Jeffrey Epstein
I had decided to write the lead essay this month about Epstein, but Trump's attack on Iran took precedence. I hope to circle back, but here is what I wanted to say: Epstein may be the iconic twenty-first century American, in the sense that Benjamin Franklin represented the eighteenth. What makes him historically sgnificant is not the four corners of his own personality and life, but the way he bent everyone around him out of shape, cheapened and even kitschified everything. His meaning lies not in his personal corruption, but in the way everyone who met him, including every professor whose scholarly work I gleaned for the first section of my Mad Manuscript on free speech, so easily jumped on board. All of these folks I thought were lampbearers, Noam Chomsky perhaps most poignantly, were empty suitors instead, world without end, amen.
AI Slop
I have been detecting AI products in my newsfeed of late, confirming AI's role in the enshittification of the Internet.
First was a completely, rather amusingly generic article, about a mayor's supposed closing of a homeless encampment. It never said what city it took place in, nor whom the mayor was; then went on to analyze, like an eighth grade term paper, the benefits of homeless encampments, and of closing them, etc.
Then came the variations on a theme: a series of articles on the purported release of zoo-hatched baby tortoises on an island, with headlines stating that they were revitalizing the island, destroying the island, etc.
The thumbnail images in my newsfeed were also a bit too glossy and simplified to be true. And many of the sites were inappropriate-- local businesses in Britain, Canada and the US which apparently had let their domains go astray, or gibberish.
Then there would be the small AI hallucination inserted in an otherwise credible article-- an unusual piece of instrumental rock which came out before its time, but a quote attributed to Rolling Stone Magazine in 1954.
The newsfeed used to be a way of finding sources and information I otherwise never would; now, I am driven back to reading only articles from the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, etc.
Cuban Embargo
By taking Venezuela, and cutting off Cuba's oil supply, Trump has Cuba on the edge of complete Haiti-style anarchy, as there is no gasoline to power vehicles or flights, and the electrical grid is failing. This is a brutal act of war against a country which hasn't been a security threat for decades (Russia's failure to rescue it, the fact there is no renewed Cuban missile crisis, proves this). There are two takeaways: 1. the normalization of this kind of savagery; 2. That we are fine (as is Israel) subjecting huge swathes of the rest of the world to Mad Max-style conditions, imagining, I suppose, that mere border walls or ICE enforcement will be adequate to prevent the millions and billions we unhouse from coming here in a desperate quest for shelter.
Encharacterization of Real People
Daryl Hannah complained recently of the selfish and manipulative personality of the character "Daryl Hannah" in Love Story, a miniseries on Hulu portraying the life of John F. Kennedy Jr.
It seems unethical and unnecessary to give the names of living people to characters who are not really intended to portray them so much as to serve as catalysts or conflict-creators, tools of typical narrative trickery in television and film writing. We are certainly familiar with purportedly biographical films showing us anonymized or composite supporting characters. It is likely that the main reason to name the character "Daryl Hannah" is because more people will watch-- which then becomes a form of theft, similar to copyright or trademark infringment.