The Petaluma Historian has posted a fascinating look at the face of cycling a century ago.
On July 4, 1896, Petaluma found itself anointed the new “bicycling Mecca” of the West Coast, as a reported 6,000 people turned out at the city’s new Wheelman Park for the annual divisional meet of the League of American Wheelmen.
Among the 18 Northern California teams competing were two comprised entirely of women—San Francisco’s Alpha Cycling Club and Petaluma’s own “women of the wheel,” the Mercury Cyclists.
The story has many amusing turns and quotes. This one might be my favorite.
As the Mercury Cyclists and other wheelwomen took to their steel steeds, they ran into some cultural speed bumps from conservative Victorians, who wanted to know where they were riding to.
When the question was put to women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton by American Wheelman magazine, she succinctly replied: “To suffrage.”
I’ve mentioned before that Russian leadership operates by removing people of any competence, favoring instead those who fight dirty yet pose no challenge. That’s a simplification of dictatorships, but it helps highlight an essential element to faulty power projection.
Ukraine has been demonstrating the problem. Because Russia has been selecting people who are unable to pose a challenge to Russia… it seems they are having a high rate of failure when actually challenged to fight in the Ukraine, especially given they claim it is Russian.
Reuters has the following buried lede within a detailed look at the weapons being used.
…Russia so far has little to show for its advance… Russian forces are becoming increasingly frustrated… Photos from Ukraine have shown abandoned Russian vehicles, including tanks, raising questions about logistical failures alongside Ukranian attacks. “They simply don’t have a lot of experience moving on another nation state at this level of complexity and size,” a senior U.S. defence official said of the Russian army. The official said it was unclear whether it was a failure in planning or execution, but added that Russian forces were likely to adapt and change the way they operate.
Russian convoy of military vehicles destroyed in the open while allegedly attacking civilians in Ukraine. Source: Reuters
It’s the last part again that I find puzzling. Adapt and change? The U.S. official is likely projecting, expecting logic to be a viable trait in dictatorships (it’s not).
…every day it goes on there’s a cost and the risk goes up. And they’re not doing [maximum use of force] and it just is really hard to explain for any realistic reason.”
At some point people looking in from the outside might stop trying to make sense of Russian incompetence and just call it what it is.
Russia has been showing a failure to adapt and change; revealing an inability to become more proficient to overcome challenges. A belief in easy wins through terror tactics and dirty tricks isn’t doing them any favors against a viable opponent.
Russian combined-arms doctrine has generally advised against making cities primary objectives. The belief has been that if the enemy’s main force in the field is destroyed, then his cities will surrender.
What evidence do we have that Russia is likely to improve or change doctrine easily? Who would they copy or steal from to get a new idea? They are following a recipe for disaster.
“These cities are going to get overrun, and it’s going to be a long, long haul for the Russians,” Mann continued. “If they think because they occupy these cities, that they’re done – if you look at the fighting spirit of the Ukrainian people – they are in for a nasty guerrilla warfare campaign that is going to bleed them dry.”
Instead I think the major risk is the opposite of improvement, which is to say Russian leaders will devolve and become worse through seeking easier targets, even straw-men and ghosts, who resist them less.
Tetyana Vlasenko was bleeding from 12 bullet wounds to her legs when she begged a Russian military officer nearby for help. His soldiers had opened fire on her family’s car, yet the officer was apologetic as the soldiers gave them first aid.
While she lay there seriously hurt, she recalls him saying, “I’m sorry for doing this but we have an order to shoot everything that is moving, and you cannot imagine how many cars like this we have full of Nazis who are trying to bomb us,” Tetyana, 42, told NBC News on Wednesday from her bed in Kyiv City Hospital 17.
Nautilus might be trying to scare people with the FUD in an article called “Deepfake… Should Scare Us”
The most recent study, by psychologist Sophie Nightingale of Lancaster University and computer scientist Hany Farid of the University of California, Berkeley, focused on deepfake images.1 In one online experiment, they asked 315 people to classify images of faces, balanced for gender and race, as real or fake. Shockingly, overall average accuracy was near chance at 48 percent, although individuals’ accuracy varied considerably, from a low of around 25 percent to a high of around 80 percent.
In a follow-up experiment, 219 different people did the same task but first learned about features to look for that can suggest an image is a deepfake, including earrings that don’t quite match, differently shaped ears, or absurdly thin glasses. People also received corrective feedback after submitting each answer. “The training did help, but it didn’t do a lot,” Nightingale told me. “They still weren’t performing much better than chance.” Average accuracy increased to only 59 percent.
My guess is the training to detect fakes wasn’t very good.
That’s an equally valid conclusion, which I don’t see mentioned here. What if training could be introduced that helped more?
To put it another way, does a test and education program about fakes include thinking about people who are blind and don’t trust any visuals? There’s an important clue in the article about why testing vision alone may be a poorly-contrived exercise:
Part of the reason it remains so difficult to make a believably realistic recreation of young Luke is because he has to emote and speak. Even in The Book of Boba Fett, producers clearly recognized the limits of their illusion, frequently cutting away from Luke’s face whenever he had extended dialogue.
So what are they training people on exactly, and why use such a narrow band, when a simple second factor would increase detection rates significantly?
Here’s another clue in the article, which reveals how “risk” analysis can end up exactly backwards:
We’re such expert face detectors that we can’t help but see faces everywhere: in rock formations on Mars, in the headlights and grilles of cars, and in misshapen vegetables.
Nobody seeing faces in misshapen vegetables gets an award for being an expert face detector. That’s a massive contradiction to the entire premise anyone should be scared by the fact that fake faces can look like real ones.
This all goes back to the main point I often try to make, which is society tends to very much like and enjoy fakes until it doesn’t. That has to be kept in mind.
Does going into a theater make it more acceptable to watch people fake other people (acting), as a form of containment, than if they do it on the street or in our homes? Every Halloween I welcome many (admittedly marginal quality) deep fakes into my environment and nobody seems worse for it.
When a person walking up to you says “I’m your father” there are a million data points in your mind evaluating that statement. When someone says “I’m celebrity X depicting fake character Y” there are significantly fewer points to evaluate. And if a researcher asks “Is this picture a real person” there are even fewer points.
Scary? At the end of the day social engineering is a problem yet hardly a new topic, so I often wonder why deep fakes are so exciting to people now instead of many years ago or even decades.
More than 20 years back I had to slide into environments, engineering my way to walk out with someone’s internal hard drive in my hands (setting an exact replica inside their computer instead) without anyone at a facility noticing.
Layers of presenting fake information are a professional exercise across many industries, probably not unlike the kind of medical operations we have come to accept as normal and beneficial (e.g. organ transplants to save a life, plastic surgery to repair burns).
Instead of being scared by the premise of challenging areas of weak trust scaffolding (e.g. looking at someone’s face to determine something), people need to think more broadly about what is really at stake in a society that is scared by fakes.
The “Deadliest Ground of the Civil War” officially was recorded as a concentration camp run by Confederate soldiers where they systematically tortured and killed American Prisoners of War (POW).
Three days after the camp was opened with the first 400 POW, already one died. Six months later it was 3X more populated than its alleged initial design, cruelly concentrating over 45,000 people into death-camp conditions without proper shelter, food or sanitation.
Soon after, over 10,000 Americans were dead.
Andersonville was very intentionally an act of war crimes. It was ordered and used by the Confederate President to maximize suffering, consistent with the overt and formally stated white police state articles (Confederacy) of preserving and expanding slavery through violent means.
Source: Andersonville National Historic Site, NPS.gov
Despite best efforts of Confederate-apologist historians to destroy or hide the truth — take unfair advantage of peace-time “healing” to denigrate American heroes and peddle propaganda about America’s enemies — the fairly well-documented Andersonville crimes should still stand out.
Purposeful concentration camps for the torture and murder of captured American soldiers were without question direct response to the emancipation of Black people; initiated under Confederate President Davis who terminated all prisoner exchanges.
…in September of 1862, President Lincoln called for the enlistment of black soldiers into the Union Armies as part of the preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. In December 1862, President Davis responded by issuing a proclamation that neither captured black soldiers nor their white officers would be subject to exchange.
More to the point, a Civil War started to preserve and expand slavery meant a prisoner exchange was unable to overcome fundamental belief in the South that they stood for murdering any Black person at any time (or anyone defending a Black person) without consequences.
Prisoner terms of freedom violated the very principle of the white prison states, which formed into a Confederacy to forever deny freedom to millions of its existing Black population held as prisoners in labor camps (plantations).
The South overtly refused to exchange or free any Black person captured because they did not consider Black people human. Many ruthless and immoral men in leadership positions of the South, such as the barbaric traitor General Lee, even allowed the outright execution of POW and civilians.
General Chalmers (Mississippi cavalry who later became known for using violent voter suppression to win a seat in Federal government) reportedly bragged about this event in words similar to General Lee that a butchering at Fort Pillow was intentional and to teach “the mongrel garrison” a lesson. Harper’s Weekly described the situation in their 1864 news report as murdering women, children and then mutilating the dead.
The term mongrel was meant to suggest that any Blacks captured as soldiers meant the Confederate General believed he would be justified in murdering all POW in their company, regardless of race, as a terror tactic.
Terror tactics indeed left an impression. The Andersonville concentration camp became news soon after the Confederacy lost the Civil War (which might sound familiar to anyone reading WWII narratives about Nazi death camps) and Americans promised to not forget.
Source: Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries.
It seems there was sufficient widespread outrage, quick documentation and public reaction to cement the facts about its atrocities in an attempt to hold someone responsible.
Following the Confederate surrender in April 1865, Clara Barton, later founder of the American Red Cross, and Dorence Atwater, a former prisoner assigned as a parolee to keep burial records for prison officials, visited the cemetery at Andersonville to identify and mark the graves of the Union dead. During the war Atwater had labeled the soldiers by name and number after their deaths. Through Barton and Atwater’s efforts, the cemetery was dedicated as Andersonville National Cemetery in August 1865.
Among the various men tried and executed for heinous crimes committed during Civil War, Captain Hartmann Heinrich Wirz became infamous as head of the Andersonville death camp.
Another man named Robert Kennedy, for example, was tried and executed in March 1865 for the crime of placing terror bombs around New York City landmarks and public spaces.
…convicted in the fall of 1865 for the execution of at least 53 captured Union soldiers, although Ferguson claimed the total was higher.
Ferguson must roll in his grave when people ignore his story despite best attempts to exaggerate the number of POW he had murdered.
Wirz stood on the gallows as just one of the many who could have been convicted.
He hanged to death in the courtyard of the Old Capitol prison of Washington D.C. on November 10, 1865, after nearly 150 witnesses testified he had personally ordered death for POW and he was found guilty in 11 of 13 counts of documented acts of personal cruelty.
For example, one Confederate soldier testified that Wirz ordered a prisoner into the stocks during a rainstorm. The soldier, observing the prisoner was drowning, placed an umbrella over the prisoner and approach Wirz, who replied, “Let the damned Yankee drown.” […] Whether or not Wirz violated the existing laws of war is not subject to debate.
However, others responsible for war crimes including mass murder of American POW soon were to have a different fate, as the NPS explains. The Federal government abruptly halted prosecutions under the premise of “healing” the nation.
There were further military tribunals against Confederates planned in the spring of 1866. For example, a board of inquiry found that there was sufficient evidence to charge General George Pickett, of Gettysburg fame, for signing off on the execution of twenty two North Carolinians serving in the Union Army who were captured at New Bern, NC in February 1864. However, thanks to the intercession of his old West Point classmate Ulysses Grant and President Johnson’s April 1866 proclamation that the rebellion was over, Pickett was never arrested and charged by a military tribunal. Johnson’s 1866 proclamation specifically banned military tribunals in peacetime, and effectively put a stop to any further arrests and charges like those brought against Henry Wirz.
One of the peculiar details about Andersonville is how quickly it was filled and then also abruptly ended, making it unquestionably a killing field.
President Davis’ 1862 order to stop all prisoner exchange, as described above, had manifested by 1864 in building this one massive concentration area, essentially making a cramped walled field of Georgia into the fifth-largest city of the South.
Why weren’t these prisoners dispersed more widely instead? Why were prisoners so easily added to the camp, or even removed from it, yet necessary supplies were not added so easily along with them? Why were supplies still being transported so easily north into Atlanta by way of Macon Railroad yet none reached Andersonville further south on that same line?
Source: Andersonville National Historic Site, NPS.gov
An urgent order to disperse the concentration camp then suddenly came when liberating armies drew close and were poised to set its victims free.
General Sherman captured Atlanta on September 2, 1864. Word quickly reached Andersonville and mass evacuations began immediately. In just the one week of September 7-13 nearly 17,000 prisoners were transferred to other prisons in Georgia and the Carolinas. In mid-September, Sherman and Confederate General Hood negotiated a “special exchange” for those captured in the Atlanta campaign and around 2,000 prisoners were sent to Atlanta for exchange. By the end of the month less than 9,000 prisoners remained at Andersonville. When Sherman began his March to the Sea on November 15, 1864, there were less than 200 prisoners in the stockade and less than 2,000 in the hospital. That very day an additional 500 were transferred to Savannah lowering the prison’s population even further. The death count on November 15, 1864 stood at around 12,100.
In other words, the prisoners saw supply chain logistics that could have delivered supplies but they were denied. The prisoners similarly saw supply chain logistics for rapid dispersal and relocation but they were denied. The pieces of the puzzle were in place to avoid a death camp, yet the South chose death camp.
I even have seen some military historians try to claim that Sherman didn’t march on the camp because to liberate it would free more Rebels to fight. This seems exactly backwards, since the Union threatening liberation of the camp meant Rebels focused on it instead of battles elsewhere. The threat of camp prisoners being free meant the Confederate South sprang into action denying them that chance. Far more resources of the Confederacy were consumed in desperate acts to prevent POW release. When the camp had been ignored by the Union, however, the Confederates similarly had ignored it and tried to run it without even the bare minimum of staff and supplies.
