Ten Second News

Feel the Bern, Part Deux? Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) announced he will once again seek the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 2020.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, whose idiosyncratic 2016 presidential campaign earned him a national following and made him a leading figure in the modern progressive movement, announced Tuesday morning that he will seek the White House again in 2020.
“I am writing to let you know I have decided to run for president of the United States,” Sanders wrote in an e-mail blast to supporters officially announcing his candidacy, “I am asking you to join me today as part of an unprecedented and historic grassroots campaign that will begin with at least a million people from across the country.”
Sanders enters a growing Democratic primary field, which now includes five of his colleagues in the U.S. Senate, with a substantial advantage over his competitors in both name recognition and grassroots organizing strength, but will likely face difficulties in winning over some in the party following an at-times tense 2016 race against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Sanders also made the announcement on Vermont Public Radio Tuesday morning, saying he wanted to give his constituents a heads up about his plans.
“I wanted to let the people of the state of Vermont know about this first,” Sanders said. “And what I promise to do is, as I go around the country, is to take the values that all of us in Vermont are proud of — a belief in justice, in community, in grassroots politics, in town meetings — that’s what I’m going to carry all over this country.”
A self-described Democratic socialist and a political Independent, Sanders’ campaign brings with it a vast organizing network built during his 2016 campaign that saw him notch wins in key primary states like New Hampshire, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Unlike 2016, where Bernie Sanders became the de facto rallying point for anyone not satisfied with the carefully coordinated coronation of Hillary Rodham Clinton, he enters a wide-opened race with no clear frontrunner. With much of his “Democratic socialist” message having been co-opted to one degree or another by much of the party, including many of his fellow candidates, recapturing the ‘magic’ of a distant second place finish in 2016 might be a tall order, let alone winning the nomination.

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Who you going to believe, that fresh face or your lyin’ eyes?

“ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com uses AI to generate endless fake faces,” By James Vincent over at The Verge shows how that question is only going to get more complicated.

The ability of AI to generate fake visuals is not yet mainstream knowledge, but a new website — ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com — offers a quick and persuasive education.
The site is the creation of Philip Wang, a software engineer at Uber, and uses research released last year by chip designer Nvidia to create an endless stream of fake portraits. The algorithm behind it is trained on a huge dataset of real images, then uses a type of neural network known as a generative adversarial network (or GAN) to fabricate new examples.
“Each time you refresh the site, the network will generate a new facial image from scratch,” wrote Wang in a Facebook post. He added in a statement to Motherboard: “Most people do not understand how good AIs will be at synthesizing images in the future.”
The underlying AI framework powering the site was originally invented by a researcher named Ian Goodfellow. Nvidia’s take on the algorithm, named StyleGAN, was made open source recently and has proven to be incredibly flexible. Although this version of the model is trained to generate human faces, it can, in theory, mimic any source. Researchers are already experimenting with other targets. including anime characters, fonts, and graffiti.

The key is all in the algorithms, and opens up almost endless creative possibilities. It also opens Pandora’s Box for folks with nefarious intentions:

Then there are the downsides. As we’ve seen in discussions about deepfakes (which use GANs to paste people’s faces onto target videos, often in order to create non-consensual pornography), the ability to manipulate and generate realistic imagery at scale is going to have a huge effect on how modern societies think about evidence and trust. Such software could also be extremely useful for creating political propaganda and influence campaigns.
In other words, ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com is just the polite introduction to this new technology. The rude awakening comes later.

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+ Video: President Trump Declares National Emergency

( 6 ) / #border #congress #DOD #national emergency #Trump

+ McConnell: Trump Will Sign Bill, Declare National Emergency

( 53 ) / #bill #border #congress #emergency #executive action #spending #Trump

+ Bad Sunday for the SBC

( 8 ) / #abuse #SBC #SBCtoo #Scandal #southern baptist

-Bad Sunday for the SBC

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/ #abuse #SBC #SBCtoo #Scandal #southern baptist

The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest protestant denomination in the United States, and is second only to the Catholic Church in American membership in the Christian faith. And they have some soul searching to do:

The Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News teamed up on the reporting:

Journalists in the two newsrooms spent more than six months reviewing thousands of pages of court, prison and police records and conducting hundreds of interviews. They built a database of former leaders in Southern Baptist churches who have been convicted of sex crimes.
The investigation reveals that:
• At least 35 church pastors, employees and volunteers who exhibited predatory behavior were still able to find jobs at churches during the past two decades. In some cases, church leaders apparently failed to alert law enforcement about complaints or to warn other congregations about allegations of misconduct.
• Several past presidents and prominent leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention are among those criticized by victims for concealing or mishandling abuse complaints within their own churches or seminaries.
• Some registered sex offenders returned to the pulpit. Others remain there, including a Houston preacher who sexually assaulted a teenager and now is the principal officer of a Houston nonprofit that works with student organizations, federal records show. Its name: Touching the Future Today Inc.
• Many of the victims were adolescents who were molested, sent explicit photos or texts, exposed to pornography, photographed nude, or repeatedly raped by youth pastors. Some victims as young as 3 were molested or raped inside pastors’ studies and Sunday school classrooms.
A few were adults — women and men who sought pastoral guidance and instead say they were seduced or sexually assaulted.

The reporting is extensive. Many will draw comparisons to the on-going scandals in the Catholic Church, but there are a few difference that should be noted. Local SBC churches, while under the umbrella of the national convention are fully autonomous and self-governed. Money and giving goes up but there is little of the authority the Catholic Church holds over their congregations coming back down. The piece goes into detail on how that model is ripe for predators, and how that makes any internal changes unlikely to be of much benefit.

“Change has to begin at the ground level with churches and organizations,” SBC President JD Greear is quoted in the report, “Our churches must start standing together with a commitment to take this issue much more seriously than ever before.”

We will see what happens now going forward.

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+ Local Elderly Man Gives Up Driver’s License

( 22 ) / #driving #elderly #prince philip

-Local Elderly Man Gives Up Driver’s License

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/ #driving #elderly #prince philip

Granted, most elderly people are not still living, let alone driving, at 97. Or coming off a crash that involved injuries to another party. Or happen to be the husband of the Queen of England.

ABC News:

Prince Philip has decided to stop driving at the age of 97, less than a month after he was involved in a collision that left two women injured, Buckingham Palace said Saturday.
The palace said in a statement that “after careful consideration,” Queen Elizabeth II’s husband “has taken the decision to voluntarily surrender his driving license.”
Philip was behind the wheel of a Land Rover near the royal family’s Sandringham estate in eastern England when he smashed into another car on Jan. 17. Philip had to be helped out of his overturned vehicle but wasn’t injured. Two women in the other car were injured, though not seriously, and a 9-month-old baby boy was unhurt.
Philip was photographed driving again two days later, without a seatbelt. Police said they offered him “suitable words of advice” after that.
The prince was not charged in the crash. Police said he and the other driver were both given breath tests for alcohol and passed.
In a letter of apology to one of the injured women, Philip said he was dazzled by the sun when he pulled onto a main road near the royal retreat, 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of London.
He told Emma Fairweather, who suffered a broken wrist in the crash, that “I can only imagine that I failed to see the car coming, and I am very contrite about the consequences.” The letter was published by a newspaper.
There is no upper age limit for licensing drivers in Britain, although drivers over 70 are required to renew their licenses every three years and tell authorities about any medical conditions that might raise safety issues.

While it is an extreme example, plenty of elderly people who are not the Duke of Edinburgh are faced with life-altering decisions when it comes to their transportation. For people who have been independent for many decades of life, the decision of when they are no longer able to drive can be very difficult. It is not just the practical side of being able to come and go, but also the mental hurdle of losing a piece of freedom and ability to control your own life. Transportation is a debate that is often swallowed up in theory, analytics, and charts, but like many things in our lives it very much affects real life, everyday people in almost immeasurable ways.

Elderly drivers is a debate with many questions, and no easy answers, but with one certainty: It is not going away. Time waits for no one, royal or not, and is undefeated.

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+ Jeff Bezos Goes Public

( 28 ) / #ami #bezos #enquirer #pecker #Trump #washingtonpost

-Jeff Bezos Goes Public

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/ #ami #bezos #enquirer #pecker #Trump #washingtonpost

Not sure who is advising AMI and David Pecker, but blackmailing the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, may prove to be a bad idea. Very bad.

Jeff Bezos in Medium:

Several days ago, an AMI leader advised us that Mr. Pecker is “apoplectic” about our investigation. For reasons still to be better understood, the Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve.
A few days after hearing about Mr. Pecker’s apoplexy, we were approached, verbally at first, with an offer. They said they had more of my text messages and photos that they would publish if we didn’t stop our investigation.
My lawyers argued that AMI has no right to publish photos since any person holds the copyright to their own photos, and since the photos in themselves don’t add anything newsworthy.
AMI’s claim of newsworthiness is that the photos are necessary to show Amazon shareholders that my business judgment is terrible. I founded Amazon in my garage 24 years ago, and drove all the packages to the post office myself. Today, Amazon employs more than 600,000 people, just finished its most profitable year ever, even while investing heavily in new initiatives, and it’s usually somewhere between the #1 and #5 most valuable company in the world. I will let those results speak for themselves.
OK, back to their threat to publish intimate photos of me. I guess we (me, my lawyers, and Gavin de Becker) didn’t react to the generalized threat with enough fear, so they sent this:

What follows is specific details, apparently from AMI, of the photos they have. The gist of it is the Enquirer wants the Washington Post, which Bezos owns, to pull a story about them they don’t like. In the background, of course, is the long simmering feud of the Post, Bezos, Pecker, and Pecker’s long-time friend Donald J. Trump. Bezos concludes his piece, along with the emails from AMI, with this:

These communications cement AMI’s long-earned reputation for weaponizing journalistic privileges, hiding behind important protections, and ignoring the tenets and purpose of true journalism. Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption. I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.
Sincerely,
Jeff Bezos

Here’s to seeing what crawls out.

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Russia Today Has a Sad over Facebook Block

How do you say, “Cry me a river” in Russian? Or better yet, sing it in Russian and post to Facebook, which Russia Today’s ‘In the Now’ can no longer do.