 2024 contests get under way.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Given how inexpensive these new AI tools are to use, I think it is inevitable that we will see an explosion of fake videos and stories during the 2024 campaign. We’ve already seen a crude first use of the technology from the Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. How are campaigns and media outlets going to manage these developments? There is already a media literacy crisis, so can we teach voters and reporters how to identify potentially faked images and videos? Can AI also be used to expose and prevent fakes and disinformation? Can we prevent the United States from slipping further towards autocracy if voters are fooled by the misinformation AI tools can create? I’m not optimistic. 

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#2

An American Nightmare: Young, pregnant & living in Texas (Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day)

“Just a few hours later, the couple were sitting in front of a maternal fetal specialist in Austin delivering unthinkable news: Terry’s fetus had not developed at all above the neck—there was no head. It was a one-in-a-million abnormality, the specialist told them. And while the fetus obviously had no chance of survival, there was still heartbeat present. 

In Texas—which enacted a near-total abortion ban in 2021, and a total ban shortly after Roe v. Wade was overturned—that was a problem. 

Texas’ abortion law doesn’t have an exception for fetal abnormalities, not even lethal ones. The state requires women to carry pregnancies even when the fetus has no chance of survival, a cruelty that Republican legislators don’t like to talk about.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

We need to highlight the real-life consequences of the abortion bans Republicans have rushed to pass since the Supreme Court last year overturned the limited federal right to abortion. Valenti tells the story of a Texas couple who had a wanted pregnancy take a tragic turn. But the abortion ban also meant that Terry (a pseudonym) could not receive necessary medical care even though her life was at risk. The purposefully vague language in these laws means doctors are unsure how to help their patients legally. 

#3

Nepo Baby John Fisher Gets His Wish, Moves One Step Closer to Ripping A’s Away From Oakland (Molly Knight, The Long Game)

“Let’s say you’re lucky enough to be born to the two people who invented The Gap. You attend Phillips Exeter Academy and then Princeton. You use family connections to get jobs working as a fund raiser for Ronald Reagan, and then George H. W. Bush. You go to Stanford Business School and graduate with an MBA. You go to work for a real estate company that does business with mommy and daddy’s clothing giant, and that venture somehow flops.

You are worth literally billions of dollars that you did not earn, but you are 43 years old and bored, and you don’t want to go sit on a beach drinking Mai Tais for the rest of your life.

So, what do you do next?

Well, if you’re John Fisher, you buy a stake in your hometown-ish Oakland A’s in 2005, along with your pal Lew Wolff, and promise fans that after they endured the franchise’s cheapskate Moneyball Era, better days are ahead.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

[Narrator voice:] Better days were not ahead. John Fisher is one of the worst owners in Major League Baseball history. That’s quite an achievement since one has to be genuinely putrid to get on that list given who has owned baseball teams since the professionalization of the sport in the 1870s. I attended the Reverse Boycott game organized by Oakland A’s fans on Tuesday because they do not deserve what Fisher—and Owners Representative (don’t call him Commissioner because he’s proven he doesn’t care about the fans) Rob Manfred—have done to this fanbase as they’ve lied and schemed to facilitate the franchise’s impending move to Las Vegas. Fisher has done quite a bit to demonstrate why I believe every billionaire is a policy failure. No person should have this much power. The fact that baseball’s leaders have been complicit in this farce rather than taking steps to ensure Fisher would field a competitive team is the latest stain on the sport. 

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#4

How Pat Robertson Helped Create The Christian Nationalist Lawyer Brigade Reshaping American Life (Sarah Posner, Talking Points Memo)

“Christian Coalition and Christian Broadcasting Network founder Pat Robertson, who died [a week ago] Thursday at the age of 93, is best known for his failed foray into the 1988 GOP presidential primary, his training of evangelicals to be both successful candidates and reliable voters, and his decades-long highlight reel of homophobia, misogyny, racism, conspiracy theories, apocalyptic warnings, and pronouncements of God’s impending wrath on America for the sins of the left.

Less well understood, though, was Robertson’s significant contribution to the Christianization of the legal profession, and the development of a Christian nationalist legal brigade that has set its sights on ending the separation of church and state, abortion and LGBTQ rights.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Grasping Pat Robertson’s influence over the modern Republican Party is necessary to understanding the current state of our politics. Robertson’s takeover of what became the Regent University School of Law has produced Christian nationalist lawyers who have become judges, GOP politicians, and Republican presidential administration political appointees. Robertson also used his Christian Broadcasting Network—and the daily The 700 Club television program (which will never end)—to transform conservative politics over the past five decades. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent also does an outstanding job explaining Robertson’s impact in this interview with Rick Perlstein, who has done landmark work in a series of books about the rise of modern conservatism. 

#5

What Ron DeSantis and a Norwegian mass murderer have in common (Robert Mackey, The Racket)

“When Ron DeSantis finally took a question from a non-right-wing outlet earlier this month, NBC News’s Dasha Burns asked him to respond to criticisms that he uses the word “woke” so often that it has started to lose its meaning. DeSantis replied: “Look, we know what woke is, it’s a form of cultural Marxism.”

That answer puzzled many Americans who had never heard of “cultural Marxism,” but it chilled me. That’s because I remember where I was when I first heard of the far-right conspiracy theory that progressives who are committed to fighting discrimination based on race, sex, gender, religion or immigration status are engaged in a secret Marxist plot to undermine Western civilization.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I want Governor DeSantis to answer questions about how much of the history of the phrase “cultural marxism” he agrees with—because it’s not just a cute turn of phrase that Fox News likes to promote. Does he agree with its anti-semitic roots? How about how white supremacist Anders Behring Breivik used the term 628 times in a manifesto that outlined his motives for killing 77 people—mostly children—in his 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway? 

#6

Capt. Crozier is finally ready to talk about the COVID chaos that cost him his career (Joe Garofoli, The San Francisco Chronicle)

“Capt. Brett Crozier became the center of an international story in March 2020 after The Chronicle published his email begging top Navy brass to send more help as COVID-19 quickly spread among the 5,000 sailors on the nuclear aircraft carrier he commanded in the early, chaotic days of the pandemic. 

The leak and the turmoil that followed eventually cost Crozier — and Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly, who fired him — their jobs. Crozier, speaking publicly about the incident for the first time, said he would have done it again, even though he was on track to becoming an admiral.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Crozier paid a price for trying to take care of the sailors under his command. After all, his request for help was inconvenient to a Trump Administration trying to minimize the impact of the virus’ spread. Reporters have been trying to get Crozier to talk about his experience for years, and now we are hearing from him about the decisions he made in the early days of COVID as he discusses his new memoir. 

#7

U.S. Spy Agencies Buy Vast Quantities of Americans’ Personal Data, U.S. Says (Byron Tau and Dustin Volz, The Wall Street Journal)

“The vast amount of Americans’ personal data available for sale has provided a rich stream of intelligence for the U.S. government but created significant threats to privacy, according to a newly released report by the U.S.’s top spy agency.

Commercially available information, or CAI, has grown in such scale that it has begun to replicate the results of intrusive surveillance techniques once used on a more targeted and limited basis, the report found.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Congress needs to step up its oversight of these programs if the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government still matter. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) deserves credit for raising the issue and extracting a promise for the creation of this report from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines during her confirmation hearings. But now we need to see the legislative branch do its job to protect Americans from the use of this information. 

#8

The long, strange history of the baseball cap (Michael Clair, MLB.com)

“The baseball cap is a really great marketing tool,” Tom Shieber, senior curator for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, said. “I don’t think they realized it was a marketing tool for a long, long time. People get it now, right? I mean, entire businesses are based on it. Because it’s right there. It’s a billboard, right above your head, where people pay attention.”

But where did the cap come from and how did it get here? How did it become both the quintessential piece of a ballplayer’s uniform, as well as the go-to wardrobe accessory for stars, artists, and the common person? To answer that question, we need to go all the way back to the game’s very first organized team.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

It’s a rare day when I am not wearing a baseball cap. I mostly can be found with one of many versions of a Chicago Cubs cap (my favorite is a ’47 brand cap featuring a white bear logo the Cubs featured around 1914). But sometimes, I mix it up with baseball cap-style hats supporting Manchester United, the United States National Soccer Team, or Bowdoin College (whose mascot is a Polar Bear, so my favorite Cubs hat does double duty supporting both team and alma mater). So I enjoyed learning about the evolution of the baseball cap, starting with the New York Knickerbockers straw hats that appeared around 1849. 

#9

Finnish businessman hit with €121,000 speeding fine (Jon Henley, The Guardian)

“A multimillionaire businessman has been hit with one of the world’s highest speeding fines – €121,000 (£104,000) – for driving 30km/h (18.6mph) over the limit in Finland, where tickets are calculated as a percentage of the offender’s income.

…

As is common in the Nordic region, fines for traffic infringements in Finland are based on the severity of the offence and the offender’s income, which police can check instantly by connecting via their smartphones to a central taxpayer database.

Under the Finnish system, a “day fine” is calculated based on the offender’s daily disposable income, generally considered to be half their daily net income. The more a driver is over the limit, the greater the number of day fines they receive.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

In 1921, Finland became the first country to introduce a “Day Fine” system. I think it is a more equitable system than fixed fines. I’d like to see California and the United States adopt the concept. 

The Closer

Ed Sheeran was found not guilty of copying Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On writing his song Thinking Out Loud in a United States copyright case. As the BBC explained, “A musicologist for Sheeran’s defence told the court that the four-chord sequence in question was used in several songs before Gaye’s hit came out in 1973.”

People aware of the Australian comedy group Axis of Awesome’s 4-Chord  sketch were not surprised by the court’s decision. 

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:

“The rich know what historians know: every society in human history with levels of inequality like those in the United States today has descended into war, revolution, or plague. No exceptions. There are precisely zero historical precedents that don’t end in destruction.” (Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War)

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