Feds Threaten to ARREST Citizens Helping NC Victims, Facebook's "Smart Glasses" Are a Stalker's Dream, ESPN Promoting Schizophrenia? (The Five for 10/04/24)
Plus, 94-year-old director's final (probably?) movie looks great. 00's Americana band reuintes, sells out 2x stadium shows. U2 is good again--with old songs.
Hey, welcome to The Five.
It’s Friday, so let’s dive into Culture & Commentary.
[one]
Well, the money for rescue and relief in Appalachia has run out, due to the government overspent on migrants, with 29% of the budget going to non-citizens.
But hey, Americans can still help Americans…everyday heroes, amiright?
Nope. Not without being incarcerated.
A South Carolina pilot who flew stranded Hurricane Helene victims in flood-ravaged North Carolina to safety claims he was told he would be arrested if he continued the rescue missions.
Jordan Seidhom was flying victims out of the devastation over the weekend when local leaders told him there was a flight restriction on the area and that they would have to arrest him if he continued making flights.
“There were other victims. As we were flying out leaving the area, we spotted within 300, 400 yards of their location [people] were waving for help as my son and I were leaving,” Seidhom told Queen City News.
After the storm wreaked havoc on the region, leaving hundreds of people stranded as entire roadways washed away, Seidhom read about a family that was stranded without water on a mountain in Banner Elk, a ski town heavily battered by the storm, and knew he had to take action.
“I thought, I have a helicopter, maybe I can help,” he told the outlet.
Seidhom, who once led the Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office narcotics unit, and his teenage son Landon flew out bottled water and food to the family on Saturday and decided they would set out to find other people in need of help.
Pete Buttigeg, aka the guy that pretty much abandoned East Palestine, OH during the train derailment, took four months off from work during the supply chain crisis, has a clear message for Americans. NO. HELPING. Just let the Appalachians die, apparently.
Our goal is to make sure that funding is no obstacle to very quickly getting people the relief that they need and deserve. There's also some safety issues that come up, for example, temporary flight restrictions to make sure that the airspace is clear for any flights or drone activity that that might be involved in helping to allow those emergency responders to do their job.
Lest things get to be too partisan in Nature, Lindsay Graham made sure the Republican party had moron representation on this issue.
“I’ve been going all over South Carolina, like most people I haven’t slept much. But look what’s going on in Israel. We have to help our friends to keep the war over there from coming here.”
I try to avoid hyperbole at all costs…so please know, I mean what I say here. For the first time in my life, I see concrete evidence that Political Elites want everyday Americans to die.
The rich and powerful have a VERY long history of hatred for this region. During the American Revolution, the people of Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee, almost the exact same region destroyed by flooding, were promised statehood if they would join the war. The 14th state would be called Franklin, in honor of Benjamin Franklin.
The people fought, bled and died…and Franklin never came to be.
So, while the hatred in 2024 for this region is abhorrent…it’s nothing new.
[two]
Facebook released a new set of “smart glasses” with Ray Ban, and the results are terrifying. The glasses can find ANYONE recorded on them, including their name and home address.
Two Harvard students used facial recognition tech and a large language model to unearth a subject's name, occupation and other details. Their setup (dubbed I-XRAY) can use that information to pull together other data about the person including their address, phone number, family member details and partial Social Security Numbers from a variety of sources on the web. All of this is said to happen automatically.
While this would be possible with a variety of cameras, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio opted to use Meta's smart glasses since "they look almost indistinguishable from regular glasses" and have a camera built in. A demo video shows the students using the glasses to swiftly find out information about people they meet in public. Nguyen and Ardayfio address people who appear to be strangers by name, discuss their work and bring up a place where they may have met in the past, based on information gleaned through the facial recognition setup.
I’m almost never the “we should make this illegal” guy…but we should make this illegal.
Sexual assault, stalking and doxing will skyrocket if this is allowed to happen.
[three]
ESPN owned website Andscape (previously The Undefeated) ran one heck of a piece of “journalism” this week, in which a writer attended an Indiana Fever game with Caitlin Clark and…well, let’s just get into it.
Then I noticed a woman standing up and dancing to the music two sections over. Her shirt said, “Ban nails” and she was wearing cartoonishly long fake acrylic nails made out of paper on her hands. It was clear that she was mocking Carrington. There were several “Make America Great Again” hats, including a man wearing a “Trump 2024” hat and holding a sign that said, “Make Basketball Great Again #22.”
Every time the Fever scored, the crowd would erupt, but it didn’t feel like fans were rooting for their team. It felt like a threat. There was an ominous feeling in the building.
But it hasn’t always been this way. “Most games feel like a mini Pride party,” Kate, a Sun season ticket holder who requested we only use her first name, posted a TikTok video about her experience at the game, told Andscape. “Last night felt like a MAGA rally in Connecticut. It felt rabid.”
This was something that fans say was specific to the Fever’s audience. “We went to see a game [earlier this season] when the Sky came to town and though there were a lot of Sky fans, the mood was different,” Prescod-Weinstein said. “A lot of them were Black women. No MAGA hats. This time it was a lot of older white people who seemed to be there to hate on our players rather than to just be fans.”
My partner and I are both queer and trans. The WNBA has always felt like a league for us. In 2023, more than 60% of the players were African American, and over a quarter of them are openly queer. This season, there was at least one trans nonbinary person in the league. The fandom has always felt like it reflected the demographics of the league. This has resulted in an environment that felt safe for both the players on the court and the people in the stands.
A few observations here:
A) How exactly, can one tell that a crowd is cheering “like a threat” after a player made a basket?
B). Concerning when the WNBA felt like a “mini PRIDE party” and a “league for us.” Maybe. But that league didn’t draw many fans. Caitlin Clark single handedly changed women’s sports in tangible ways, including tripling the Fever’s viewership and brought more than $100 million in economic activity to the city of Indianapolis.
C). Could “ban nails” be racist? Could be…but probably not. I would categorize Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comment about fake eyelashes as openly racist. But fingernails are weapons in sports. In high school sports, my nails were actually spot-checked at random, along with my teammates…making sure we hadn’t filed them into points to scratch the other players.
The WNBA absolutely SHOULD ban long and fake nails…particularly after Dijoni Carrington likely aimed her nails directly into Caitlin Clark’s left eye.
In summary…a writer went to a well-attended basketball game. Nothing happened, except for people cheering. And the writer “felt threatened.”
It’s not my job to diagnose this writer, and I’m not a licensed mental health professional, but here’s what the DSM-5 has to say about Schizophrenic people believing nefarious forces (which can include basketball fans?!) are plotting against them:
"Persecutory delusions occur when a person believes they are being conspired against, spied on, followed, poisoned, harassed, or obstructed in the pursuit of their goals."
And the former “leader in sports” thought this was a good piece to run.
[four]
Former Project Veritas lead James O’Keef exposed an MSNBC producer, who revealed that the cable network is…quite literally…an extension of the Kamala Harris campaign:
During an undercover date with an OMG journalist, Basel Hamdan (@BaselYHamdan), a writer and producer for MSNBC’s show “Ayman,” (@AymanMSNBC) was asked what the network has done to assist the Kamala Harris campaign.
Hamdan revealed on hidden camera that “what her [Harris’s] message of the day is, is their message of the day,” as MSNBC actively pushes Harris’s narrative to help her win. He admitted that MSNBC is doing “all they can to help,” Harris get elected, with the network operating as an extension of the campaign. He went on to say, "MSNBC is indistinguishable from the party," further highlighting their partisan agenda.
In discussing the relationships between the MSNBC hosts and Democratic politicians, Hamdan reveals, ”The anchor and the politician are just in total agreement about everything.” He adds, “If you watch an interview with a Democratic politician, they just finish each other's sentences.” Hamdan also didn’t shy away from criticizing the network’s audience, stating, “They’ve made their viewers dumber over the years,” and explaining that MSNBC is “too cozy with Democratic politicians.”
It’s obvious for anyone who’s watched for 5 minutes that MSNBC leans hard left (just as Fox News leans right), but collaboration between a major news outlet and a POTUS campaign is a whole new level of messed up…
[five]
As always, let's head into the weekend with a pop culture roundup…
Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter ran one of the most acclaimed shows of all time, but was fired from the sequel series Mayans MC for “confusing leadership” and being “frequently absent” from the set. a
Sutter was trying to redeem himself with The Abandons, an upcoming Netflix western series starring Lena Headey (Game of Thrones, 300), Gillian Anderson (The X-Files, The Crown) and Ryan Hurst (Sons of Anarchy, Remember the Titans).
Now, Sutter has been fired from the series after filming all but one episode in the first season, because he insisted the pilot be 1 hour 40 minutes long. Netflix disagreed strongly enough to can him…If you’ve got little ones, Paddington in Peru is probably something you’ll see whether you want to or not. (Trailer). This time, the British-y bear from South America goes on a quest to find El Dorado. Looks fun.
QVC, a network popular with your grandma and…nursing homes maybe? Is getting into live sports, starting with Pickleball.
Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven, Gran Torino) PROBABLY just turned in his last film, directing Juror #2, a courtroom drama starring Nicholas Hoult (X-Men First Class, Mad Max: Fury Road), Kiefer Sutherland (24, Young Guns) and J.K. Simmons (Whiplash, Juno).
Eastwood is 94 years old…so the fact that he’s still sharp enough, physically and mentally, to do this is just incredible. In theaters 11/01.
Anthony Mackie (Avengers: Endgame, Falcon & Winter Soldier) and Morena Baccarin (Deadpool, Homeland) take on monsters and try to save the life of an 8-year-old boy in some kind of post-apocalyptic world. I’m down. Out 11/08.
Announcement fellow Elder Millennials…we’re now old enough to see our teen and twentysomething pop culture and fashion in “retro” movies. Time Cut is basically Back to the Future with a murder-mystery thrown in. Streaming 10/30.
[new music]
Alt-country pioneers Cross Canadian Ragweed (despite the name, they’re from Oklahoma) constantly circled the nation as a scrappy touring unit throughout the 90’s and aughts, bringing attention to the burgeoning “Red Dirt” music scene out of Oklahoma and Texas.
The band broke up in 2010, while other artists from the same ecosystem rose to much bigger heights, including Turnpike Troubadours, John Moreland and Zach Bryan.
Fourteen years after hanging it up, Cross Canadian Ragweed (which you can’t abbreviate, because “CCR” has been claimed since the 70’s), and playing a show next April with Turnpike. This is one of the strange cases where a band got MUCH bigger after blowing up…with younger and new fans finding them online.
Cross Canadian Ragweed and Turnpike Troubadours will co-headline a stadium show together in 2025. No word on new music or additional touring after that, but more than 120,000 people signed up for the ticket pre-sale, so a second show has been added.
From the mid-80’s to the early aughts, U2 had an impressive run as one of the biggest bands in the world. Now, they’re mostly a Gen-X afterthought with a loyal fanbase who will turn out for their live shows…but it’s been quite some time since the band has put out a culturally relevant album.
The good news is…U2 finally sound great again. The bad news is…that’s because they’re tapping into un-released songs from 2003, which doesn’t help the case that they’re much more than a greatest hits touring machine in 2024.
For the 20th anniversary of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, the Irish quartet’s album that heavily dealt with the death of vocalist Bono’s father, the band is re-releasing the original project, along with a bonus album of b-sides.
The first two pre-release tracks (now two decades old) are absolutely worth a spin…and much better than the new stuff, more evidence U2’s best days are fading into the rearview. The full project drops 11/22.
[read]
With the Israel and Hezobollah in conflict, and Iran entering a war with Israel as well, there’s never been a better time to read thriller-writer Jack Carr’s first nonfiction book, Targeted: Beirut. Known for the Terminal List books and TV show (on Amazon Prime), Carr dives deep into the origins of Hezbollah, and the attack in 1984 that left more than 200 Americans dead. It’s a thrilling, if grim, read…that sheds a lot of light on current day events.
Until the next one,
-sth