The Weekly Weird #27

Nigel Farage's milkshake model, yo' mama spreads fake news, children of 'a dying empire', AI is full of Schmidt/Commies on the Moon, Nepal's digital ID

Welcome back to your weekly fun-filled fast-track through the foggy forest of facts, faux facts, FUD¹, and techno-Fabianism!²

A special hello to our new followers and subscribers - thanks for climbing on board, we won’t let you down.

What a week it’s been! The verdict that launched a thousand think-pieces, the end of an era in India, the damp squib of a British general election…where to begin?

Well, obviously by crying (with laughter) over spilt milk…

Nigel Farage’s Milkshake Model

For the uninitiated or indifferent, Nigel Farage is a British commodities trader-turned-politician with a track record that leads journalists to refer to him as a ‘polarising figure’, a ‘populist’, and, perhaps most uncharitably, ‘the man who broke Britain.’

In the eyes of the commentariat, his sins include campaigning for Brexit, and insulting (one of) the EU President(s) to his face. He’s been accused of being a racist, fascist, misogynist, alcoholic, and, generally, an asshole.

Exhibit A:

A choice headline/sub-header combo from the Big Issue, regarding his appearance on the ITV ‘reality’ show I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here:

“No amount of kangaroo anuses or camel penises can make up for the damage Nigel Farage has inflicted on Britain.”

Here’s a photo of the man himself, snapped just as he spotted a woman’s nipple during a press conference³:

His cardinal sin, of course, has been to succeed in his aims (and to be smug about it) while remaining popular enough to stay relevant culturally, through his presenting on the much-maligned GB News and his show on LBC, Britain’s largest untapped source of renewable wind that sometimes masquerades as a talk radio station.

Throughout, he has been at least outwardly chirpy in the face of insults and attacks, usually putting it down to the cost of being in politics. As they say, if you want to dish it out, you have to be able to take it too.

His most recent ascent to the top of the news cycle has been because in the short space of a few days, he became the leader of the Reform Party, said categorically that he wouldn’t run for Parliament in the general election recently called by Prime Minister Sunak for July 4, and then almost immediately announced that in fact he would run.⁴

His campaign, as Yahoo News put it, “got off to a sticky start Tuesday when someone chucked a milkshake in his face.”

The video, from multiple angles, with slow-motion:

The Daily Mail, exhibiting a flair for headline-scripting that is increasingly the main divider between tabloids and ‘broadsheets’, titled their video Nigel Farage is splattered with milkshake in Clacton.

ITV News managed to bag a moment with a subdued and circumspect Farage after the incident, in which he referred to it as ‘scary’ and seemed ever-so-slightly haunted by the prospect that it could have been something gross or dangerous (like poop or acid) rather than a mere banana milkshake.

His riposte on X, uploaded later on that day, was a typical (for him) seizure of the opportunity to at least pretend that he has a thick skin and a sanguine nature about being abused by the public, both qualities (ersatz or actual) admittedly well-suited to a politician.

Unlike the milkshake, the plot thickened when it came out that the woman who had ‘milkshaked’ him is Victoria Thomas-Bowen, 25, an OnlyFans ‘creator’ who likes the colour red, aesthetically and politically.

Her ‘Brexit-voting brother Paul’ was quick to distance himself, telling the Mail: 'I have just seen it, and to be honest, I'm appalled. I don't know where she is. I don't want anything to do with her.'

Ms Thomas-Bowen has since been arrested, presumably for ABH (Aerial Banana Hurling). Contributions to her legal defence can probably be made on her Only Fans page.

As an enterprising independent businesswoman, she has been using the notoriety she’s gained from her supposedly political act to drive traffic to her adult content by posting panty-pics featuring lyrics from Kelis’s song Milkshake.

In an unintentionally perfect encapsulation of the state of modern politics, economics, and journalism, the Mail explained Ms Thomas-Bowen’s ‘motivation.’

Thomas-Bowen, who films her x-rated video clips in the spare bedroom of her mother's £260,000 house in Grays, told the BBC she flung the banana milkshake because she 'just felt like it'.

'He doesn't stand for me', the self-described 'petite blonde pocket rocket' added. 'He doesn't represent anything I believe in, or any of the people around here. He doesn't represent us, he's not from here.'

Mention of porn? Still living with parents at the age of 25? Needless inclusion of house price? Quoting the subject in a way that adds nothing to the story but includes sexual search terms in the article for clicks? Vacuous nihilistic pseudo-political position stated in throwaway off-the-shelf language? Tick tick tickety-tick.

Also, disliking Nigel Farage because “he’s not from here” has to be peak irony. What’s next, dismissing him because he doesn’t share her values and the way of life he stands for is incompatible with hers?

Farage has form when it comes to getting milkshaked, having been previously drenched with dairy in 2019.

(Caption competition activated! Shoot your shot in the comments.)

As per Yahoo News:

Farage was campaigning for the [Brexit] party in Newcastle in 2019 when he had a milkshake thrown at him—a Five Guys banana and salted caramel milkshake, to be precise.

The attack was so predictable at the time that police in Scotland had even asked a McDonald’s near to where one of his rallies took place to stop serving milkshakes.

Despite the many controversies and thrown foodstuffs that follow him around like an oily fart in a narrow corridor, Nigel Farage has played an important role in British culture. Without him, what quite possibly could be the greatest piece of political satire ever produced in the English language might never have been created.

NB: NSFW, contains saucy ribald humour, sexual references, one rather gross photo, satirical xenophobia, and the ‘c’ word, but funny as anything. Watch right to the end.

Nigel, you keep on keepin’ on, no matter what life (or a voter) throws at you.

Yo’ Mama Spreads Fake News

Ars Technica published an article this week detailing a study that examined the spread of ‘misinformation’ online and came to a surprising conclusion (emphasis mine):

[The study] identifies a small group of misinformation superspreaders, which represent just 0.3 percent of the accounts but are responsible for sharing 80 percent of the links to fake news sites.

While you might expect these to be young, Internet-savvy individuals who automate their sharing, it turns out this population tends to be older, female, and very, very prone to clicking the "retweet" button.

The study uncovered some interesting statistics related to how and why so-called fake news gets shared:

On an average day on Twitter at the time, only 7 percent of the news stories shared linked to sites prone to publishing misinformation. Supersharers ended up accounting for most of these for two reasons. One is that they shared more news links than anyone else, an average of 16 a day compared to less than one for the random sampling (the heavy news sharers were in between the two, at five news links a day).

But they were also more heavily invested in fake news sources, which accounted for 18 percent of their links. That's in contrast to 2 percent for heavy news sharers and 3 percent for the random sampling. So, the superspreaders reached their position through a combination of volume and lack of discrimination.

It probably won’t come as a shock that stories aimed at engaging or enraging rather than informing get more of a response from the denizens of social media:

They found that over 5 percent of the total accounts were following at least one superspreader. And the tweets of superspreaders received more replies, retweets, and likes than tweets from the rest of the population did. And the researchers estimate that the superspreaders account for roughly a quarter of the links to misinformation sites that their typical followers were exposed to. For over 10 percent of their followers, they were the only source of fake news.

With Arizona, Florida, and Texas landing high on the list of places with a concentration of these ‘superspreaders’, Ars Technica elaborate on the demographics:

While both the comparison groups were roughly evenly split between male and female, the superspreaders were 60 percent female. They're also older, on average 58 years old, nearly 20 years older than the sample as a whole. And, while much of the misinformation about the election largely circulated within Republican circles, only 64 percent of the superspreaders were registered Republicans (nearly 20 percent were registered as Democrats).

While the article itself seems to be coming from a ‘let’s do something about all this misinformation’ angle not necessarily endorsed by yours truly, the study’s findings, based as they are on a large sample size cross-referenced against voter data, make for a fascinating insight into how news (of whatever quality) travels online.

Children Of ‘A Dying Empire’

From a study to a poll and from mothers to children now: Semafor are covering a poll that shows a pretty serious lack of enthusiasm among young voters for something called ‘America’.

Young voters overwhelmingly believe that almost all politicians are corrupt and that the country will end up worse off than when they were born, according to new polling from Democratic firm Blueprint obtained exclusively by Semafor.

[…]

“I think these statements blow me away, the scale of these numbers with young voters,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.”

How bad are the numbers?

As part of the online poll of 943 18-30-year-old registered voters, Blueprint asked participants to respond to a series of questions about the American political system: 49% agreed to some extent that elections in the country don’t represent people like them; 51% agreed to some extent that the political system in the US “doesn’t work for people like me;” and 64% backed the statement that “America is in decline.” A whopping 65% agreed either strongly or somewhat that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power” — only 7% disagreed.

All this bodes ill for the upcoming US election, which is said to hinge on the young, the disaffected, the undecided, and the politically homeless. Are young voters being needlessly negative, or are they waking up to the earthy aroma of kakistocracy?

AI Is Full Of Schmidt/Commies On The Moon

Former Google CEO and “Bilderberg insider” Eric Schmidt⁵ sat down with Noema Magazine recently to have a chat about AI.

Schmidt lists the three big deals in AI today, the functions that will be game-changers within the next five years:

(a) an infinite context window, (b) chain of thought reasoning in agents and then (c) the text-to-action capacity for programming. 

One of the big takeaways from the interview was that Schmidt thinks text-to-action AI is better than humans because it will do what it’s told and work round the clock:

You might say to AI, “Write me a piece of software to do X” and it does. You just say it and it transpires. Can you imagine having programmers that actually do what you say you want? And they do it 24 hours a day?

Oh Sweet Mother of Mercy, to contemplate a frictionless journey from one person’s singular vision to their desired outcome without any intervening stages of discussion, development, improvement, thought, or input from others. Once AI is at full strength, why would we even need people, other than the super-wealthy and the politically connected? Everyone else can just be jettisoned into space and sent to colonise an inhospitable planet where the obvious governmental system would have to be inflexible and tyrannical just to ensure survival. Or is it just me with such dark imaginings of the not-too-distant future?

So what happens in a world where AI has capabilities that make it autonomous and super-intelligent?

What happens then poses a lot of issues. Here we get into the questions raised by science fiction. What I’ve described is what is happening already. But at some point, these systems will get powerful enough that the agents will start to work together. So your agent, my agent, her agent and his agent will all combine to solve a new problem. 

Some believe that these agents will develop their own language to communicate with each other. And that’s the point when we won’t understand what the models are doing. What should we do? Pull the plug? Literally unplug the computer?

Unthinkable, right? We’ve survived and thrived as a species for thousands of years, before electricity, before computing, before satellite technology, and yet the prospect of curbing or halting a clearly troublesome and accelerating movement towards an almost-certainly undesirable outcome by simply not doing it and being fine with what we’ve already got is yada yada’d as some outlandish concept.

Schmidt goes on to explain that Western companies, which he says are mostly well-behaved and wary of litigation in their deploying of disruptive technology, aren’t the problem for the future. Instead, the problem is putting guardrails in place that will constrain the actions of less diligent and socially responsible companies and governments from around the globe. When pressed by the interviewer on why he distinguishes Western companies as special, he gives an interesting example:

Well, one of the things that we know, and it’s always useful to remind the techno-optimists in my world, is that there are evil people. And they will use your tools to hurt people. 

The example that epitomizes this is facial recognition. It was not invented to constrain the Uyghurs. You know, the creators of it didn’t say we’re going to invent face recognition in order to constrain a minority population in China, but it’s happening. 

Why is there such a risk that malefactors will gain access to and do bad things with AI? Prepare to be shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

In open-source and open-weights models the source code and the weights in models [the numbers used to determine the strength of different connections] are released to the public. Those immediately go throughout the world, and who do they go to? They go to China, of course, they go to Russia, they go to Iran. They go to Belarus and North Korea. 

When I was most recently in China, essentially all of the work I saw started with open-source models from the West and was then amplified. 

Who would have thought that a Big Tech guy would have a beef with open source?

Schmidt sums up the stark reality of the (within five years) future later on:

The long-term threat goes something like this: AI starts with a human judgment. Then there is something technically called “recursive self-improvement,” where the model actually runs on its own through chain of thought reasoning. It just learns and gets smarter and smarter. When that occurs, or when agent-to-agent interaction takes place, we have a very different set of threats, which we’re not ready to talk to anybody about because we don’t understand them. But they’re coming.

And how about China?

My estimate, having now reviewed the scene there at some length, is that they’re about two years behind the U.S.

Good times.

Meanwhile, news broke this week that Schmidt has donated $48 million to CERN, the home of the Large Hadron Collider, to fund AI data analysis tools. His donation, and others like it, have been solicited by the Swiss research centre in response to China’s declaration that it will build the world’s largest particle accelerator within the decade.

From Semafor:

“If China were to start their project before CERN, there is a risk of Europe and the US also losing the leadership in high-energy particle physics, and also in the technology development that goes with it,” said Charlotte Warakaulle, CERN’s director of international relations.

Maybe China will locate their Circular Electron Positron Collider on the dark side of the moon, where they landed an unmanned spacecraft this week.

Why not? Things can’t get any weirder on Earth…

Nepal’s Digital ID

Finally, things got a little darker for the good people of Nepal this week, with progress being announced in their sweeping digitisation programme.

As per Biometric Update:

Nepal’s transition to a digital identity system is a dramatic shift from traditional paper-based citizenship certificates to biometric smart national identification cards. Which integrates a photograph, personal information, and fingerprint biometrics. The collecting of biometric data for over 14 million citizens, which accounts for more than 90 percent of the eligible population, is a significant milestone in this journey. The government has already printed 3 million biometric ID cards, distributing 1.8 million to district offices and 350,000 to citizens.

As is to be expected, there are serious issues of privacy and data security that have not been properly dealt with:

Some digital security professionals and lawmakers have raised concerns about data privacy and safety, revealing problems related to storage access and handling sensitive personal information. Comparisons of data breaches with other countries like the breach of confidential information from India’s Aadhaar system as an example underscore the need for strong controls on security measures to avoid similar occurrences. Despite these hurdles, the government of Nepal is optimistic about the outcome of the project. Plans include scaling up distribution of digital ID cards countrywide and establishing a common biometric database which is expected to augment efficiency in service provision.

So, despite the hurdles of data leaks and inadequate privacy legislation, Nepal’s government is “optimistic” because their solution is to scale up the issuance of digital ID cards and build “a common biometric database”?

Well, that sounds watertight.

That’s it for this week, fellow Weirders. Thanks as always for reading. Hit me up in the comments with your thoughts, feelings, ravings, responses etc.

Outro music is this awesome ‘bardcore’ version of Kelis’s Milkshake by Beedle the Bardcore, in a nod to Nigel Farage’s preference for things as he thinks they used to be.

1. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

2. Fun fact: Thesaurus.com provides no synonym for fascism. Not one. They have a few for socialism, and plenty for most other words. But fascism? No sir. No soup for you. That’s why I settled for Fabianism as a stand-in for a fascism-flavoured word beginning with ‘f’. Yes, I know it’s different, and refers to the concept of spreading socialism through peaceful means. But what’s a little creative-license lexicology between friends?

3. Kidding. That’s just his face.

4. Making this the eighth time he has campaigned for Parliament (after seven failed attempts).

5. Of “privacy is dead” and “globalisation is wonderful” fame.