Old Photos That Would Never Happen Now! Tabs, Thursday Feb. 23, 2023
For one thing, Ike is no longer president. How things change!
What's this? Arizona's former attorney general Mark Brnovich had reports proving there was no election fraud in 2020, but he kept them under wraps while promoting the Big Lie himself? Well imagine that! [ Washington Post gift linky ]
Near Orlando, Florida, a 19-year-old man shot and killed a woman, then later in the day, shot at a TV crew covering the shooting, killing one journalist and wounding another. Then he went into a nearby home and shot a woman and her 9-year-old daughter. The girl died, the woman survived. The alleged shooter was arrested. It's America and the problem is the guns, goddamn it. [ CNN ]
The Anti-Defamation League has published a report detailing how mass killings linked to extremism have sharply increased over the last 10 years. And in 2022, all of the extremist killings were connected to right-wing extremism, mostly of the white supremacist variety. The answer is clearly more guns. [ AP ]
At least a dozen Colorado school districts went into lockdown yesterday because of phone calls threatening mass shootings and bomb threats; it doesn't appear any actual shooting occurred, but the chaos and fear were real. No suspects in the fake threats have been arrested yet. Christ this country. [ Colorado Public Radio ]
Enough mayhem. Here's a nice thing instead. From cartoonist Rosemary Mosco, a sweet story about stopping while driving through Florida one night, to move a corn snake off the road, and it's really just a little magical. Needless to say, if the very idea of snakes freaks you out, feel free to skip.
“A snake story part 2, based on something that happened to me in Florida. cw: snake”
— Rosemary Mosco (Bird And Moon Comics) (@Rosemary Mosco (Bird And Moon Comics)) 1676918088
These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And snakes to warm before I sleep,
And snakes to warm before I sleep.
Jared and Vanky have been subpoenaed by special counsel Jack Smith in his investigation of the January 6 attacks. That should be fun. [ CNBC ]
The Defense Department released a selfie taken by a U-2 spy pilot as he checked out the Chinese spy balloon as it floated over the central part of the US earlier this month. So hey, that's public domain. [ CNN ]
The US Copyright Office has decided that you can't copyright AI-produced images because they are "not the product of human authorship." The office determined that Kris Kashtanova, who wrote a comic book and then used the AI program Midjourney to create images for the story, can get a copyright for the parts of the comic they wrote, and for the arrangement of the images and text in comic-booky form, but not for the images themselves. A letter to Kashtanova's lawyer explained, "The fact that Midjourney's specific output cannot be predicted by users makes Midjourney different for copyright purposes than other tools used by artists."
The Copyright Office has so far not gone so far as to insist that Dok should stop fooling around with the AI pictures and focus on writing instead. [ Reuters ]
We guess it's snowing and storming everywhere but Idaho. Stay safe, darn it! (Update: Woke up, looked out the window, and yep, Boise got snow too. Never trust anything I say) [AP ]
You probably were wondering when the Thornton photo would arrive. Here he is, reminding me to acknowledge him.
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