Trump finally gets his 'peace prize' and the world collapses in laughter

& a very uncharacteristic (for me) defense of Notre Dame

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Tuesdays at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. This week, Wendy Snyder will be sitting in for John. The WGN listen-live link is here.

Cheers!

It’s “Songs of Good Cheer” week! The finest holiday tradition in Chicago history — many people are saying so — kicks off Thursday night and runs through Sunday at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Lincoln Square.

Here is the cast on Sunday doing a last run through of our tribute to the late Brian Wilson. We’ll lead a singalong of about two dozen holiday-themed songs — songbooks provided — and engage in a bit of merriment and sentiment.

It’s the 27th annual SOGC program hosted by me and Mary Schmich (that’s her on the piano). There are still a few tickets left for Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Buy tickets online, by phone (773-728-6000) or at the Old Town School of Folk Music box office, 4544 North Lincoln Ave. in Chicago.

Screen capture

The most pathetic prize in the world goes to our pathetically needy president

The entire world has got to be laughing at President Donald Trump for the greedy eagerness with which he accepted the FIFA Peace Prize at Friday’s World Cup draw. This was an event to chose the brackets for the 2026 World Cup which will be held in the US, Canada and Mexico. The prize was created just last month in an over-the-top effort to curry favor with our mad would-be king who desperately wants a Nobel Peace Prize despite his endorsement of obvious war crimes in the Caribbean.

AP:

In awarding the prize, (FIFA President Gianni) Infantino told Trump it was a “beautiful medal for you that you can wear everywhere you want to go.” Trump promptly placed the medal around his neck. The certificate that Infantino handed Trump recognizes the U.S. president for his actions to “promote peace and unity around the world.” …

“This is truly one of the great honors of my life,” Trump said.

Trump’s lack of self-awareness caused him not to realize, as even Fox News sycophant Jesse Watters observed, “they’re kissing his butt because he’s hosting the (World Cup).”

Human Rights Watch didn’t see the humor:

FIFA’s so-called peace prize is being awarded against a backdrop of violent detentions of immigrants, national guard deployments in US cities, and the obsequious cancellation of FIFA’s own anti-racism and anti-discrimination campaigns.

A fake award from an organization with a history of corruption. And he can wear that medal around his neck everywhere he wants to go, because he is such a good boy!

It all tracks perfectly.

Notes and comments from readers — lightly edited — along with my responses

Murder, he wrote

Marty G. — shooting or bombing a person who is out of the fight or injured meets the elements of first-degree murder.

Zorn — Yes, but my guess is no one will ever serve a day behind bars for the depraved killing of two men clinging to flotsam and signaling for help. President Donald Trump will be sure to issue blanket pardons.

Kudo

Lynne Allen Taylor — Thursday morning’s Tribune is why I keep subscribing. The front page article on Jose Coronado Meza — “A border crosser. An execution killing. And political theater” (gift link) by Joe Mahr and Gregory Royal Pratt was excellent. As Jeff Tiedrich would say, the Trib committed a journalism.

Zorn— Agreed. The Trib has a crew of top-notch reporters who do a very fine job. That crew is too small, but it remains mighty.

Garbage about people

Mark K. — Trump’s vile insults of Somali immigrants — calling them “garbage people” — are despicable and disgusting. The worst part is the general reaction — mostly quiet as the right tacitly supports this kind of sentiment and the left is at outrage fatigue and just can’t keep up. It’s just so normalized at this point, we have no choice but to let it go and wait for him to spew the next batch of vitriol. Will we ever be able to get back to some level of decency and respect in this country?

Zorn — My thought, my hope, is that as the Trump years fade into the background, history will record this as a very shameful chapter, and many people who like to think of themselves as decent, moral, fair-minded people will be ashamed at having enabled Trump or looked the other way as he degraded our nation and attacked our Constitution.

The slippery slope and medical aid in dying

Phil Koesterer — You wrote in favor of the End-of-Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act now on Gov. JB Pritzker’s desk and blasted the “hand-wringing,” “what if?” and “other slippery-slope arguments … being employed to attempt to prevent people from having agency over their own lives.”

But one need only look at Canada to see that “what-if” and “hand-wringing” are bad-faith characterizations of the objections to euthanasia. Just because there is a slippery slope fallacy doesn’t mean that some slopes aren’t really slippery.

Matthew W. — I too am cautious about the end-of-life bill. I remember how the SAFE-T act was presented as helping the poor get out of jail for a minor offense of shoplifting because they could not afford bail. They showed cases where the person waiting for the trial was locked up longer than the actual sentences. The unintended consequences were people being let out to await trial that should not have been let out. There was talk of amending the bill and passing some revisions, but I don’t think the legislature did. So, because of that debacle I wonder what some of the unintended consequences are in the end-of-life bill.

Zorn — I’m not averse to entertaining thoughtful slippery slope arguments against any change in law. You have to be able to see around corners in this life. But there are at least 11 U.S. jurisdictions that allow medical aid in dying so we’re not in uncharted territory. Safeguards appear to be robust enough that we’re not seeing discomfiting instances of despondent people taking their lives or people being coerced into suicide.

Laws can be adjusted to meet all but the religious objection that one must never willingly let go of life.

As for the SAFE-T act, the problem of judges too often not locking up patently dangerous people is a problem unrelated to the end of cash bail, and it can be and should be addressed.

Rich Miller of Capitol Fax had a strong op-ed in the Sun-Times over the weekend headlined “SAFE-T Act criticism after Blue Line attack is mostly misguided.”

The Cook County Jail has experienced a 16 percentage point increase in inmates between the end of last year through the end of this year’s third quarter, according to a Loyola tracking dashboard. The county jail’s population was about 8% higher at the end of the third quarter than it was just before the SAFE-T Act was fully enacted.

And a chart recently posted by CWBChicago.com, which focuses exclusively on crime and is not exactly known as a liberal site, shows that a wide array of violent offenses committed by people awaiting trial in Cook County dropped from 116 victims in 2021 (before the SAFE-T Act) to 52 last year and 37 so far this year. Attempted murder victims dropped from 50 victims in 2022 to eight so far this year.

Point being, too many reporters, pundits and others are far too quick to bring up everybody’s favorite bogeyman before any facts are known or even acknowledged.

Is the SAFE-T Act perfect? Of course not. No law designed by human beings can ever be perfect. Could it be improved? Again, humans should always try to improve on their work.

Gary Cozette — If I end up with Alzheimers with possibly two to 10 years to live, I want to be able to end my life. I do not want to exhaust my family to care for me when I have no reason to continue living other to simply exist meaninglessly. I would rather leave my limited savings to friends, family and public service rather than a nursing home with underpaid staff just keeping me alive for no purpose. It is unfortunate that I must keep $10,000 plus airfare on hand to go to Switzerland to end my life peacefully at the time of my choosing. Why can’t I do this in my own home when I know it is time for me to shuffle off this mortal coil? I urge Governor Pritzker to sign the bill.

Zorn — Same. Problem is that someone who wants to avail themselves of medical aid in dying need to be of sound mind, and those with dementia clearly are not. I’d appreciate an advanced directive instruction that says if I can no longer recognize by name any family members, put me on the metaphorical ice floe.

Sloppy thinking? A dialogue with a non-reader

Jeff Nichols — Regarding the post about high school reunions: I don’t want to be a jerk, but I don’t want to read a post that has an AI slop illustration (above). It signals that the writer/editor just doesn’t care. It isn’t hard to find a photo of a 1976 yearbook.

Zorn —“Slop” is such a lazy term. It makes those who deploy it sound like all the tech skeptics who came before them objecting to the automobile, radio, TV, CDs, computers and so on.

Though the above AI illustration lacks ethnic and body-type diversity, what, aside from your intuitive guess, makes you call it “slop”? What is it that tells you the writer/editor (me) “just doesn’t care?”

Doesn’t care about what, exactly? '

Human artists have illustrated newspaper and magazine articles as well as books with stylized, imagined images like this for centuries — I don’t recall anyone ever referring to inexact representations of scenes like this as “slop” until AI prejudice came along.

I wanted an image that said “50th high school class reunion, 1976” — a generic yearbook cover or yearbook pages would not have worked as well. I certainly can’t afford to hire an illustrator to generate such an image or a photographer and models to stage one, and I’d rather not swipe someone else’s possibly copyrighted photograph or drawing.

Shake your fist all you want at the imaginary clouds, but this technology is here and getting better all the time. Calling it “slop” won’t stop it.

Jeff Nichols — You have a head of hair not attached to a body. You have a person talking to curtains. You have a three-fingered person pointing at a big book with a fish-like illustration.

As a reader, I might have decided to read a post illustrated by a Creative Commons photo of funny old yearbook pictures. It would have taken you three whole minutes to find a free photo that evokes an emotional response.

Does your spirited defense of AI include writing? Or is it just lesser forms of human creativity? If your whole post had been created by AI, would it deserve respect as the product of technology and your brilliant prompts?

Zorn — I concede that there is an oddly disembodied head of hair in the image, but no one I see is talking to curtains, and the woman pointing to the book with the fish has all five fingers -- her index finger eclipses her thumb and her pinkie is in the shadows but extends from her knuckle:

Creative Commons is filled with, well, I won’t say “slop” but lots of tangentially relevant images, none of which had what I wanted.

I will defend the use of AI in creating images and in writing if and when it is not jarringly and noticeably bad. What I’m arguing more broadly is that name-calling and appeals to inchoate ideas of “human creativity” won’t stop the advance of AI, just as the dire and largely unfounded ululations of previous generations of technophobes didn’t stop the advance of everything from the printing press to streaming TV.

Jeff Nichols: Do you not see the woman who is talking to no one? Now that you have zoomed on the hand, I see she has four weird fingers. Just because you can’t see the weird hallucinations and odd interactions in AI confections doesn’t mean that your readers can’t. In the print age, readers also chose not to read material with weird illustrations. As far as being a technophobe, this took me one whole precious minute to find. There are about a zillion yearbooks on The Internet Archive, too. As much as you want to frame this as a reader that would be opposed to the choo choo or the printing press or antibiotics, my complaint actually comes from a technological point of view. You see this illustration as something readers would relate to. I see it as a sign of a person who can’t hunt. Just because it doesn’t look and taste like slop to you doesn’t mean others won’t identify it as such.

Zorn — I’ll concede that it’s far from an ideal illustration and contains some glitches. Some AI images will “taste like slop” to highly discerning inspectors of imagery for the time being, but we’re still in the pusher biplane era of AI, by which I mean to recall the time when many expert skeptics were sure that air travel would never replace train and boat travel for everyday people — “It is scarcely conceivable that airplanes will ever make great journeys with passengers.” aeronautical engineer Albert F. Zahm of the Smithsonian in 1911, for example. That era in AI will soon be over. Then you’ll have to come up with another adjective to disparage its output and dismiss the output and work ethic of those who use it .

A friend and former colleague weighed in to support Jeff Nichols’ characterization:

Lara Weber — “Slop” is a perfect word for most AI-generated creative content. Saying so is not being a luddite; it’s recognizing that this technology — as beneficial as it may be in some fields —- cannot replace human art. Sure, your reunion illustration is hardly a hill to die on, but I think many of us are responding with alarm to the very slippery slope we see. Maybe AI-generated old-timey fiddle music should just be piped into farmers markets and legion halls from now on?

Zorn — Oh, I think there’s a very real possibility that AI will at least take a place alongside human art in that even sophisticated readers/listeners/viewers will be unable to tell the difference. If “slop” refers to the little errors such as the floating head of hair in the background of the above image — a sloppy generation — then sure, I’m OK with the use of the critical term. But the use of “slop” to express a negative emotional response to the idea that a computer and not a human being generated an image, song, story or other creation we consider art strikes me as inexact, at best. I agree that alarm/concern is called for, as the looming reality of near-perfect deep-fake videos and images poses a threat not merely to our aesthetic sensibilities and to the jobs of actors, graphic artists etc, but to democracy itself. The ability to tell human art from AI art is of far lesser importance, to my mind, than the ability to tell truth from fiction.

And anything that extends the reach of old time fiddle tunes is OK with me!

Unpopular opinions?

Incumbent officeholders should not have to submit nominating petitions to run for re-election.

In the news this week is the story headlined “Political veteran George Cardenas fighting to stay on March primary ballot.” Cardenas, the former 12th Ward alder, won a four-year seat as the 1st District Commissioner on the Cook County Board of Review in 2022, and so far seems to have come up 273 valid voter signatures short of the required 4,941 necessary for his name to appear on the ballot.

I support the idea behind signature requirements — to prevent the ballot from being cluttered with whimsical vanity candidates, hopefuls ought to demonstrate a certain level of viability, organization and support.

Even though people often sign petitions for candidates they don’t necessarily support simply in order to get campaign volunteers off their porches, the very act of overseeing a successful petition drive signifies a non-whimsical level of commitment if not actual support.

But incumbent officeholders are by definition non-whimsical. There’s no good reason to make them jump through the petition-gathering hoop in order to appear on the ballot when running for reelection to the same office. I have no opinion about Cardenas’ record on the Board of Review — I live in the 2nd District, not the 1st, which I know only because I just looked up the boundary map — but he is presumptively a serious candidate.

What’s wrong with asking incumbents to pass petitions? It makes it harder for challengers to get on the ballot because once you sign a petition for a particular candidate, you cannot sign for another candidate for that same office and have your signature counted.

NOTE — This was an error on my part. In fact, the prohibition applies only to signing petitions for candidates of more than one party or more than one independent or new-party candidate. I discuss that error more fully here.

And the ability to serve effectively in office usually bears little relation to the ability to oversee a petition drive.

The argument against this idea is that all candidates for office should be treated equally, and officeholders who can’t get their stuff together well enough to run decent petition drives have possibly slid into general incompetence.

Oh, and there is also the Barack Obama argument. Here’s NPR:

(Alice) Palmer was a friend and early mentor to Obama when he was working as a grassroots organizer after law school. She was a longtime and popular state senator on Chicago’s South Side.

Then in 1996, Palmer decided to make a run for Congress. …

But Palmer lost in the primary for that congressional seat and decided that she wanted her old Senate seat after all. Her protege Obama (who had announced his candidacy) would have to step aside. …

Obama stood his ground and went one step further. Using an aggressive procedural move, he challenged the signatures on Palmer’s nominating petitions. …

The maneuver worked. … He cleared the field and sailed on to an easy victory in the heavily Democratic district.

Your view?

Last week’s result

Here is the argument.

469 votes

M. de Hendon — Northwestern should have taken the long view, told Trump to do the anatomically impossible, and hunkered down for a small number of lean years. This kow-towing to the racist nationalists in the Agent’s fascist clown car is not only debasing but also is futile--you think they won’t be back for more? This vile regime will pass, heroes of the resistance will be celebrated, and collaborationists will be reviled.

Monica Metzler —Would you tell Northwestern not to pay up if it was your family member or friend getting laid off because the funding for their job stopped back in March? I had dinner with a friend last week who’s a lab tech at NU. She’s very worried that her job and many others are hanging by a thread. This administration’s strategy is evil and puts institutions between a rock and a hard place. So I can’t criticize the choice of an institution(s) responsible for hundreds (or thousands) of people, as well as medical research.

Mark K. — Appeasing bullies never works, it only emboldens them, they will always come back for more until stopped. It also makes everyone else more vulnerable. NU’s reputation is seriously damaged by this move. The $75 million ransom payoff would have been better spent on lawyers fighting to maintain the institution’s integrity. The argument that the federal funding was critical and loss of it would have been damaging doesn’t resonate with me — NU’s endowment is somewhere around $15 billion ( it was $14.2 as of 2024, has to be higher now), they should have had no problem finding a way to tide themselves over while fighting in the courts to restore the funding.

Gillean Wilsak — So NU has to promise to prohibit the wearing of facial coverings “for the purpose of concealment of an individual’s identity”, but it’s OK for the Border Patrol and ICE agents to do so?

I’m not a Notre Dame fan, but dang, they got screwed

Rooting against Notre Dame in football is one of my little pleasures. Are their fans more insufferable than the admittedly insufferable fans of the University of Michigan, my alma mater? Arguably not, but the schools are rivals, and very little feels more insufferable than the preening and air of superiority of the supporters of a rival school.

As Paul Sullivan writes in Tuesday’s Tribune, Notre Dame is “the Frasier Crane of universities, always acting a little loftier than the rest.”

Yet the Domers have my sincere sympathy. The Fighting Irish are clearly one of the twelve best teams in college football and have earned the right to be in the 12-team postseason tournament. After 10 straight wins by an average of 30 points a game, they ranked 9th in the latest Associated Press poll and the coaches’ poll. Yet they lost out in the tournament draw to Miami (10th), Alabama (11th), Tulane (17th/18th) and James Madison (19th).

Miami and Alabama have a good case to be in the tournament. But Tulane and James Madison snuck in because they were the champions of the American Conference and the Sun Belt Conference, which, come on, so what? Patronizing the winners of these weaker conferences by allowing them to be postseason buzzard meat is no way to run a tournament and no way to draw fan interest.

In the wake of the snub, Notre Dame announced it would not be participating in one of the many exhibition bowl games for also rans (Go Blue!). Some have called this poor sportsmanship (PS reader Laurence Siegel labeled them “The Whining Irish”), but I can’t blame them — why ask your players to risk injury and undergo weeks of extra practice for a meaningless TV show? Kansas State and Iowa State also declined to accept bowl bids despite being eligible along with seven schools with losing records that would not have otherwise been eligible.

If anything can draw extra attention to the unfairness of the way teams are currently chosen to be in the tournament, I’m all for it.

NewsWheel

Inspired by the WordWheel puzzle in the Monday-Friday Chicago Tribune and other papers, this puzzle asks you to identify the missing letter that will make a word or words — possibly proper nouns; reading either clockwise or counterclockwise — related to a story in the news or other current event. The solution is at the bottom of the newsletter.

The week’s best visual jokes

Here are some funny visual images I've come across recently on social media. Enjoy, then evaluate:

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Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

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Answer to the NewsWheel puzzle

CLEMENCY