ALI SWENSON and KELVIN CHAN, Reporters - Associated Press
Stephan:
This is what really concerns me, not just for the United States but all the democracies of the world. If your source of information is social media, most of what you are reading is partial or complete misinformation. I fear it is going to warp the outcome of the U.S. election, where 54% of the adults can’t read past elementary school sentences such as: The man walked across the street. The only way through this miasma of misinformation, I can see is to only choose that or whom fosters compassionate life-affirming wellbeing. If we can get enough people to commit to that we may be able to save our democracy.
Paul Carpenter describes AI software during an interview in New Orleans, Friday, Feb. 23, 2024. Carpenter says he was hired in January to use AI software to imitate President Joe Biden’s voice to convince New Hampshire Democrat voters not to vote in the state’s presidential primary. Credit: Matthew Hinton / AP
LONDON, ENGLAND — Artificial intelligence is supercharging the threat of election disinformation worldwide, making it easy for anyone with a smartphone and a devious imagination to create fake – but convincing – content aimed at fooling voters.
It marks a quantum leap from a few years ago, when creating phony photos, videos or audio clips required teams of people with time, technical skill and money. Now, using free and low-cost generative artificial intelligence services from companies like Google and OpenAI, anyone can create high-quality “deepfakes” with just a simple text prompt.
A wave of AI deepfakes tied to elections in Europe and Asia has coursed through social media for months, serving as a warning for more than 50 countries heading to the polls this year.
“You don’t need to look far to see some people … being clearly confused as to whether something is real or not,” said […]
I have been telling readers for 15 years (see SR archive) that this was coming, and now it has begun. I have a friend in Key West who is selling his property because of rising sea levels, and another with a summer cottage on the Outer Banks of North Carolina also selling, both because insurance is becoming impossible, they see what is coming, and want to come away with something. This is just the beginning of the migrations I have been predicting. First, away from coastal areas. The second will be out of the Southwest because of lack of water and rising temperatures. The third will be out of the central states because of the destruction caused by violent weather events. By the end of this century there will be tens of millions of internal migrants.
Newsweek composite image. The number of “motivated sellers” in Florida has grown in the past two weeks. Illustration by Newsweek / Getty
The number of “motivated sellers” in Florida has grown in the past two weeks, as more homeowners are trying to offload their properties quickly amidst a worsening of the state’s insurance crisis.
As of Wednesday morning, 204,833 properties, including single-family and multi-family homes, apartments, condos, townhomes, and lots, were listed for sale on Zillow. Of these, 5,244 were listed by self-described motivated sellers—homeowners and agents willing to accept a lower offer than the price listed on their ads.
When Newsweek reported on the issue on February 28, there were 4,928 listings in Florida of properties whose sellers described themselves as motivated sellers out of a total of 202,000.
The Sunshine State’s number of motivated sellers on Zillow remained much higher than in other states like California and Texas. As of Wednesday morning, California had 1,032 motivated sellers for a total of 74,792 properties listed, while Texas counted 1,829 out of a total of 1818,888.
In California, the number of motivated sellers trying to offload their properties is now lower than a couple of weeks […]
MICHAEL ROTOLO, GREGORY A. SMITH and JONATHAN EVANS, - Pew Research Center
Stephan:
Christianity has profoundly altered in the United States. As this Pew Research survey shows people find religion a greatly diminished influence in American society. In my view, that is because Christianity for the evangelical/fundamentalist believers is less a religion and more a White supremacist, male dominance, fascist political movement — christofascism, or Christian Nationalism. Although it talks about society in Biblical terms, it has very little to do with Jesus’ teachings. It is not Christianity at all.
A new Pew Research Center survey finds that 80% of U.S. adults say religion’s role in American life is shrinking – a percentage that’s as high as it’s ever been in our surveys.
Most Americans who say religion’s influence is shrinking are not happy about it. Overall, 49% of U.S. adults say both that religion is losing influence and that this is a bad thing. An additional 8% of U.S. adults think religion’s influence is growing and that this is a good thing.
Together, a combined 57% of U.S adults – a clear majority – express a positive view of religion’s influence on American life.
The survey also finds that about half of U.S. adults say it’s “very” or “somewhat” important to them to have a president who has strong religious beliefs, even if those beliefs are different from their own. But relatively few Americans view either of the leading presidential candidates as very religious: 13% of Americans say they think President Joe Biden is very religious, and just 4% say this about former President Donald Trump.
While the congregations of christofascist churches are growing, traditional real Christian churches are shrinking. To a point where, as this article describes, their congregations are considering other uses for their church buildings that reflect true Christianity. Meanwhile, the christofascist churches are buying their ministers bigger fancier cars.
The Rev. Chris Deacon delivers a Sunday service at Northwood Presbyterian Church in Silver Spring, Md., on Jan. 21, to a crowd that totaled 19 people. One attended online, he said. Credit: Danny Nguyen / The Washington Post
Northwood Presbyterian Church is, in a sense, a kind of home. People have gotten married in the cinder block building. They’ve sat with their kids in the pews and watched the Rev. Chris Deacon deliver sermons beneath the stained-glass cross for years.
But as the 15,000-square-foot church, which sits on seven acres on the edge of Silver Spring, Md., has seen its congregation shrink from 400 at its first service in 1958 to just above 100 in recent years, Deacon and his colleagues believe the church could be used to house people in a more literal way. Church officials have begun talking to developers about whether they can shrink the congregation’s physical space and convert parts of the property into affordable housing.
As churches across the region and the country have seen attendance decline — a decades-long trendhastened by the pandemic — some are examining creative ways to use their […]
Brooke Sopelsa, Editorial Director of NBC Out, NBC News - NBC News
Stephan:
Something is happening with younger women in the U.S., as this report describes. It is my opinion that this is happening because of what is happening with men, who are angry and resentful that women want and expect equality, and who are tired of men telling them the state (men) has control of their bodies. This has become part of The Great Schism Trend and, I think, the next chapter of this horror story will be attacks on contraception. TCP men are scared of women who seek equality, they want Hand Maids.
Women ages 18 to 26 were more than twice as likely to identify as LGBTQ than their millennial counterparts, the survey found.
The percentage of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer adults in the U.S. continues to increase, reaching an all-time high of 7.6% in 2023, according to a new Gallup report. Broken down by gender, the survey of 12,000 people 18 and older across the country found that women were nearly twice as likely as men to identify as LGBTQ.
“Almost 30% of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ+, most as bisexual,” Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup, told NBC News. “That’s where a lot of the growth seems to be happening.”
This is the first year Gallup has laid out its annual LGBTQ identification report in a way that breaks down each generation by gender. Looking at all generations, 8.5% of women and 4.7% of men identified as LGBTQ, the survey found. The survey reported margins of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points among LGBTQ respondents.
Parsing each generation, the gender story gets more interesting. In the three younger generations surveyed — Generation Z, millennials and Generation X — women are more […]
