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Afternoon Links: Flying Bureaucrats, Behind the Memes, and the End of Video?

By Jim Swift

The end of video? When I was younger, I recall a photoshop the Sidney (Ohio) Daily News did on the front page of Tonya Harding becoming a wrestler. The story was about the wonders of digital photo editing technology, and was essentially the first “fake news” I ever saw. Now, such technology is becoming more readily available for video, and people are using it for all kinds of bad things. The AV Club is rightly worried about some of the political implications:

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The technology also opens up the door to a very near future in which we won’t be able to trust video evidence—long the gold standard, at least in the court of public opinion. This could be particularly damning in the political realm, where (say it with us) “fake news” and the very nature of reality is somehow now open to partisan interpretation.

The upside to this new technology? People are using it to insert Nic Cage into every movie ever made.

Flying bureaucrats. This story in the Los Angeles Times is wild:

Seven work days into Ron Beilke’s job at the Central Basin Municipal Water District, the agency’s governing board placed an item on its next meeting agenda. It called for firing him from his $98,000-a-year job as assistant to the general manager. Two hours later, Beilke crashed headfirst into a wall on the second floor of the district’s headquarters in the City of Commerce. One employee later said she watched Beilke fly across the frame of her door, arms stretched out, like Superman.

After worker’s compensation and a settlement for his wrongful termination claim, the city was out $1.5 million. You think your local government has problems? Read the whole thing.

Scientific American Gets Woke. Move over, Teen Vogue, a new entrant for wokest non-political publication has emerged: Scientific American. Yesterday, an author called 500 Women Scientists took to task TV entertainer Bill Nye: “Bill Nye Does Not Speak for Us and He Does Not Speak for Science.” Amen! Finally, somebody with the courage to criticize a man who left a engineering job to work in entertainment for posing as a scientific authority figure! Right?

Well, no, that’s not the concern of these 500 Women Scientists: “By attending the State of the Union with NASA administrator nominee Jim Bridenstine, the Science Guy tacitly endorses climate denial, intolerance and attacks on science.” I believe we in the biz call that a “logical fallacy.”

Behind the memes. Remember Left Shark from Super Bowl XLIX? The guy behind the fuzz shares the back story before going out on top:

It’s been three years, and we’re still talking about left shark. I’m glad it makes people happy. These performances should be uplifting and joyful. It did change my life — I didn’t become a millionaire, but I had lived one of the biggest dreams any dancer could imagine. It was an experience I’ll always have. I hope other people keep following their dreams, keep growing and never be afraid to be that quintessential left shark.

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