Friday, June 19, 2026

OK, It's Clearer Why UK Labour Hates Musk

This post here from last weekend gives just a glimpse of the UK uniparty's program to control media coverage of migrant stabbings and grooming gangs, and in fact, UK legacy media has been generally cooperative. The problem is that, just as in the US, people are bypassing legacy media to get their news. In the post embedded above, the legacy BBC, equivalent to the US PBS, is ranked fourth behind X, reddit, and something called Nextdoor: Neighbour Network. I asked the AI oracle if Nextdoor: Neighbour Network is legacy media, and it answered,

No, Nextdoor is not a legacy media organization. It is a hyper-local social networking platform. While it partners with thousands of publishers to distribute local journalism and emphasizes community information, its core function is peer-to-peer social interaction rather than a traditional publisher.

As if to twist the knife, Musk polsted this in response to the Rupert Lowe-Restore Britain report on grooming gangs: The Labour government has been implementing new policies to control social media, the best known of which is to keep children under 16 off most social platforms, especially X, entirely. However, a more comprehensive program will limit or prohibit social media postings the government deems harmful during "crises":

Social media companies have been ordered to have emergency measures in place to stop illegal content going viral, as regulators battle to stop the type of misinformation spiral that circulated after the 2024 summer riots.

Sites such as X, formerly Twitter, and TikTok will have to have a “crisis protocol” in place to intervene when the sharing of dangerous content begins to rise.

Under the measures to be implemented by Ofcom, the UK’s tech regulator, online platforms will also need to reserve a dedicated line of communication channel through which the police can contact them in a crisis.

It follows concerns at the top of government over the speed with which misinformation spreads at pivotal moments. Ofcom’s announcement also follows the outbreak of rioting in Southampton over the police response to the fatal stabbing of Henry Nowak.

. . . “For example, evidence from previous crisis events illustrate how the perpetrators use online services to carry out illegal activity, such as inciting racial or religious hatred, making threats or inciting violence. This can lead to an increase in the amount of illegal content circulating online but also manifest in violence in the real world.

The consensus is that the proposed controls will require everyone to have a digital ID, if only to verify age. But kids around the world have found ways to bypass this:

Im over 18 but I didn’t want to give Twitter my ID or selfie because [redacted] the government so I just took photo of some random dude on a different screen and on third attempt it worked.

I’m not in the UK but I imagine that it’s similar there ?

My experience of online controls in the US -- for instance, corporate attempts to block work computers from accessing adult-content sites -- are largely unsuccessful; as the user just above suggested, people can just keep trying, and nobody has the resources to monitor that sort of thing. Controlling VPNs woluld be an even bigger task:

The idea of a “Great British Firewall” makes for a catchy headline, but it would be riddled with holes and cause huge problems.

. . . To comprehensively block VPNs, the government would need to require internet providers to inspect traffic, restrict apps from app stores, and attempt to cut off access to thousands of VPN servers worldwide. That would be a massive, expensive, and deeply complicated undertaking—and it still wouldn’t work.

. . . Even if the government successfully blocked every major commercial VPN app and service, technically skilled users could simply rent a cheap server anywhere in the world and set up their own private tunnel in under ten minutes. There are also tools designed to evade exactly this kind of blocking, disguising encrypted traffic as ordinary web activity.

To give an idea of the popularity of VPNs, although I don't use one myself -- I'm too small potatoes -- simple math from my blog statistics tells me that roughly 99.5% of my traffic comes from VPNs. That's how many people don't want a record that they're visiting this blog, and it's probably the reason there are almost no comments. But it's also an indication of how big a problem the UK would have in trying to ban VPNs.

posted by test @ June 19, 2026   0 Comments

Thursday, June 18, 2026

The Death Of Hollywood

A recent piece, The Inexplicable Suicide of Hollywood, inadvertently ties the disastrous underperformance of the two latest summer blockbusters together:

Since starting this article, Hollywood has experienced a summer blockbuster phenomenon with the success of two thrillers, Obsession, an indie produced by a YouTuber making over $230 million on a budget of $750,000 and Backrooms, a larger indie distributed by A24 making $118 million on a $10 million budget and directed by twenty-year-old. Audiences showed up to theaters for these two movies while shunning a $165 million Disney Star Wars movie released at the same time.

It looks like he submitted his piece before this past weekend's disappointment with Spielberg, which just reinforces his point.

To be fair, there really isn’t one single cause, but the ones you don’t hear are probative. You’ll never hear that the content just sucks; that we just haven’t been producing entertainment that’s widely enjoyed. And that we’re willing to let Hollywood die before re-focusing from politics and morals to art and commerce.

On rare occasions, you can get a glimpse at internal data. In a break from conformity, Disney made public that they were desperate to attract young men back to the brand. The announcement came as a shock and resulted in pushback from employees. This sheds light on how much they devalued the golden goose of Lucasfilm and Marvel. Most of the industry will remain in denial, but you can feel an inkling of understanding rising under bouts of lashing out in hatred of the very audience they rely on to survive.

During my time at film school, I was forced to pledge to use any opportunity I’d have working in the film industry to support and promote women. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Two decades in, it’s clear how much this sort of indoctrination has shaped the landscape. During the mid-2010s, the generation raised on this ideology hit critical mass.

. . . Laying low became a skill. The revolutionaries saw their power and control proliferate. Every major studio somehow became beholden to the whims of some obscure administrator at San Diego State University, and suddenly, no project would be greenlit unless it met certain quotas in front of and behind the camera. People with no experience dictated terms. This was “important” and the “right thing to do.” Men were purged for the sake of being men.

I'm actually remiinded of Tom Wolfe's argument in his 1975 The Painted Word:

Wolfe's thesis in The Painted Word was that by the 1970s, modern art had moved away from being a visual experience, and more often was an illustration of art critics' theories. Wolfe criticized avant-garde art, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. The main target of Wolfe's book, however, was not so much the artists, as the critics. In particular, Wolfe criticized three prominent art critics whom he dubbed the kings of "Cultureburg": Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg. Wolfe argued that these three men were dominating the world of art with their theories and that, unlike the world of literature in which anyone can buy a book, the art world was controlled by an insular circle of rich collectors, museums, and critics with outsized influence.

Let's move to a piece at Real Clear Politics by Roger L Simon. Once again, in my view, RCP is conventional wisdom, and Simon is the sort of elder statesman of conservatism that they like to platform. Here's his take on Disclosure Day:

[B]efore I get into details, let me say that I enjoyed the movie; at least I didn’t feel compelled to leave, as I do with so many these days. Mediocre Spielberg is better than almost everything else out there.

Contrast that with the YouTube reviewer in the clip embedded above, who cites tweet after tweet, "Possibly the worst Spielberg film yet. . . . This is one of the cringiest experiences I've ever had in a movie theater. . . . This is 'alien conspiracy movie' for normies. . . . Disclosure Day is genuinely one of the dumbest science fiction movies I've ever seen. . . . Word of mouth is burying this movie. . . . Felt like someone tried to imitate a Spielberg movie. . . . I mean, potentially one of the worst movies I've ever seen."

Well, Roger L Simon is a respectable conservative who's made a media career for himself as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, director, and pundit as both a liberal and a conservative. He likely has too many friends in the film industry to step too far out of line. Spielberg is still a Great Man, apparently, so Simon gives us dimestore social analysis:

The Spielberg of the late 70s and early 80s was working in an optimistic America that was still relatively postwar. Sometimes accused of being shallow, he turned his attention to the darker moments of recent history with Schindler’s List, Munich, Saving Private Ryan, and an even darker fantasy of an alien invasion, an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. The latter contains giant extraterrestrials of a rather distant kind from the benign characters of his earlier films.

By then, we were in a post-9/11 America, and nothing was the same. The journey to Disclosure Day is not all that far. Conspiracies, real or imagined, are the order of the day. No one trusts anyone. Why shouldn’t we be housing extraterrestrials as if they were animals in a zoo? Why not make a movie about it?

A simpler explanation is that Spielberg made a career out of exploiting cinematic cliches, but cliches by their nature go out of date. The people who master and exploit them don't recognize it when they do. Judging from the remarkable number of YouTube reviews that suggest Disclosure Day is comically bad, it's not hard to think it's a symptom of Hollywood's complacency, something Simon's Oscar and detective novel awaard nominations may have blinded him from recognizing.

posted by test @ June 18, 2026   0 Comments

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

New UK Grooming Gangs Report, One Of Several

In connection with my recent posts on migrant-related stabbings in the UK, I've mentioned a related problem referred to there as "grooming gangs". According to Wikipedia,

Several government reviews have reported failures by British institutions in preventing, identifying and prosecuting the widespread cases of group-based child sexual abuse and exploitation that mostly occurred between the 1990s and 2010s. Allegations of governmental and institutional failures to respond to the problem or to downplay or cover up the issue have been described as a grooming gangs scandal.

. . . Media coverage and political discourse around these crimes has especially focused on the ethnic and religious background of perpetrators in high-profile cases, most of whom were Muslim men of Pakistani descent, and whether this prevented proper investigation. Data in Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire shows that, in the 2020s, men of an Asian ethnic background are disproportionately represented among perpetrators in those areas, but there is insufficient data to draw conclusions about ethnicity of perpetrators across the UK [cough, cough].

. . . Group-based child sexual exploitation and localised grooming are terms used to describe the sexual exploitation or grooming of children and adolescents by groups

. . . A 2013 report by the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee describes a group first making contact with the child in a public place. After the group's initial contact with the child, offers of treats (takeaway food, cigarettes, drugs) persuade the child to maintain the relationship. Sometimes a boy similar in age presents himself as a "boyfriend"; this person arranges for the child to be raped by other members of the group.

There were numerous local investigations of individual cases in the 2010s, but reports from government and local agencies routinely downplayed the ethnicity of the offenders, often going so far as to say they were mostly white.

In 2023, then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stated that victims had been failed due to political correctness, and established a taskforce to target this specific issue. In 2025, the Labour government commissioned Baroness Casey to make a detailed audit of these cases, published as the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. In her audit, Baroness Casey wrote: "Assertions that the majority of child sexual abuse offenders are White, even if true, are at best misleading. In a population with over of 80% of people of White ethnicity, it should always be a significant issue when people from a White background are not in the majority of victims or perpetrators of crime". The review found that there were serious shortcomings in the recording of ethnicity data about perpetrators of group-based sexual abuse. In one instance, Casey stated finding a case file where the word "Pakistani" had been tippexed [whited] out. On 14 June 2025, having previously resisted launching an investigation, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that the British government would launch a full national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs.

The "Casey Report" was released in June 2025.

The British government has announced a national inquiry into organised child sexual abuse following the release of a damning report by Baroness Louise Casey that criticised decades of institutional failure to protect children from so-called “grooming gangs”.

It marks a remarkable U-turn by the Labour Party government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, which had resisted months of calls for an inquiry, stating that it was focusing on recommendations already made in an earlier seven-year probe.

. . . In her report, Casey concluded that too many grooming cases have been dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges because a 13- to 15-year-old is perceived to have been “in love with” or have “consented to” sex with the perpetrator.

Her review also highlighted reluctance by the authorities to “examine the ethnicity of the offenders”, saying it was not racist to do so.

The formal parliamentary report is still in progress; its partial results can be found here. But yesterday, UK MP Rupert Lowe released his own crowd-funded report on rape gangs. Lowe has previosuly been associated with Brexit and Reform, but as of 2025, he founded the Restore Britain party, which is somewhat to the right of Reform, and as of now he is the only member of Restore Britain in parliament.

The full Lowe report can be found here. Its main point is that "at least 250,000" white girls were raped and trafficked by predominantly Muslim gangs since the 1950s. The reaction I've seen so far confirms what I've been saying here about the problem of the working class in the UK:

As I've noted, the loathing of the UK lower bourgeoisie for the working class dates back at least to the General Strike of 1926, there's nothing recent about it. It's also reflected in Henry James's 1898 story "In the Cage", where a working-class woman in a telegraph office becomes fascinated with what the bourgeois people in the neighborhood reveal about their lives in the telegrams they send. She becomes particularly attracted to the complex relationships of a Mr Everard, and the two develop a special intimacy on that basis.

Finally they meet outside the office and acknowledge the special relationship -- but soon, Mr Everard's complex dealings require that the woman retrieve a particular telegram, sent months earlier, from the office records. If it can't be found, Mr Everard and a certain noblewoman will be ruined. The woman retrieves it, only to discover that it will put a potential scandal to rest and allow Mr Everard and the noblewoman to marry. So much for the other "special" relationship.

It looks like Henry James had insights into UK class relations as far back as Victoria's reign. The stuff you can pick up in English class! Here's a relevant YouTube as well:

posted by test @ June 17, 2026   0 Comments

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

Bachelor Degree Aspirants Decline

The value of a college education:

In a new research brief, The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Education found that only 44 percent of American high school students expected to earn a bachelor’s degree in 2022, down from 72 percent in 2002. The study also revealed a parental gap among high school students, with only 33 percent of first-generation students aspiring to a bachelor’s degree in 2022, compared to 60 percent two decades earlier.

. . . Historically, the prestige of higher education relied on a form of geographic and information monopoly. In 2002, the narrative surrounding a teenager’s future was tightly managed by local gatekeepers—parents, high school guidance counselors, and FCC-regulated television networks that uniformly reinforced the traditional American Dream. If these gatekeepers insisted that a bachelor’s degree was the sole gateway to a middle-class life, a teenager had few tools to verify or challenge that claim. The cultural value of the degree was artificially protected by a lack of visible alternatives.Higher education has been forced to compete in an open attention economy.

Today, those bottlenecks are gone. With teenagers spending an average of eight and a half hours a day consuming decentralized digital media, the local gatekeeper has been entirely bypassed. In this informational vacuum, higher education has been forced to compete in an open attention economy against hyper-charismatic, highly relatable creators who operate with zero institutional overhead.

Nevertheless,

When combining tuition, fees, room and board, books, transportation and other expenses, the cost to attend 16 colleges and universities across the nation tops $100,000 per year, according to new data from the Princeton Review.

“We just keep going up and it just never stops,” Jeff Selingo, author of “Dream School,” told CNBC, which reported on the data.

“For the 2026-27 academic year, 16 institutions — including Duke, Georgetown, New York University and University of Chicago — have a sticker price of more than $100,000, according to data exclusively provided to CNBC from The Princeton Review’s upcoming ‘The Best 392 Colleges’ list,'” the outlet reported.

But as I've pointed out here, very few US-born students pay full freight. The real moneymakers are foreign students, who are much more likely to pay the posted price. Except,

The number of newly enrolled international students declined by 17 percent during the recent fall semester, according to the Institute of International Education’s Fall 2025 Snapshot on International Student Enrollment.

This drop has exposed universities’ heavy financial reliance on foreign tuition dollars, according to Shaan Patel, CEO and founder of college admissions company Prep Expert.

Unlike the nearly 40 percent of American students who rely on federal aid to cover higher education expenses, international students do not have access to these benefits and pay their tuition in cash, making them infinitely more attractive to universities, Patel told The College Fix via email.

. . . Schools with larger endowments such as the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia, whose student bodies are approximately 20 percent and 40 percent international, respectively, have been able to keep their heads above water financially, even outright refusing federal dollars.

Yet broader structural problems remain. Since 1980, college tuition and fees in the U.S. have increased by 1,200 percent, prompting critics to accuse universities of inflating costs and prioritizing profits over affordability for American families.

Over my working career, I had jobs (especially in government) where a bachelor's degree was an absolute requirement. Most tech-type jobs in private industry, though, had four-year degrees optional. I saw very little difference in interpersonal skills or oveall intelligence among my co-workers in either environment. For that matter, our friends at church have varying educational levels, but judging only from their interpersonal and communication skills, there's no way to tell the difference.

The same applies to our neighbors in a very prosperous community -- many have done well at blue-collar jobs in Hollywood, and you can't really distinguish them from others with lofty qualifications.

Another factor is cheating at the college level. I've discussed here how prevalent plagiarism was in freshman composition classes 50 years ago, but apparently with the rise of AI, the problem has only gotten worse. The result is that both students and their parents say that merely paying college tuition and fees should be enough to guarantee status in the upper bourgeoisie, no need to check their work. At best, the univerisites are nervous about this:

Princeton University recently decided to adopt a proposal that would reintroduce proctors to every exam room over AI cheating fears.

The proposal would revise Princeton’s 133-year-old Honor Code, an agreement between students and faculty established in 1893. Previously, students pledged not to take unfair advantage during examinations. In exchange, faculty proctors were not present in the exam rooms.

The proposal cites “the advent of generative artificial intelligence products” as one of the primary concerns which prompted its development. As a result, instructors will “act as additional observers” in the exam room.

The conundrum seems to be, especially with AI, it's difficult to determine whether a submitted piece of work, a paper or an essay exam response, is the result of a student's own mental process or a machine's ability to generate a facsimile of an informed response to any question. But this goes to the problem of the professors, who must themselves work within a closely circmscribed set of views within their subject area -- if they're discouraged from creative thought, how can they recognize it in students?

I don't have a whole lot of confidence that this will be solved, especially not by the universities themselves.

posted by test @ June 16, 2026   0 Comments

Monday, June 15, 2026

What On Earth Did Spielberg Have In Mind?

The more I read or see reviews of Disclosure Day, the more I wonder if Steven Spielberg's head is stuck somewhere in the 1970s, or maybe his private fantasy of the 1970s. This review has two insightful points; first:

Disclosure Day is a movie that is hanging on to the value of legacy media, with the overarching journey trying to get the stolen footage on network television. There’s an archaic quaintness to this, and it’s a willful one, as O’Connor’s whistleblower seems heavily inspired by Wikileaks, so Spielberg and Koepp know the internet exists. The reason for the focus on network television may be entirely functional - the movie needs a ticking clock. It has two - Wardex chasing our heroes as they try to release the footage and WWIII brewing in the background as North Korea starts acting up significantly.

In other words, we're back to Woodward, Bernstein, and "Deep Throat", using the white hats at the Washington Post to catch the Nixon administration bad guys, pure 1974. Never mind the Post, with the whole legacy media establishment, has seriously declined, we're expected to suspend disbelief and root for the whistleblower hero. The review's second point is this:

Hewson’s Jane, the innocent bystander caught up in the chase, talks to Josh O’Connor about the possible deleterious impacts of letting everybody know ET is real. Her argument is that it will cause a breakdown in the social order because of religion, but the movie never examines what this means. . . . This is one of the aspects of UFO theorizing that has always baffled me. The Catholic Church has been okay with the idea of aliens for a long time, and Pope John Paul II once replied to the question about whether there is life on other planets with the statement “Always remember: they are children of God as we are.” . . . I really feel like the popularity of science fiction over the past 70 years means that most folks would accept aliens as simply technologically advanced beings also created by God. The problem would be with Evangelicals, who invented the idea of the Bible being infallible, and thus have very strict ideas about what should and should not exist in the universe. But those folks today are saying UFOs are demons, which indicates to me not that the existence of aliens would create a religious crisis for them but rather act as a proof of faith.

Again, media people don't seem actually to know much about Christianity. Cdl McElroy just revoked the license of a Catholic exorcist who said UFOs are demons, and Vice President Vance, a Catholic, believes UFOs are demons, too. It's not just Evangelicals, and of course infallibility and inerrancy are difficult terms.

The concepts of infallibility and inerrancy are related but distinct. Infallibility refers to the Bible’s inability to fail in matters of faith and practice, while inerrancy denotes freedom from all errors, including historical or scientific details. Some denominations allow for minor errors in non-essential historical or scientific details under infallibility, whereas inerrancy traditionally holds that all original manuscript content is fully true.

The reviewer concludes,

There was nothing I wanted more than to love this movie. The religious element intrigued me, and Spielberg doing aliens again seemed so promising. . . . knowing that Spielberg is a True Believer I was hoping for something deeper and more interesting when it came to the space brothers. But there isn’t; Spielberg doesn’t break an inch of new ground here, and there’s not a UFO moment or idea in this movie that hasn’t been explored better in The X-Files thirty years ago. It’s very disappointing.

I'm coming to the conclusion that Spielberg is drinking his own Kool-Aid. Last week, I noted that Spielberg was expecting the film to make Christians question their faith as it made the entirely hypothetical proposal that space aliens are real. Why did he expect this?

I think he expected it because he knew he had a real turkey on his hands, but he was counting on the likes of Franklin Graham to denounce the film from the pulpit, which would spark interest. The review embedded above begins, "The runup to the movie's release has featured claims that it's anti-Christian, that it's designed to make people question their beliefs as they leave the theaters." Instead,

“Disclosure Day,” a sci-fi adventure from Steven Spielberg, opened to No. 1 at the domestic box office with $44 million from 3,824 theaters.

Those ticket sales were above estimates of $35 million, though below the $50 million that rival studios argue a film of this scale should earn in its debut to justify its price tag. “Disclosure Day,” one of the summer’s biggest gambles, cost $115 million to produce and $80 million to market. Since theaters keep about half of revenues, “Disclosure Day” needs to earn about $300 million globally to be profitable.

. . . Meanwhile, “Obsession” continues to do unprecedented business with $19 million in its fifth weekend of release, a 25% decline, and enough for second place on box office charts. . . . Now the low-budget “Obsession” has generated $188.3 million in North America and $265 million globally.

“Backrooms,” another horror sensation, captured the No. 4 spot with $12 million from 3,404 venues in its third weekend. The film, from another YouTube phenom Kane Parsons, has grossed $160 million domestically and $262 million worldwide to date.

The YouTube reviewer above sums it up: "Disclosure Day is a very, very bad movie." Spielberg hoped to rescue it by trying to twist Franklin Graham's tail. Not even that could help.

posted by test @ June 15, 2026   0 Comments

Sunday, June 14, 2026

Uneasy Weekend In The UK

A more complete story is at legacy BBC:

A girl who was stabbed in the neck as she walked down the street has been released from hospital.

The 17-year-old was attacked as she walked along Wood Street in Brierfield, Lancashire, at about 15:00 BST on Friday.

A 30-year-old, described by Lancashire Police as a British man of Pakistani heritage, was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder of the teenager, who the BBC understands is also of Pakistani heritage.

"This was a very serious incident but thankfully the girl's injuries were not life-threatening," a police spokesman said.

This seems not to have provoked riots, since both victim and perp were of Pakistani heritage; had the victim been of native UK working-class stock, we may surmise the outcome would have been different. Meanwhile, legacy media stressed "anti-racism" demonstrations:

Belfast had its “largest ever” anti-racism rally on Saturday afternoon, with thousands of people gathering in the city centre.

Speakers at the event included Lord Mayor Róis-Máire Donnelly, the SDLP’s Matthew O’Toole, trade union representatives and figures from voluntary and migrant support groups.

Ahead of the event, AI-generated posters advertising an anti-immigration counter-protest had been circulated online. The turnout for the counter-protest was small.

Meanwhile, at a similar event in Londonderry, a Guyanese woman said anti-racism rallies “let people know that there is hope”.

Nurse Beverly Simpson, who attended the event at the Guildhall, said: “I think it is fantastic to see so many people supportive. People are so aware of what is happening and totally against racism.”

But the problem isn't race. The problem is 80 years government policy bringing in third-world migrants to keep wages down, when the migrants arrive in such numbers that they can't be assimilated. The fact that even after generations in the UK, they murder each other over issues like honor killings (the likely root of the incident above) is an illustration of the problem. That the mayor, other politicians, and union officials would headline the Belfast "anti-racism" rally indicates that the official line will be that protests about migrant stabbings and rapes are "racist".

But apparently this isn't enough:

Britain’s minister for Northern Ireland, Hilary Benn, delivers a warning to those who complain on social media about their stabbing or beheading. Minister Benn notes the danger created by people online sharing information from Belfast after two days of civic unrest in the city following a migrant stabbing and slicing a local resident.

. . . “Social media companies have a very heavy responsibility. It’s why we’re going to bring forward new powers next week to make it clear that social media companies need to take down illegal content, particularly when we are facing circumstances such as the ones we’ve seen in Northern Ireland over the last two days”

According to The Guardian,

Social media companies have been ordered to have emergency measures in place to stop illegal content going viral, as regulators battle to stop the type of misinformation spiral that circulated after the 2024 summer riots.

Sites such as X, formerly Twitter, and TikTok will have to have a “crisis protocol” in place to intervene when the sharing of dangerous content begins to rise.

Under the measures to be implemented by Ofcom, the UK’s tech regulator, online platforms will also need to reserve a dedicated line of communication channel through which the police can contact them in a crisis.

. . . Ofcom said it would define a crisis as an “extraordinary situation in which there is a serious threat to public safety in the United Kingdom”, which is highly likely to have “resulted from a significant increase in relevant content”.

. . . “For example, evidence from previous crisis events illustrate how the perpetrators use online services to carry out illegal activity, such as inciting racial or religious hatred, making threats or inciting violence. This can lead to an increase in the amount of illegal content circulating online but also manifest in violence in the real world.

“Such crises are exceptional, and this means that online service providers’ usual content moderation systems and processes may not be sufficient in such circumstances.”

The bar for the implementation of such protocols is high, dealing with outright illegal content. The new measures will come into force after being approved by parliament.

The main problem for the UK government is Elon Musk. The government had already been mulling the option of banning X under the Online Safety Act:

The UK government is threatening Elon Musk’s X with the nuclear option under the country’s online safety laws: a ban. The social media platform is under pressure from ministers after it allowed the Grok AI tool, which is integrated within the app, to generate indecent images of unsuspecting women and children.

. . . The Online Safety Act (OSA) contains a provision that allows Ofcom to seek a court order imposing “business disruption measures” on a website or app that is in breach of the legislation. These measures are in effect a block on the recipient operating in the UK.

. . . Ofcom said it must follow due process as part of its investigation. “As the UK’s independent online safety enforcement agency, it’s important we make sure our investigations are legally robust and fairly decided,” it said.

Ofcom’s own guidance also makes clear this is not workaday punishment under the act and such measures are not a “matter of routine”. “We acknowledge that business disruption measures are a significant regulatory intervention and therefore we are unlikely to find it appropriate to apply to the courts for business disruption measures as a matter of routine where we have identified failures, or likely failures, to comply with enforceable requirements,” Ofcom said.

It seems to me that the problem Labour faces is that in the current migrant crisis, stabbings and rapes are going to continue at a pretty rapid rate -- as are equivalent episodes with homeless and mentally disturbed individuals in the US. Labour's aim will be to keep such continuing episodes from being publicized, rather than to try to solve the underlying problem. But in trying to rein in Musk's own perceived right to free speech, this will likely annoy Trump and others in his circle like Rubio and Vance, since Musk has their ear.

Well, good luck. I think Musk's post above suggests he understands the one solution to the UK's migrant crisis: call early elections. Letting Labour stay in power another three years will be disastrous.

posted by test @ June 14, 2026   0 Comments

Saturday, June 13, 2026

Disclosure Day Bombs

I asked the AI oracle, "Has Disclosure Day been getting bad reviews?"It answered,

Yes, Steven Spielberg's sci-fi film Disclosure Day has been receiving a significant amount of mixed and negative reviews.

While it has a decent audience score of roughly 75% on platforms like Rotten Tomatoes, critical reception has been polarizing.

"Polarizing" is a polite word for it; a good example is the YouTube review embedded above, for which I can only give an extreme bad language warning. The Critical Drinker makes the point that the two big summer blockbusters released so far, The Mandalorian and Grogu and Disclosure Day, have been runnming behind a pair of low-budget horror flicks made by YouTubers, Obsession and Backrooms, although my barber says although Obsession is good, even Backrooms isn't worth the time and money.

I haven't seen any of these, but I'll speculate on why nobody's interested in Disclosure Day. In some ways, this is odd, because in his heyday, Spielberg was always a step or two ahead of the public imagination, but it seems to me that he's somehow lost it now. The first big issue is the films's MacGuffin, which is what Hitchcock called the object or secret that sets the plot in motion. In this case, it's the fact that a government contractor, Wardex, has a secret stash of evidence that extraterrestrials are real. Daniel Kellner, a brilliant data privacy expert, goes on the run after stealing part of the stash.

OK, first quick stop. I spent part of my tech career in the data privacy field. There are no geniuses in that field, only paper pushers. Even if they somehow stumbled on something important, they wouldn't have a clue it was.

Back to the main thread. Trump wrongfooted Spielberg just this past February by announcing the government would begin declassifyhing its UFO files, and several tranches have been released since May. Here's an example of what Wardex pesumably has:

The comments overwhelminmgly say it's a Chinese lantern and recommend doubters spend $20 and try several themselves. UFO clips are already part of the public imagination, and the public already expects somethiong at the Plan Nine from Outer Space level at best. If they want fantasy, Spielberg already knows how to give them fantasy, laid on thick. But this time, he's trying to leave fantasy behind, he thinks he's gonna make them ask the deep, deep questions.

Deep questions indeed. In fact, anticipating this, legacy media had already been furrowing its brow. I got an idea: I decided to try to get AI to help me cheat on a sophomore essay. I asked the oracle, "Can you write me a wishy-washy first paragraph of an essay that says there's no conflict between Christianity and UFOs?" It answered,

While the intersection of faith and the cosmos is often debated, many theologians and philosophers argue that there is no fundamental conflict between Christianity and the existence of UFOs. Instead of mutually exclusive worldviews, they suggest that the vastness of the universe and the potential for extraterrestrial life can actually enrich one's spiritual understanding of a divine creator.

If you are writing an essay on this topic and want to narrow down your focus, I can help you.

I could probably have answered, "No, I'm actually trying to get something published at Real Clear Politics, and I just want another 750 words of anodyne blather," and it would have given me what I needed, but RCP was already there this morning:

In Disclosure Day, the head of a far-flung conspiracy to control the narrative about extraterrestrials warns of a worldwide collapse of order if the truth is revealed. But a sympathetic character, a person of faith, also is fearful of disclosure: She makes the case that humans “will stop believing in God” if they’re presented with evidence of superior beings in space to compete with the superior beings evoked by religion. “People can’t handle both,” she warns.

. . . But religious leaders here in reality tend to sound much more chill about aliens. The Vatican has acknowledged the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe and affirmed its consistency with Catholic theology. Jewish rabbis have contemplated ETs and reached the same conclusion, as have Muslim scholars who see textual evidence that life could exist out in the vastness of space. Buddhists believe that their sacred traditions anticipate that life on earth is part of a much grander cosmic community.

A similar piece made it into The Wall Street Journal, Are You There God? It’s Me, Spielberg:

The only reason to think alien theology would look radically unlike ours is if we assume from the jump that human theology is nothing but the local fiction of a primate species, rather than a set of valid claims about the rules governing the universe. But that’s exactly the kind of open question we might hope aliens, if we met any, would help us resolve. They might shock us by professing total disbelief in the things of the spirit. But they might astound us still more by finding our ideas about creation consonant with, even similar to, their own.

All these pieces do is demonstrate how easily this sort of product can be produced by AI, far more quickly. I asked the AI oracle, "What does the Wall Street Journal pay for an op-ed picee?" It answered,

The Wall Street Journal typically pays between $200 and $500 for a published op-ed piece, though rates can vary based on the author's prominence, the topic, and the exact length of the essay.

However, writers primarily submit op-eds to major national outlets like the WSJ for the prestige, thought leadership, and exposure rather than the writer's fee.

But if AI can generate the same thing that op-ed writers think can bring them prestige and thought leadership, why is anyone bothering? And this is Spielberg's miscalculation, too. It really sounds like Spielberg somehow decided these were Weighty Questions For Our Time, and he maybe thought he was gonna cap off his career with something equivalent to War and Peace. Instead, he came up with the stuff sophomore essays are made of.

The public is actually ahead of this.

posted by test @ June 13, 2026   0 Comments