Nicolás Maduro has moved Christmas forward to Oct. 1 by imperial decree. Now I am just waiting for him to publish his conversations with St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary. I imagine the Holy Family in Nazareth quietly preparing their suitcases to leave for Bethlehem in a few weeks when suddenly they receive a call from the dictator: “By order of the Bolivarian revolution, I inform you that you must be ready to give birth to the Child God on Oct. 1. And instead of Bethlehem, he will be born in Caracas.” The good Saint Joseph must be thinking what bad luck he must have that he should have to undertake a trip to Bethlehem because of Caesar’s taxes, that being the reason for which they have to register there — in addition to fulfilling the Old Testament promise. Now, even before overcoming the unforeseen, another socialist usurper has crossed his path and asked him to walk to Caracas in less than a month, where in addition to taxes there are expropriations and all kinds of outrages. (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 132: Venezuelan Fraud Is A Cautionary Tale For Americans) In a solemn announcement to the Venezuelan people, Maduro has confirmed the Christmas advance as if he were an AliExpress Santa Claus: “For everyone, Christmas has arrived, with peace, happiness and security.” Maduro’s idea of happiness is having to put up with a bastard who lost the elections and refuses to step down and abide by the results of the polls. Maduro’s idea of security is to have your children or any other relative kidnapped in your own house because someone has reported them for their presence in one of the demonstrations in support of the person who won the elections. Everything surrounding the Caracas mustachioed sperm whale would be funny if it were not so tragic. (RELATED: Maduro, Get Down From Your Tree and Scram) In a prime-time televised masterclass, to confirm before the world how brutish he is, Maduro explained his theory: “Jesus Christ was the first anti-imperialist in modern history. Jesus was a young Palestinian. When he was crucified by the Spanish empire and the oligarchies that dominated the area, he died as a Palestinian man, he was resurrected as a Palestinian spirit.” That is, in short, Jesus was a Palestinian boy crucified by the Spanish empire. Maduro is about as wise as one, as defined by P.G. Wodehouse, whose “IQ was somewhat lower than that of a backward clam — a clam, let us say, which had been dropped on its head as a baby.” That enlightened find, that historical Christmas epiphany soon fell apart: Jesus Christ could not have been Palestinian because he was born 2000 years ago and Palestine did not exist. He could hardly have been too anti-imperialist in the middle of the Roman Empire, and he could not have been of Modern History because his existence is framed in Ancient History. Nor could he have died as a Palestinian man and, in any case, he would have died as a Jewish man. But what is certain is that he could not be resurrected with a Palestinian spirit because spirits are not from any place. In any case, since God is one and triune, perhaps Maduro would like to refer to God as the Holy Spirit, who also does not come from Palestine since, as the creed points out, he “proceedeth from the Father and the Son.” And, as you may have suspected, Jesus could not have died at the hands of the Spanish Empire, because it was formed much later — in the 15th century. Maduro, in short, knows as much about Christmas and what Christians celebrate on those dates as I do about the sexual habits of the nematocera. The strange thing is not that he has brought Christmas forward to October but that he has not banned it outright, like China and North Korea, or imprisoned Santa Claus as in some Islamic countries where the old bearded man is forbidden to go out in the street. Maduro may make a fool of himself every time he tries to give a history lesson, or he may stumble with the grossest blasphemy when dealing with religious matters. But he must know something: His time is running out, and his only way out is to get out of there as soon as possible. Nobody wants him. But above all, Venezuela no longer wants him. The post Maduro Moves Christmas to October by Imperial Decree appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Pornography generated by artificial intelligence is a moral horror, and there is no clear solution in sight. There are more delicate ways of broaching that subject, but the conclusion seems unarguable. In mid-August, a theater employee in Florida was arrested for allegedly using generative AI (GenAI) to produce sexually explicit images of children. His arrest follows others in Wisconsin and North Carolina; in Spain, 15 teenage boys were convicted of generating pornographic images of their classmates. (READ MORE: Google’s Report on AI Abuse Isn’t Comforting) The technology behind the arrests is another evolution of so-called “deepfakes”: AI-generated images of specific actual individuals, intended to be indistinguishable from the real thing. The technology has uses that are legitimate, or at least benign; the 2016 film Rogue One used it to create a digital duplicate of deceased actor Peter Cushing. That duplication, however, required a plaster cast of Cushing’s face and the resources of a digital effects studio — and the effect was still more uncanny than convincing. Six years later, a YouTube artist with neither of those could outperform the original. Deep Fake Pornography Threatens Women, Children, and Families Today, GenAI deepfakes pose a broader challenge. In Ukraine, false images of President Zelensky were used to urge its military to surrender, while scammers used the technology to pass identity checks. At issue in many of the arrests above, however, is the ability of GenAI image generators to produce “nudified” images. Such systems take a normal, fully-clothed photo and create a naked or otherwise sexualized body, matched to the original subject’s face and features. The hazards here are multiple. The corrosive effect of pornography on the user is old news; studies correlate its use with unhappy marriages and extramarital affairs, with one widely-cited survey suggesting porn usage is a factor in 56 percent of divorces. (WATCH: The Weekend Spectator Ep. 2: AI Is Progressing Faster Than You Think) The particular horror of GenAI pornography, though, is for its targets. Where “revenge porn” cases used to involve the distribution of previously-intimate and private photos, deepfaked pornography does not require the victim’s participation or even knowledge. Indeed, it’s difficult to see how it can be guarded against; who, in 2024, can erase all of their photos from the web? In the most wicked cases — as in several of those above — the victims are children. The girls targeted in Spain were reportedly, “completely terrified and had tremendous anxiety attacks… [they] were afraid to tell and be blamed for it.” Another adult victim said that she felt that she “was probably better off dead because it was just absolutely, horrendous.” Potential Legal Solutions Appear Not Enough and Too Far Away Legal solutions remain unclear. Traditional approaches to obscene material focus on limiting access to providers, prosecuting creators, requiring user identification, or blocking financial transactions. Unfortunately, many sources of AI porn are overseas; other generative AIs can run on a local PC, meaning there is no “provider” to block. Further, since image generation itself requires no human participation, its marginal cost is almost zero. Like the digital piracy of the aughts, the resulting crimes are decentralized and largely immune to financial obstacles. Individuals might be prosecuted for the possession, creation, or distribution of images, but here too the matter is uncomfortably murky. A previous federal child pornography law — the Child Pornography Protection Act (CPPA) — was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2002. The law prohibited “any visual depiction…. [that] is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct;” the Court objected that “the CPPA prohibits speech that records no crime and creates no victims by its production… [in this case], there is no underlying crime at all.” In other words, manipulated images that merely appeared to be child pornography were not criminal, because no actual children were involved. While Congress rapidly passed a replacement to the CPPA, depictions of a digital simulacrum might face the same problem as before: there is no actual child. Deepfakes of adults, meanwhile, might only be pursued under harassment or defamation charges. (RELATED: The Dark Side of AI: Generating Child Porn) New legislation attempts to address these concerns. The DEFIANCE Act, which cleared the Senate in July, would allow the targets of deepfakes to sue the creators of those images, while multiple states have passed related legislation. For now, though, legal protections remain a patchwork, and a thin one; a comprehensive response to digital challenges is still hypothetical. In the meantime, individual organizations might pursue solutions closer to the ground. As evidence mounts that unfiltered web access is a mental health risk, schools have begun banning smartphones; parents, meanwhile, might refuse to purchase them. Private colleges and workplaces can update their policies to include clear and punitive policies for using such tools, particularly for colleagues. Yet such solutions seem badly outgunned. In 2023, deepfake pornographic videos were viewed more than three hundred million times. The early-2000s internet-enabled learning and communication in ways previously unimagined, but it also transformed the ease and ubiquity of access to pornographic materials. Whatever its eventual virtues, generative AI seems poised to provide another leap downward. So far, no clear fix is in view. The post The Internet Has a New Problem: Deepfaked Pornography appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The Biggest Issue in This Election

Would Harris Secure the Border That Biden Did Not?

Media Bias Makes It Easier To Run a 'Flawless' Campaign

Time for a Federal Law Prohibiting Abortion

The Evil of Cowardice

2024 Is Beginning to Smell Like 1980

San Francisco Shooting Highlights Kamala’s Policies

An Open Letter to Pro-Life Americans: Trump and the Future of our Movement