Comparing U.S. Leaders on ‘The Diplomat’ to the Real Thing; How Grindr Is Training Its AI With User Pics–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Oct. 26, 2026

Indy Digest: Oct. 26, 2026

The hubby and I just finished the new, fourth season of The Diplomat on Netflix. In case you’re unfamiliar: The show stars Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell as two U.S. diplomats/ambassadors who are married to each other—and their marriage is rocky, to put it mildly.

If you’d like a well-done, well-acted political thriller—with a cliffhanger at the end of pretty much every episode—then you REALLY need to be watching The Diplomat.

Anyway, I bring up The Diplomat, because a friend of mine who’s also a fan of the show posted a comment on social media that stuck with me: I like watching The Diplomat because I like imagining that the people running this country are smart.

She has a point: There’s quite a contrast between the U.S. leaders on The Diplomat—all of whom are smart, if not necessarily ethical—and the real-life U.S. leaders of today, who are NOT necessarily smart, nor are they necessarily ethical.

I am not saying that some of our leaders aren’t smart; some of them definitely are. But then you look at our Health and Human Services secretary, who thinks he knows more about vaccines than scientists. Or our Defense Department secretary, who’s obsessed with testosterone and “beardos” and calling his organization the Department of War. And, well, I could go on, but these two examples will suffice. Rather disconcertingly.

The result of this mélange of people like RFK Jr., Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller and Donald J. Trump is a government that at times does things that are both 1) terrible and 2) make no damn sense at all. Like, say, floating joining forces with China and Russia (!) to float the name of Viktor Orban (!!) to become the next United Nations Secretary-General (!!!)—news that was broken by The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board (!!!). That board wrote, under the headline “Viktor Orbán, U.N. Secretary-General?” (gift link):

You read that correctly. Sources from three countries confirm that the Trump Administration has advocated Viktor Orbán for the role of United Nations Secretary-General. The U.S. has encouraged the former Hungarian Prime Minister to enter the race, even bringing him the initial idea. The plan awaits a final decision.

A Trump State Department official concedes that it sounds crazy at first. But Russia and China are believed to be supportive, based on prior conversations with Washington, and the plan would be for Mr. Orbán to be their joint candidate. As officials from the U.S. and a second country told us, when the U.S., Russia and China all want the same thing at the U.N. Security Council, they usually get it.

The State Department official counted eight Security Council votes “comfortably” for Mr. Orbán, and 10 within reach from the 15 council members. Would Britain and France then stand in the majority’s way? Those two are typically cautious in their use of the veto power.

As U.S. officials discussed who they would want to see atop the U.N., Mr. Orbán’s name kept coming up. “Someone like Orbán,” they would say, and Chinese and Russian counterparts would agree. Eventually U.S. officials asked themselves the question: Why not Mr. Orbán?

Why not Mr. Orban? Well, here’s what Time magazine wrote back in April, after Orban’s party lost an election, leading to his ouster:

In the years since he first rose to become Prime Minister, Orbán and his party have taken control of Hungary’s media outlets and deployed propaganda to vilify his political opponents, as well as consolidated their power over institutions intended to serve as checks on executive authority, such as the country’s courts. 

In 2022, the European Parliament said that Hungary has become a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy,” meaning that, while the country holds elections, “respect for democratic norms and standards is absent.”

(Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies) said that Hungary is considered by many to be “one of the most corrupt countries now in the European Union.”

“[Orbán has] utterly changed the nature of Hungarian democracy where it basically revolves around him,” Bergmann said. “He has run Hungary as if it were his fiefdom.”

Uh, THAT would be why not Mr. Orban.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• The Justice Department sent the state a list of more than 20,000 voters it claims are non-citizens, and told elections officials they had to set aside ballots cast by those voters … but the feds offered no info about how the list was assembled. According to CBS News: “A federal appeals court on Monday dismissed the Justice Department’s effort to force California election officials to set aside thousands of ballots that the Trump administration claims may have been cast by alleged noncitizens. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said in a 2-1 decision that it lacked jurisdiction over the appeal and granted a motion by the top elections official from Los Angeles County to dismiss the effort. … The fast-moving dispute over California’s mail ballots was filed earlier this month after Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter sent letters to California’s secretary of state and the top election official in Los Angeles County, Dean Logan, which gave them 48 hours to review a list of more than 20,000 registered voters who the Trump administration believes are ‘likely’ noncitizens and who were sent mail ballots. Los Angeles County told McCotter in a letter dated Oct. 15 that the list of suspected noncitizens contained addresses of registered voters throughout the state, and said his letter did not include information about how the list had been compiled. The county also told McCotter the letter did not provide any information as to how the county was to confirm citizenship status. A lawyer for Los Angeles County said the Justice Department was asking Logan, the registrar-recorder and county clerk, ‘to engage in an unlawful course of conduct.’”

• Even though Brazil’s presidential election didn’t go the way he wanted, President Trump has indicated he won’t get involved—although he did indicate his belief that the election was “rigged.” The Washington Post (gift link) says: “Brazil’s leading right-wing politician, Flávio Bolsonaro, effectively conceded defeat to the incumbent left-wing president Monday, minutes after President Donald Trump indicated he would not intervene on his behalf despite saying that Sunday’s vote ‘looked like another rigged election.’ Bolsonaro had initially declared he would challenge the outcome of the election, which he had been widely expected to win. He said that an extension of voting hours on Sunday, driven by poor weather and requests from both campaigns, was a ‘dirty trick’ used to rig the election. The decision to extend polling hours was made by a Supreme Court justice, Cristiano Zanin, who was once Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s personal lawyer. But minutes after Trump spoke to reporters Monday, Bolsonaro backed off his call to annul the election. He said he would instead file a lawsuit accusing Lula da Silva, known as Lula, of abusing the power of incumbency to influence the vote — a routine move by losing candidates that rarely succeeds in court.”

• Meanwhile, Israel has a big election this week—and The New York Times is reporting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose party is in a tight race for control, wanted to attack Iran before voters headed to the polls (gift link): “In advance of Israel’s pivotal election on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought for weeks to orchestrate a new airstrike on Iran but ran into resistance from the military’s chief of staff, according to three senior Israeli defense officials and three other people briefed on the matter. Then, over the past few days, the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, became concerned that Mr. Netanyahu had begun pushing for a separate action against Iran, short of an overt strike, according to an Israeli official and a person briefed on the matter, neither of whom described the nature of such an action. General Zamir believed that this would be a miscalculation that could provoke Iran into attacking Israel. Spokesmen for Mr. Netanyahu did not respond immediately to requests for comment. The Israeli officials and the people briefed on the deliberations spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Mr. Netanyahu’s rationale for pressing to attack Iran before the election was not clear, but a return to war could have potentially disrupted or even delayed the vote.” It’s worth noting that Netanyahu could face criminal consequences should his party lose.

• Popular gay “dating” app Grindr is appropriating users’ photos and some other info to train its AI technology, according to an investigation by Ronan Farrow, and reported on by Metro Weekly (Detroit): “Under CEO George Arison, Grindr has aggressively integrated gAI (pronounced ‘gay-eye’) into its app. The technology powers Edge, a premium subscription service that Grindr has tested at prices as high as $499.99 per month. In his video investigation, posted to X and Instagram, Farrow reports that Grindr needs users’ explicit permission to train gAI on ‘special-category’ data—including gender, sexual preferences and orientation, racial and ethnic origin, chat content, and precise location. But the company doesn’t ask permission to use so-called ‘limited data,’ including users’ photos, ages, taps, and display names, to train gAI. Training AI involves using data to help a system learn patterns so it can perform tasks or make predictions. Grindr says gAI is intended to personalize the user experience, summarize chats, recommend potential matches, and support platform safety. Grindr acknowledges on its website that its default settings allow limited data to be used to train gAI. Users can opt out by changing their privacy settings in the app.”

• Related to the newsletter intro about our less-than-stellar federal government … ProPublica reports, per a headline, that “Bird Flu Is Raging on a Mink Farm. It Could Spark a Human Pandemic, Experts Say, but Officials Won’t Act.” Hoo boy. Details. “For (it to gain a foothold in humans), this bird flu would likely need to find an intermediate host—an animal vulnerable to viruses that infect both birds and humans. These animals would be crowded together, each infection raising the odds that a new strain could arise through mutation. Then, for that strain to jump across species, it would have to have access to humans and time to spread among them undetected. That perfect petri dish exists right now, a ProPublica investigation found. For over two months, an outbreak of bird flu has raged uncontrolled on a Utah farm that raises thousands of mink for fur. Mink have lungs and airways that on a cellular level are remarkably similar to those of people; they have caught and spread other flus and infected some humans with COVID-19. Instead of trying to stop the outbreak and prevent it from spilling into humans, state and federal officials have done little except try to keep its existence quiet, our investigation shows. The failure to act amounts to a cascade of missteps flu experts called ‘irresponsible’ and ‘puzzling.’ One called it ‘playing with fire.’”

• And finally … Wired magazine covers the embarrassing plight of people whose Wikipedia pages were deleted … because those people were not “notable.” Ouch: Wikipedia editors do not themselves decide that a person is not notable, only that there is a lack of reliable evidence to support the claim. One person who recently lost her Wikipedia biography on notability grounds is Kimberly Small, the CEO of a Nevada nonprofit that supports survivors of sexual assault. The debate occurred in a public page on Wikipedia itself; it’s in that space that the really tricky decisions about what is and what isn’t good enough for the encyclopedia are made. One editor raised a question: “How should we judge not-for-profit executives? By the nature of their job, the focus is, as it should be, on the organization and the work the organization does, not them.” Another editor replied: “I don’t think there is anything wrong with not-for-profit executives being less often individually notable. Wikipedia coverage is not a prize. Is it not? ‘Having an article says something,’ (Wikipedia editor) Britta Gustafson admitted. ‘It implies something.’”

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