BECAUSE HONORING IS THE SAME AS REVILING:  Today’s blacklisted American: Colorado Democrats move to blacklist all mascots and imagery honoring the American Indian.

Also REEEEE.

YEP:  Alternative Structure.

THIS TO BE HONEST:  You may have noticed that I haven’t delved too deeply into the Jussie Smollet trial.

LOOK FOR THE LEFT TO SLAM THE BORDER SHUT IN 3, 2, 1:  Hispanics continue to turn right.

HE IS THE SAME PIECE OF WORK NOW AS WHEN HE WAS CAUSING PEOPLE TO DIE OF AIDS, UNTREATED:  Book Review: The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

DEFINE “GOOD” AND “EDUCATION”:  Proposed 2022 California Ballot Initiative Makes ‘High-Quality’ Education a Constitutional Right.

Also, you can’t give a right that depends on the labor of others.

By any sane measure of education providing life skills, California and most of our public school system fails. Hard.

I WISH HER TO GO TO A MORE CONGENIAL COUNTRY. SHE’S FAILED FIFO:  Rashida Tlaib Wants Taxpayers to Pay Off Student Loan Debts, Including Hers.

(FIFO — Fit In or er… F Off.  An immigrant who fails at this should choose a more congenial shore. So should a native. Yes, I’m saying America, love it or leave it. Why is that a bad thing? We have planes, trains and automobiles. Hate America? Go, leave, vamoose.)

WHY IS ANYONE ALLOWING THIS SOCIOPATH MEDIA SPACE?  Hillary Cries as She Shares Her Would-Be Presidential Victory Speech.

Yes, I get that she’s very funny, but seriously. The nausea she induces is stronger than the laughter.

I WANT THE ALLEGED DR. FAUCI TO SHOW SOME PROOF OF IQ FIRST:  Fauci Wants You to Check Your Family’s COVID Papers This Christmas.

No, I don’t want to know his IQ. I want proof that he has one. His biography doesn’t encourage this belief.

CULTURES SEEM TO BEHAVE LIKE SENTIENT BEINGS:  Under The Surface.

Very large ones. That move slowly. But oh, they do move.

OUR GARBAGE INSTITUTIONS:

OPEN THREAD: But it’s just the price I pay.

THANKS FOR ALL THE CHRISTMAS/HOLIDAY PAYPAL DONATIONS: They’re much appreciated. Thank you notes are underway.

AS ALWAYS, THERE IS NO WAY ANY SATIRIST CAN IMPROVE UPON REAL LIFE FOR ITS PURE ABSURDITY: Dozens of Camels Ejected from Saudi Beauty Contest over Botox.

Note that the article is from the AP wire, not the Babylon Bee.

I QUESTION THE PREMISE: The Beatles: Get Back shows that deepfake tech isn’t always evil.

What happened next is quite astonishing. Jackson had the grainy, desaturated film fed through a computer algorithm. Suddenly, the resulting video had bright, vibrant colors, with sharp images that looked like it was filmed yesterday, not in 1969. But even more impressive than the film restoration, which is a technical triumph in and of itself, is what they did with the audio. Per Jackson, in his Variety interview:

“To me, the sound restoration is the most exciting thing. We made some huge breakthroughs in audio. We developed a machine learning system that we taught what a guitar sounds like, what a bass sounds like, what a voice sounds like. In fact, we taught the computer what John sounds like and what Paul sounds like. So we can take these mono tracks and split up all the instruments we can just hear the vocals, the guitars. You see Ringo thumping the drums in the background but you don’t hear the drums at all. That that allows us to remix it really cleanly.”

The machine learning technology used here is very similar (if not identical) to what has been used in the past for deepfakes, making fake video look and sound real. A prime example of this is the Emmy Award-winning demonstration video produced by MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality, “In Event of Moon Disaster,” which depicts then-president Nixon reading a prepared statement that the Apollo 11 astronauts had perished in a catastrophe. To create it, MIT used Nixon’s likeness and speech from television appearances and fed it into a machine learning system to synthesize the audio and video and produce the uncanny film.

Uncanny is the right word — the video of deepfake Nixon reading William Safire’s proposed speech has that uncanny valley feel that Admiral Tarkin and Princess Leia had in the 2017 Star Wars prequel, Rogue One. The technology is making remarkable strides, yet you still know you’re watching a “synthespian” — but going forward, this technology is only going to get more and more realistic:

(Granted, simulating the fuzzy “Never Twice the Same Color” look of a live 1969 American TV broadcast helps to hide some of the flaws, unlike seeing Rogue One on a 25 foot tall movie screen.)

However, I’m not sure if the restoration techniques used to restore the audio and 16mm film from the 1969 Let It Be sessions counts as deep fakery. Jackson used even more powerful digital techniques to restore the scratchy, wiped out 1918-era WWI footage for his 2018 documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old. For Get Back, he had well-preserved 16mm color footage to begin with, giving the restoration techniques used on his WWI documentary that much more of a head start.

For the sound, once the band moves into their basement Apple studio, Jackson had a mix of the mono audio the filmmakers were recording of the group between songs, and the band audio was recorded on eight track reel to reel by Glyn Johns, one of rock’s best engineers (and in 1969, one of its wildest dressers).

To remix the mono audio of the band rehearsing in Twickenham Film Studios, Jackson used a version of the remix applet that’s included in several audio restoration programs, such as Izotope’s RX9:

Jackson was lucky that Billy Preston hadn’t arrived yet, since the current platform doesn’t separate keyboards from guitars. Perhaps the most powerful audio restoration was done in the scene where John and Paul discuss George quitting in the Twickenham cafeteria. But even with all of the sound restoration technology available to both Disney, and the director of the Lord of the Rings movies, he still had to subtitle the conversation for the viewer to understand what’s going on:

So it’s all very powerful digital audio and film restoration technology, but nothing in Get Back seems like we’ve entered into deep fake territory. (Unless you were a “Paul is dead” believer in 1969, that is…)

OUR UNPRECEDENTED SITUATION. “I have been in some part inclined to the opinion that present arrangements are unstable and may be approaching their end. Yet in thinking it through further, I am forced to admit that our times are marked by so many unprecedented trends and events that making predictions seems foolhardy. . . . America has yet formally to transform (if it ever will) from republic to empire. Yet in all important respects, our country is no longer a republic, much less a democracy, but rather a kind of hybrid corporate-administrative oligarchy.”

I’VE ACTUALLY WORRIED ABOUT THIS A BIT, BUT IF IT HAPPENS WE WON’T KNOW IT: Here’s how the universe could end in a ‘false vacuum decay.’

THIS IS CNN: Jeff Zucker Failed To Address Serial Sexual Misconduct At CNN And Should Be Fired Immediately.

SENATE VOTES TO REVERSE BIDEN VACCINE MANDATE FOR PRIVATE COMPANIES: “The effort to block the mandate is likely to end at the Senate chamber doors, however. The measure heads to the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a vaccine mandate proponent, plans to ignore it. Pelosi has tagged the GOP as ‘anti-vaxxers,’ who do not believe in the science behind the shot. While it won’t become law, the Senate vote sent a strong message that the mandate is unpopular with many people and in particular businesses.”

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Never Forget: All the Libs Who Fell for the Jussie Smollett Hate Crime Hoax.

Of course, there was one notable exception (seriously NSFW language warning, needless to say):

Related: Ashamed: ABC Hosts Wants You to Forget Their Embarrassing Smollett Reporting.

WHY IS WESLEY WHITESPLAINING? Wil Wheaton Calls Dave Chappelle A “Bigot” And “Piece Of S***” After Netflix Announced The Comedian Will Headline ‘Netflix Is A Joke Festival.’

AN ACQUAINTANCE HAS BEEN IN THE HOSPITAL FOR A FEW DAYS, A BIT LONGER THAN PLANNED. She’s a bodybuilder and the lousy food and interrupted sleep have been especially hard on her. It reminds me of this column I wrote years ago. Excerpt:

Being in the hospital is an exhausting, draining experience even if you aren’t sick. I spent a lot of time, and a couple of nights, there, and I felt like I had been run over by a truck. Imagine how I’d have felt if I had been, you know, a patient with something actually wrong with me.

Sleep interruptions are one problem. The floor below my wife’s housed the sleep-disorder clinic, where they monitor people and try to help them overcome various problems, like sleep apnea, so that they can achieve an uninterrupted night’s sleep. Ironically, it’s probably the only place in the hospital where they let you sleep all night long if you want. My wife was interrupted, on average, about every 90 minutes or so all night long: To have blood drawn, to have vital signs checked, to have her temperature taken, to be given medications (“wake up, it’s time for your sleeping pill” isn’t just a hospital joke) and, most irritatingly, to be weighed.

Now, there are good reasons for a lot of this stuff. Medications have to be given at certain times, temperatures have to be monitored, and so on. Even the weight is important, especially for cardiac patients where fluid balance often matters a lot. (Though not in my wife’s case, as her problems were different.)

But the end result of all of this stuff, especially when it’s spread over the evening, is a huge amount of stress on somebody who’s already under stress from illness. I don’t think that anyone has done the experiment (as has in fact been done with regard to mental hospitals) of hospitalizing some healthy grad students for a couple of weeks and then measuring their condition on discharge, but I’m pretty sure I know what the result would be: Most of them would come out in far worse shape than they were when they entered, even if they managed to avoid other hospital hazards like nosocomial infections or malnutrition from lousy hospital food. And I rather doubt that anyone familiar with hospitals and hospitalization would disagree. That suggests to me that somebody ought to be thinking harder about ways of making the hospital environment more patient-friendly. It’s impossible to make a hospital as stress-free as, say, a spa or a hotel, but it seems to me that with a bit of planning and organization it would be possible to do a lot better than we’re doing now. (And several of the nurses with whom I discussed this problem agreed.) Like the traditional hospital gowns, an awful lot of things seem to be “flimsy, drab, and designed for the practitioner’s convenience rather than for the patient’s comfort.” It’s time for that to change.

Speaking of hotels and comfort, it might be a good idea for hospitals to pay more attention to visitors’ needs, too. No matter how good the nursing staff is, they’re understaffed almost everywhere. That means that hospitals rely, to greater or lesser degrees, on patients’ families and friends for everything from minor services like refilling water glasses to fairly major things like monitoring treatments and medications to make sure there aren’t errors. I always pay close attention to that sort of thing on behalf of my family members who are hospitalized, and have caught a couple of mistakes that might have led to serious problems.

You’d think that would be cheap malpractice insurance, and hospitals seem to notice in the abstract — I saw posters telling people that if they couldn’t have family or friends around they should hire someone to sit with them — but not much is done to make the lot of long-term visitors easy; even the chair in my wife’s room was excruciatingly uncomfortable. (“I’d rather be a patient than a visitor,” one nurse told me). While there are some efforts along these lines, there’s not enough.

Related: Why Hospitals Should Let You Sleep: Frequent disruptions are more than just annoying for patients. They can also cause harm.

Much more here.

IS IT A CAT? THEN YES. Scientists Developed a Questionnaire to Identify Whether Your Cat Is a Psychopath.

2019’s SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY WANT YOUR DIVIDENDS: AOC Says Taxpayers Should Have to Pay Her $17K Student Loan—Even Though She Makes $174K a Year.

To be fair, in terms of wanting ever more amounts of taxpayer money, she’s got that aspect of socialism down cold.

Flashback: “In a famous Soviet joke, then-leader Leonid Brezhnev shows his mother his luxury apartment, his limousine, his fancy country house and his helicopter only to have her object: ‘But what if the communists come back?’”

SO DOCTORS ARE SPARING THEM THE RISK OF ADDICTION? Black, Hispanic people in U.S. less likely than White people to receive opioids.