Unfortunate Son

A Call for Truth, Doctor GPT

In the hours following the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, his parents issued a statement that concluded with this plea: “Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.” That could be the rallying cry of the era. As was the case after the killing of Renee Good, the lies about the incident and the victim began immediately, and came from the very top. How do we get the truth out about this American son when an administration, its media and political enablers, and a social media army (fueled by AI-powered distortions and good old-fashioned falsehoods) are so determined to get the truth out of American life? In Minneapolis, protesters are recording masked agents, and agents are recording scenes from their perspective. But as Charlie Warzel explains in The Atlantic, even these realtime recordings can’t deliver agreement about what happened among those who view them through filters poisoned by partisanship and relentless lying. “A dark irony of our current age is that there is more video and photographic evidence than ever before, and yet propagandists can coerce or convince others to not believe what they can see with their own eyes.” It’s easy enough to say, Believe Your Eyes, but it’s something else to convince others to believe theirs.

One of the troubling trends is that even mainstream media orgs tend to fall into the trap of giving the benefit of the doubt to the Trump administration’s official version of events, before dismantling that version, fact by fact. Yes, eventually we might stumble toward to obvious conclusion like this from the NYT Editorial Board (Gift Article): The Trump Administration Is Lying to Our Faces. Congress Must Act. “The administration is urging Americans to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. Ms. Noem and Mr. Bovino are lying in defiance of obvious truths. They are lying in the manner of authoritarian regimes that require people to accept lies as a demonstration of power.” But in today’s media landscape, it doesn’t cut it to eventually get to the truth after giving credulous consideration (and headline space) to the lies. When people lie every time, like every single time, maybe it doesn’t make sense to give them the benefit of the doubt in the first rough draft of history. At this point, it’s not enough to call out the lies we can plainly see with our own eyes. We have to assume the lie as a starting point. As Vinson Cunningham asks in The New Yorker: “Their untroubled and automatic dishonesty, amid so much shared evidence, gives rise to a horrible question: If this is what they do when we can see, what’s going on in the places—planes and cars, detention centers—where we can’t?” We need to find out. We owe it to Alex Pretti’s parents, and we owe it to America.

2

Street Level View

“For weeks, these agents had been actors in a kind of theater of power, meting out various forms of state force and violence, framed by the smartphone cameras they carried, providing a steady stream of content for the Trump administration’s various social media platforms. What was clear in person, seeing the scene outside of the frame, were the limits of this performance of power. The agents had no capacity to maintain order or much apparent interest in doing so. Their presence was a vector of chaos, and controlling it was not in their job description. All that was holding the crowd back, as far as I could tell, was the knowledge that an officer like these shot a woman a week earlier and that another shot a man up the street an hour ago. I left the scene that night certain it would happen again.” NYT Magazine(Gift Article): Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis.

+ “In the frozen streets of Minneapolis, something profound is happening.” Welcome to the American Winter.

+ Even some Republicans are calling for an investigation into what’s happening in Minneapolis. Republicans Call for ‘Transparent’ Investigation Into Fatal Minneapolis Shooting. And the White House is trying to distance itself from the attacks on the victim made by Stephen Miller (who called Pretti “an assassin [who] tried to murder federal agents”) and Kristi Noem. Here’s the latest from AP, The Guardian, and NBC News.

3

Doc’ing Station

“Like many people who strap on an Apple Watch every day, I’ve long wondered what a decade of that data might reveal about me. So I joined a brief wait list and gave ChatGPT access to the 29 million steps and 6 million heartbeat measurements stored in my Apple Health app. Then I asked the bot to grade my cardiac health. It gave me an F.” Luckily for Geoffrey A. Fowler, ChatGPT’s analysis of his health data was wrong. But when you read AI analysis, especially when you’re desperate for answers, it often sounds right. WaPo (Gift Article): I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data. Then I called my doctor.

+ If I shared my health data with ChatGPT, I’d expect it to say, “Hey, maybe you should get offline for a few hours and we can talk about this later...” For now, I’ve only asked it about some household fixes. And those answers were about as accurate as the ones Geoffrey Fowler got about his health. Let There Be Light.

4

The Grand Scheme of Things

If you’re a busy, tired, stressed parent looking for new ways to get your own parents to help out with the kids, and the usual guilt trips aren’t working, here’s a new angle. Tell them taking care of their grandkids is for their own good! Helping to raise your grandchildren? It’s good for your brain. Researchers “found that seniors who provided child care for their grandchildren − including watching them overnight, caring for sick grandkids, playing with them, helping with homework, making meals and driving them to school and extracurriculars − scored higher on memory and verbal fluency tests than those who were not caregivers.”

5

Extra, Extra

The Last Hostage: “The remains of the last hostage held in Gaza have been identified, the Israeli military said Monday, ending a more than two-year saga for captives’ families in Israel — and paving the way for the second phase of the ceasefire in the war-torn enclave.”

+ House Call: “Millions of Americans are starting to see their monthly health-insurance bills rise, a new pressure point for a nation still frustrated with the high cost of living. Many of those facing the most substantial dollar increases are middle-income Americans who buy health insurance through the marketplaces set up by the government’s Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.” WSJ: Health Insurance Is Now More Expensive Than the Mortgage for These Americans.

+ Winter Came: Northeast sees more snow from the tail end of a colossal winter storm, at least 25 deaths reported. “A colossal winter storm brought deep cold, ice, sleet, and snow to millions across a huge swath of the country.” In Photos: Snow and Ice Blanket the U.S.

+ Tim Apple Goes to Washington: In the hours after the latest Minneapolis killing, the CEOs of some of America’s most powerful tech companies were at the White House grinning for photos at the screening of the new Melania doc. It’s not easy to navigate being a global CEO in the age of Trumpism. But this is particularly bleak.

+ Up Shit Creek on The River Road: “’The people who got the ability to impose their will on us here in this community have decided that our lives are not worth anything. They can come in here, do what they can do, just like they’re doing,’ Taylor told me in his family’s den. ‘They can suffer the horrors of you dumping these chemicals and pollutants into their bodies.’ He shook his head. ‘Sacrificed,’ he said. ‘For the benefit of the riches of these other people. People that’s not even from here.’” Lex Pryor in The Ringer: The Sins on the River Road Cannot Be Erased. “How did a tiny industrial hub in Louisiana find itself at the center of America’s culture war?”

6

Bottom of the News

“Climber Alex Honnold successfully completed a ‘free solo’ ascent up the Taipei 101 skyscraper in Taiwan on Saturday, doing so without a rope or harness in an event that streamed live on Netflix for a worldwide audience.”

+ Here’s a timelapse video of the climb. (It would have been hard to beat him to the top if you took the stairs...)

+ ‘Bionic Woman’ Star Lindsay Wagner, 76, Reunites With Lee Majors, 86, for 50th Anniversary. (All of my earliest romantic stirrings began when she tore this phone book...)