June 23 Update: AI Plagiarism; France's Neo-Fascist Face Ban; Climate Engineering's Risks; High-End Bike Crime; UAV Jammers to Become Ubiquitous

NYPD Sergeant Dana Martillo wearing prohibited 'Punisher' logo patches at a 2021 Black Lives Matter demonstration. NYC's police watchdog agency has been heavily disciplining officers for wearing the banned items since 2019.

Hot enough out there for you? Two thirds of the United States has been under a heat dome all week in what forecasters are calling an abnormally early spike in temperatures - but we'd better get used to it. There are some shoots of green out there in terms of some interesting carbon capture projects coming online out West (n.b these cannot and should not be used as 'carbon credits' sold to large-scale polluters, but they currently are), but given the cowardice of politicians like New York Governor Kathy Hochul in finding real solutions to emissions, funding public transportation and reducing automobile congestion and the nascent artificial intelligence industry's rapacious desire for energy, there needs to be far more action taken to avert cataclysmic rises in temperature.

In case you missed it, I kicked up a bit of a storm last weekend with independent reporter Jason Wilson about a Berkeley center for tech utopians that hosts conferences featuring neo-eugenicists and is allegedly funded by purloined deposits from the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange FTX. There was quite a bit of caterwauling on the internet about this (particularly from far right propaganda outlets like Quillette. Give our Guardian investigation a read and judge for yourselves.

Midweek, I published a quick-turn investigation into rising misconduct allegations against the NYPD, which have reached a twelve-year high not seen since oligarch Michael Bloomberg's mayoralty and the height of the stop and frisk era, when over half a million New Yorkers (90 percent of them young Black and Latino men) were stopped and searched by the police. I also uncovered an interesting trend regarding extremism in the ranks: for half a decade, New York City's independent police watchdog agency has been sustaining officers for violating the patrol guide by wearing 'morale patches' replete with the Punisher logo, which they state is indicative of far right ideology. The logo has been co-opted by 'thin blue line' groups and, according to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, is inextricably linked with seditious militia organizations like the Three Percenters and Oathkeepers. Might be more than the twenty-odd cases I turned up in this article at issue, methinks.

Enough about me. Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-The Artificial Intelligence industry is coming for every kind of creative job imaginable (graphic design, film production, recording artists, journalists; the list goes on), laws be damned. Particularly copyright, as evidence by the ongoing legal battles between authors, news publishers and other entities whose content has been scraped by AI companies to train their language learning models. Wired dug into Perplexity, one of the flashier AI 'search engines' that is backed by Google co-founder Eric Schmidt, which plagiarized a recent Forbes investigation into Schmidt's secretive drone startup wholesale. Wired not only debunked Perplexity's denials about the Forbes article, but sniffed out the AI firm's scraping tools poring through Conde Nast's websites via the company's IP addresses. It's the old adage of tech firms moving fast and breaking things. Time for media organizations and publishers to lawyer up and put all those high-priced, over-educated intellectual property lawyers to use.

-As France creaks on the precipice of a snap election that could bring the Far Right Rassemblement National to power, the streetfighting element of France's Fascist movement is under renewed focus. Per investigative powerhouse Mediapart, Interior Minister Gerard Darmanin is weighing a formal ban on the Groupe Union Defense, or GUD, which was founded in the 1960s and incubated generations of Le Pen loyalists and Neo-Nazis. Despite RN leader Marine Le Pen's successful attempts to rehabilitate the RN's image from her father's once-fringe party of Holocaust deniers, Monarchists and Hitler apologists, the GUD remains extremely close to the party's leadership and still serves as a pipeline for young militants to the now-mainstream party. In French, but a few translation sites or plug-ins should do the trick.

-Last month, a cloud-seeding project on the USS Hornet in Alameda, California was halted by the local city council over concerns about aerosol discharges that might violate air quality laws. While the merits of those claims are still under debate, the broader practice of geo-engineering to combat runaway global warming is entirely unregulated and presents serious risks, as readers of science fiction writer Neil Stephenson's 2021 novel Termination Shock might recall. The Guardian aired scientists' warnings about potential heat waves in Europe if cloud-seeding operations are allowed to proceed off the West Coast.

-Getting a bike stolen is a miserable experience, particularly when the bike in question costs several thousand dollars. And in the Bay Area, where high-end frames are the status symbol du jour for Silicon Valley's nouveau riche, the pickings are plentiful. The ill-gotten gains don't stay in the U.S., however; a private investigator interviewed by Wired has tracked hundreds of stolen bikes from California to Mexico, where they are resold for a fraction of the price.

-Drones have fundamentally altered the nature of modern warfare, from surveillance to persistent air cover to covert assassination programs. As the devices become cheaper and increasingly modifiable, they have penetrated each aspect of military operations to the point where both Russian and Ukrainian armed forces cannot deploy without their own UAVs - or the appropriate countermeasure devices. Drone jammers that throw off the radio waves these devices rely on for command instructions were once prohibitively expensive and tightly controlled. As the UAV arms race ramps up commensurate to spiking demand in Eastern Europe, the Sahel and other hot theaters of operation, the countermeasures are also in high demand. The Financial Times' military coverage is consistently ahead of the mainstream pack, and their report on the coming wave of counter-drone devices will have significant ramifications for military operations and, a few years downrange, for law enforcement, the secondary market for such devices.

BOOK - Yes, I am partial to books about law enforcement corruption, brutality and accountability. Veteran journalist Lou Cannon's Official Negligence (1997) is the definitive account of the savage videotaped beating of Rodney King in 1991, which shocked the world, led to two trials of the LAPD officers who abuse him, and triggered massive riots in 1992 following acquittals of all involved officers by a jury in suburban Simi Valley.

Those riots reshaped Los Angeles for generations and forced a reckoning for LA's political leadership with a police department rife with racism, brutality and seemingly immune to any outside oversight or accountability. Cannon's account is well-written, exhaustive (600+ pages) and unsparing towards all parties involved. An excellent companion to Mike Davis' City of Quartz and a poignant reminder of how profoundly King's beating affected American society when the truth of the LAPD's street conduct was laid bare for all to see.

FILM - It's hard to make films about migration these days without hitting stereotypes or political narratives. Io Capitano (2024) avoids all this by focusing on the journey of a young Senegalese boy to Europe across the Sahel, through the torture chambers of a Libyan mafia prison, and across the Mediterranean in a staggeringly simple, brutal film shot through with humanity.

Incredibly high production values, no schlock, no respite. And in a wild mixture of Italian film tradition and Senegalese culture, some moments of magical realism that rival the phantom football match from Timbuktu.

MUSIC - Some months back while I was in Southern California covering Samuel Woodward's murder trial (still ongoing, by the way), I wandered out to Long Beach's Fourth Street corridor and popped into an unassuming bar known for live music. I'd no clue what I was walking into: a top-notch performance by an avant-garde jazz quintet reminiscent of Sun Ra, Miles Davis' later years, the Bad Plus, and even Christian aTunde Adjuah. If you ever see Dan Rosenboom and his Polarity Quintet on a venue's schedule, by all means do not miss them.