• Yes, it’s getting all too easy to generate completely realistic photo images using Google’s Pixel 9 and Magic Editor/Reimagine functionality.  This has the potential to become a dangerous tool, especially without proper watermarking.  See this article in the Verge. An excerpt:

“The industry’s proposed AI image watermarking standard is mired in the usual standards slog, and Google’s own much-vaunted AI watermarking system was nowhere in sight when The Verge tried out the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. The photos that are modified with the Reimagine tool simply have a line of removable metadata added to them. (The inherent fragility of this kind of metadata was supposed to be addressed by Google’s invention of the theoretically unremovable SynthID watermark.) Google told us that the outputs of Pixel Studio — a pure prompt generator that is closer to DALL-E — will be tagged with a SynthID watermark; ironically, we found the capabilities of the Magic Editor’s Reimagine tool, which modifies existing photos, were much more alarming.”

• From Jamelle Bouie’s August 10 opinion piece in the NYT, JD Vance has right-wing friends in high places:

“When asked to explain his worldview, Vance has cited his former boss, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who has written passionately against democracy (“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”), and Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned blogger and provocateur who believes the United States should transition to monarchy (“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia”). Yarvin has also written favorably of human bondage (slavery, he once wrote, “is a natural human relationship”) and wondered aloud if apartheid wasn’t better for Black South Africans…

Take Vance’s view that the United States is in a period of Romanesque decline. “We are in a late republican period,” Vance said on a podcast in 2021. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”…

Vance is close enough to Jack Posobiec — an alt-right lunatic who pushed the vile and absurd Pizzagate conspiracy theory and collaborated with online neo-Nazis to spread antisemitic hate — to blurb his latest book, a polemic devoted to the idea that liberals and leftists are Untermenschen who must be stopped lest they destroy civilization. “As they are opposed to humanity itself,” Posobiec and his co-author, Joshua Lisec, write, “they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.””

• David Wallace-Wells delivers his usual excellent piece in the NYT, this time discussing our woeful public health efforts on H5N1.

• Highly recommended reading regarding how far the republican presidential candidate strays from reality, both from the New York Times.

The first, from Steve Rattner –  Don’t Take Trump’s Word for It. Check the Data. One telling excerpt (out of many):

Lie: “Our crime rate is going up, while crime statistics all over the world are going down because they’re taking their criminals and they’re putting them into our country.”

Truth: Crime has declined since Mr. Biden’s inauguration. The violent crime rate is now at its lowest point in more than four decades, and property crime is also at its lowest level in many decades.

The other, by Linda Qiu: Trump’s 2024 Convention Speech Had More Falsehoods Than His 2016 One

• An excellent essay By Robert E. Rubin and Kenneth I. Chenault in the NYT – The Enormous Risks a Second Trump Term Poses to Our Economy. An excerpt:

“The two of us have been involved in business, government and policy for many years, with more than a century of experience between us. We’ve worked with elected officials and business leaders across the ideological spectrum. And we believe a straightforward assessment of Mr. Trump’s economic policy agenda — based on his public statements and on-the-record interviews, such as the one he recently conducted with Time magazine — leads to a clear conclusion.

When it comes to economic policy, Mr. Trump is not a remotely normal candidate. A second Trump term would pose enormous risks to our economy.”

• Ezekiel Emanuel writes in the Atlantic about his impression of Joe Biden’s fitness.  Alas, I agree with his conclusions; though Mr. Biden is remarkably active for his age, he is definitely showing some signs of functional cognitive decline.  I would for for him over DJT in a heartbeat, but I think he would do a service to his country if he were to step aside for a younger candidate.