Category: You Should See This

When Charlie Chaplin watched “Triumph of the Will,” his immediate impulse, according to Luis Buñuel, was to burst into laughter. The orator onscreen seemed to be an insane variation on Chaplin’s Little Tramp persona, down to the toothbrush mustache. The experience unnerved him, though, as it did many leftist filmmakers who witnessed the technical virtuosity of German cinema being applied to sinister ends. In 1940, Chaplin released “The Great Dictator,” a lavish satire of Hitler’s histrionics. Inevitably, Wagner is on the soundtrack, yet Chaplin makes the surprising choice to detach the music from the Nazi context. The ethereal prelude to “Lohengrin,” suggesting the sacred power of the Holy Grail, is heard twice in the film, serving first to puncture Nazi iconography and then to amplify a message of peace.

This strikes many people of color as disingenuous. “How about when the rights of Hispanics, Black Americans, and Muslims are trampled on?” an activist in Lansing said. “Where are these rallies? Where is all this outcry? We don’t see it.” Attorney General Nessel, who, as a private lawyer, successfully challenged Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage in a case that, along with others, was upheld by the Supreme Court, told me, “You didn’t see these people who now refuse to enforce the Governor’s orders saying, ‘Well, if you’re a county clerk and you don’t like the law, go ahead and start handing out marriage licenses to same-sex couples.’ These same sheriffs would have been horrified had that happened.”

It was a sign of impending doom, to some, when earlier this summer Parscale began coming in more often just as the target on his back swelled to carnival proportions. The polls? Trump trailed his almost-invisible challenger by double digits nationally and by a considerable margin in most battleground states. The messaging? Well, you try to “spin” six months in which 160,000 Americans died and at least 5 million more were infected by a virus you first said wouldn’t be much to worry about. Six months in which your best case for reelection — the greatest economy in the world — was destroyed too. The offense? Trump couldn’t even settle on a nickname for Joe Biden. Was he “Sleepy Joe,” or “Creepy Joe,” or “Beijing Biden”? That tiny Tulsa rally Parscale had organized — which followed weeks of massive hype — preceded a spike in coronavirus infections in the city that, local officials said, was probably born of the event, where the guest list included Herman Cain, who later died. Meanwhile, nationwide, there was civil unrest that Trump, whose political career had begun with a media tour to promote a racist conspiracy theory called birtherism, was unfit to handle. Yet there was an attitude, naïve and cocky, that led Parscale to compare the campaign to the Death Star, ready to fire but with no apparent idea where to aim. What was next? Locusts? How could the circumstances be any worse? The campaign was in a hole so deep it was actually historic — a deficit not just bigger, at this point in the race, than any an incumbent had ever overcome, but bigger than any an incumbent had ever even faced.

By Monday, Lovett was on CNN’s home page. That afternoon, a Fulton epidemiologist named Juliana Prieto provided scripts for contact tracers to use when calling Lovett families. “You do not have to answer any question you do not feel comfortable answering,” the scripts explained. A tracer soon reported that, of his first six calls, five went to voice mail, and the one parent he reached had “declined to talk.” That night, an epidemiologist named Carson Telford, who was helping with the tracing effort, informed his colleagues that he wasn’t having any luck either. “Only 1 parent would provide information,” he wrote. Later, Telford shared a text exchange he’d had with another Lovett parent. “I will not help you,” the parent wrote. “You are a fraud. Leave me and all the Lovett families and kids alone. Get the Lord on Board and go volunteer if you have this much time to stalk social media. The entire Lovett family is onto you and your dishonesty. You did not get our names from the nurse—that would be a violation and they would never provide that private info. Leave us alone, please.”

Schaake proceeded to answer her own question with a long wish list. “A.I. development should promote fairness and justice, protect the rights and interests of stakeholders, and promote equality of opportunity,” she said. “A.I. should promote green development and meet the requirements of environmental friendliness and resource conservation. A.I. systems should continuously improve transparency, explainability, reliability, and controllability, and gradually achieve auditability, supervisability, traceability, and trustworthiness.” She paused before revealing that she had been reading from “Principles of A.I. Government and Responsible A.I.,” an ethics statement produced by China’s national committee of A.I. experts the previous June.

Polished, soft-spoken, and a self-styled moderate, Jared Kushner has become his father-in-law’s most dangerous enabler.

State agencies issued protocols for dumping milk, which can pollute groundwater and decimate fish populations. Though Volenec has not had to dump any of his milk, he’s been worrying about the environmental costs of large-scale dairy farming, from water contamination to climate change. Manure runoff from industrial dairy farming has contributed to a dramatic increase in bacteria and nitrates in the state’s groundwater, according to a study funded in part by Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources. (A farm with twenty-five hundred cows produces as much waste as a city of four hundred thousand people.) The E.P.A. recently sampled the groundwater in a thirty-mile area of Juneau County that’s dense with dairy cows and found that sixty-five per cent of the sites had elevated levels of nitrates, which have been linked to birth defects, colon cancer, and “blue-baby syndrome,” a condition that reduces oxygen in an infant’s blood and can be fatal.

Ward opened the bag and heaved it, chunking stacks into the woods, the bundles of bills hitting the tangled brush, others landing in the dirt. He went inside, knowing, even if the money was gone, this was not over.

Once they had logged where and when the spoofing incidents occurred, researchers cross-referenced this information with the travel schedule of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. On a fall afternoon in 2017, six minutes before Putin gave a speech in the coastal town of Bolshoy Kamen, a nearby ship’s G.P.S. coordinates showed it jumping to the airport in Vladivostok. In 2018, when Putin attended the official opening of a bridge across the Kerch Strait, at least twenty-four ships in the area reported their location as Anapa Airport, sixty-five kilometres away. What was going on? It seemed increasingly likely that the President’s security detail was travelling with a portable software-defined spoofer, in the hope of protecting Putin from drone attacks.