The Weekend of Foolish Attention

Bits and bytes of the week

RABBIT HOLE FACTS. Yup. I went down the deep research rabbit hole this past week. Here are a few choice nuggets to chew on.

Barack Obama deported 3 million undocumented immigrants in his two terms. Donald Trump has deported just over 200,000.

Less than six percent of all undocumented immigrants are unemployed and the 94% that are working contribute just under $100 billion dollars in taxes and Social Security contributions.

Chicago has spent nearly $400 million to accommodate the immigrants bussed here from Texas and Florida.

It takes up to four years to become a citizen of the US through normal procedures. If you have between $1,500 and $3,000 to drop when you cross, it takes less than two months.

AH, JUPITER! Last Saturday night, Gisela and I returned to the park to catch the orchestra play one of my favorite suites: Holst’s The Planets. It was a great time before the concert seeing so many of the people we worked with last summer. Lots of hugs and selfies taken. I was gifted bags of cheese cubes from the fabulous Tammy. We drank beer, sat on the lawn, and as the orchestra started in on Holst, I was taken away. Sitting in a huge public park, surrounded by skyscrapers and the sounds of Chicago, listening to a world class orchestra for free was a trip. Just a brief reminder of why I love this city so damn much.

Vegans are the single most despised activist group which is remarkable in the presence of anti-abortion groups, trans-activists in favor of dudes in drag beating the shit out of women in sports, and Flat Earthers.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL. For most of my life, from 1978 when the Ayatollah took American hostages and effectively handed Ronald Reagan the 1980 election, Iran has been the subversive Big Bad in the global videogame. The very concept of this theocratic, anti-Western regime getting nuclear capability has been a low-grade anxiety of every American president since. As it unfolds, it seems that the Israel attack was coordinated with Trump on board and was the first, most decisive acknowledgement that patience has run out.

Iran has funded Hamas and Hezbollah, both covert terrorist groups, to eradicate Israel from the map. Their rhetoric has made that clear. Religious extremist are the single most terrifying group this side of serial killers and the leadership in Iran are lockstep in that camp.

In a quick I just can’t have this conversation right now moment, an acquaintence tossed out the idea that somehow the attack was that of hegemony and colonial expansion against brown people in the Middle East.

“On the other hand, perhaps this is just a global example of accountability culture, right? Iran has been funding attacks and threatening Israel for decades. There are consequences to that behavior and it seems those consequences are being enacted.”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand the idea of accountability culture.”

She was wearing a pin on her shirt—Queers for Palestine. Ugh.

A GOP DREAM COME TRUE. The House passed a bill Thursday afternoon to cancel over $1 billion in funding for PBS and NPR, via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This funding was included in the 2025 fiscal year budget, but this action removes it.

The cuts would amount to about 6 percent of Chicago Public Media's budget, which the organization estimates to be about $3 million annually.

WBEZ has endured some of the worst top-down management in its history since 2015 and squandered so many opportunities ever since. This could be seen as a devastating blow to public media or it could be taken as an opportunity to reset and go back to its roots when huge bags of cash was not the agenda. The legendary public media giant, Torey Malatia, once told me “Remember, the operative word in ‘Public Radio’ is ‘Public.’”

My guess is that if the station can survive this when Trump leaves and someone new comes in to clean up his many messes, WBEZ will be granted a boon but I hope they take the moment and remember the public part.

WHEN SEEING IS NO LONGER BELIEVING. On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast a radio dramatization of H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds on CBS Radio. The program was presented in the style of a news bulletin, which led many listeners to believe that Martians were actually invading Earth, specifically Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. While most of the reaction has been exaggerated—less mass hysteria and more pockets of confusion—it was a great prank that put into question how reliable real news coverage was on the rapidly popular platform of radio.

I’ve met at least one person who genuinely believes that the U.S. never landed on the moon and, instead, hired Stanley Kubrick to film it but, for the most part, we believe what we see. The Civil Rights Movement and Anti-War protests of the 1960s was fueled by both images of the Vietnam conflict broadcast in living rooms and of black children being mauled by police dogs in the street. We saw it with our own eyes and the world changed because of it.

In 2020, a mass protest across the country spawned #BLM and Ibram X. Kendi all because we saw a 91/2 minute video of George Floyd murdered. Arguably, Donald Trump won the 2024 election in part due to a video we all saw of him being shot in the ear. We see, we believe, we react.

All of that is about to change and we need to find some sort of skepticism about what we see soon.

At the Google I/O 2025 event on May 20, Google announced the release of Veo 3, a new AI video generation model that makes 8-second videos. Within hours of its release, AI artists and filmmakers were showing off shockingly realistic videos. You may have even seen some of these videos in your social media feeds and not realized they were artificially generated.

To be blunt: We've never seen anything like Veo 3 before. It's impressive. It's scary. And it's only going to get better.

The short film "Influenders" is one of the most widely shared short films made with Veo 3. "Influenders" was created by Yonatan Dor, the founder of the AI visual studio The Dor Brothers. In the movie, a series of influencers react as an unexplained cataclysm occurs in the background. The video has hundreds of thousands of views across various platforms.

"Yes, we used Google Veo 3 exclusively for this video, but to make a piece like this really come to life we needed to do further sound design, clever editing and some upscaling at the end," Dor said in an email to Mashable. "The full piece took around 2 days to complete." Dor added, "Veo 3 is a massive step forward, it’s easily the most advanced tool available publicly right now. We're especially impressed by its dialogue and prompt adherence capabilities."

Here’s the Venn Diagram to be alarmed by: an entire generation (or two) who live sixty percent of their daily lives online and make their money by things they put up on social media intersecting with the rise in real life pranking and the general gullibility of Americans as seen by both Russia and China influencing our Facebook feeds. Now add the by any means necessary kind of activism on both sides of the ideological cess pool and we are entering a place where only the things we can see in real time, right in front of our faces, are reliable.

To put it in right now, goddamnit terms, Donald Trump sent in the National Guard to LA based upon images and videos of protesters burning cars and throwing rocks. If you only saw it online, how do you know it wasn’t generated by AI software?

If you catch a video of me with a tinfoil hat and a sign that says “The End is Near",” gimme a call because, really, who knows?

THE FEATURE OF DEMOCRACY. With the SCOTUS deciding that Tennessee can regulate the medical gender transitioning of minors, we enter the part of democracy where we disagree with each other and work to persuade, convince, and find compromise.

In the past few years, like the rapid advances in technology and almost pathological need for immediate gratification, the transgender movement has pushed on the one hand a perfectly reasonable call for more inclusion and on the other a radical culture change most Americans are just not ready to embrace. Turns out that screaming and insisting on unreliable science isn’t a great way to win hearts and minds.

THEY/THEM: “Oh my god. The rise of anti-trans legislation is exploding!”

What’d you expect? That an entire nation built on the idea that each of us is a fully reliable autonomous individual could legitimately be bullied into going along with a pretty broad swerve culturally in a few years when every other sea change in this country traditionally takes decades?

This is not a bug of democracy, this is the fundamental feature. Immediate change only comes at the hands of authoritarians. And authoritarianism can come from Mao or Stalin.

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Yup. It’s summer, gang. It’s gonna get a tad warm this next week so hydrate and try to take it easy. Sure, it seems like we’re on the brink of WWIII so remember to hide under a desk because that’s what we GENXers learned to do if a nuclear attack comes.