One Republican governor in the south is promoting vaccinations

Asa Hutchinson is the governor of Arkansas, a deeply Republican state in which vaccine rates are low and covid-19. infections are correspondingly high. But unlike many of his Republican colleagues, he is urging people to get vaccinated and has been on a tour of his state, holding meetings with local communities but he is facing deep resistance. Thanks to Fox News, other right wing media, and Republican leaders who have demonized the federal government and Anthony Fauci in particular, some people seem to think that anything that emerges from the government has to be opposed.
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The ethics of using AI voices for dead people

There is a new documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain about the food and travel writer who died by suicide in 2018. In the documentary, at one point they have him reading an email he sent to a friend. Why would he read an email aloud? Well, he didn’t. What the filmmakers did was to use AI to synthesize a voice that closely resembled his, a technology that could be used to have any text seem to emanate from him. (I first learned about this technology when Marcus Ranum had a post on it back in 2016.)

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The global appeal of Shakespeare

The radio program On The Media aired a superb program about the appeal of Shakespeare that transcends his English origins and conquered the world.

In the first part of the show, host Brooke Gladstone discussed with James Shapiro, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and author of Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future, about how and why Shakespeare became so central to US literature that America now considers him as their own and how the political, social, and cultural dimensions of his work resonates so widely. Shapiro is a droll speaker and his anecdotes made for riveting listening. (32 minutes)


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For how long can you ignore this evidence?

I know that I keep coming back to the topic of the folly of opposing vaccinations but I simply cannot wrap my mind around this willful blindness. A host on the the extreme right wing station Newsmax argued that vaccines ”go against nature”, as if countering debilitating illness and early death is somehow a bad thing.

Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt cavalierly suggested on Friday night that vaccines are “against nature” because some diseases are just “supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people” since that’s just the “way evolution goes.”

In recent weeks, right-wing media has seamlessly shifted from casually pushing vaccine hesitancy on its viewers to outright advocating for vaccine resistance, culminating in a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas this weekend cheering at the fact that the federal government hasn’t met its vaccination goals.

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The joy of watching Foley artists

What goes on behind the scenes in films has as much fascination for me as the story I see on the screen. And some of those people whom I find particularly fascinating are the Foley artists, who provide almost all the ambient sounds that we hear, such as footsteps, water flowing, doors opening, keys clicking, and pretty much everything other than the spoken words of the actors.

I have written about Foley artists previously and came across this video of a group of three people in the profession who walk us through the steps of how they do what they do, which involves collecting what looks like a whole lot of junk and having a sharp ear for the sources of sounds and then being able to exactly synchronize the sounds they create using this junk with the action they see on a screen.

Does this really show what it purports to show?

I came across this article that started as follows:

Ask a child to draw a scientist, and research says they will often draw the typical stereotype of a “mad scientist” – an older, usually white, man, with wild hair, wearing a lab coat and goggles. This mental image perpetuates myths about who can and can’t work in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) careers. The reality is that anyone can be a scientist or support the work of scientific institutions, regardless of age, gender, race, personality, or even perceived predisposition.

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Great moments in decision making

The flood of tell-all books about Donald Trump’s words and actions during his presidency keeps gushing forth. As I said in an earlier post a couple of weeks ago, these books appear to be largely just insider gossip that tell us little that was substantive but instead add to the picture of a petulant man-child who should never have got anywhere near a responsible high office. The books are all unflattering and now Trump has chosen, unwisely I think, to hit back at his critics and his own comments reveal more damaging things about him than what are in the books.

I was particularly struck by a statement put out by him is response to the reports that the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff General Mark Milley had been highly critical of Trump and had warned that he was trying to stage a coup but that he (Milley) would not allow it.
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What’s going on in Texas

There are all manner of political shenanigans going on in Texas as Republicans try to legislate even more restrictive voting practices. Most Democratic members of the state legislature left the state to prevent a quorum and the governor Greg Abbott has threatened to arrest them if they return. Yes, this is what democracy has come to.

One reason that Texas has become such a focus is that Joe Biden narrowed the gap in that state even though he lost it to Trump. The margin was the smallest in 24 years. Republicans seem to fear that if Democrats start winning Texas, they will have a lock on the electoral college, and they are pulling out all the stops to prevent that outcome.
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Are they actually trying to get people killed?

It is bad enough that in the US people are killed by police when they have toy guns or toys that look like guns but do not fire anything or guns that are less lethal, like BB guns. They have even been killed when they had a cell phone or a wallet in their hand that the police claim they mistook for a gun. What is one to make of a company that markets real guns that look like toys?

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The curious use of the label ‘un-American’

One of the features of being an immigrant (like me) is that one has a natural frame of comparison when observing certain patters of behaviors and language. One that strikes me in the US is how frequently one hears politicians use the term ‘un-American’ when describing a practice or person that they deplore. Take for example this speech recently by Joe Biden castigating the efforts by Republicans around the country to make voting harder, especially for poorer communities and communities of color, under the belief that those people are more likely to vote for Democrats.

Speaking at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Biden called state efforts to curtail voting accessibility “un-American” and “un-democratic” and launched a broadside against his predecessor, Donald Trump, who baselessly alleged misconduct in the 2020 election after his defeat. Biden called passage of congressional proposals to override new state voting restrictions and to restore parts of the Voting Rights Act that were curbed in recent years by the Supreme Court “a national imperative.”

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