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The Ledes

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

New York Times: “The Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, who emerged from the backwoods of Louisiana to become a television evangelist with global reach, preaching about an eternal struggle between good and evil and warning of the temptations of the flesh, a theme that played out in his own life in a sex scandal, died on July 1. He was 90.” ~~~

~~~ For another sort of obituary, see Akhilleus' commentary near the end of yesterday's thread.

The Wires

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To keep the Conversation going, please help me by linking news articles, opinion pieces and other political content in today's Comments section.

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OR here's a link generator. The one I had posted died, then Akhilleus found one, but it too bit the dust. He found yet another, which I've linked here, and as of September 23, 2024, it's working.

OR you can always just block, copy and paste to your comment the URL (Web address) of the page you want to link.

Note for Readers. It is not possible for commenters to "throw" their highlighted links to another window. But you can do that yourself. Right-click on the link and a drop-down box will give you choices as to where you want to open the link: in a new tab, new window or new private window.

New York Times: “The New York Times Company has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms, the company said on Thursday. The multiyear agreement 'will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,' the news organization said in a statement. Besides news articles, the agreement encompasses material from NYT Cooking, The Times’s food and recipe site, and The Athletic, which focuses on sports. This is The Times’s first licensing arrangement with a focus on generative A.I. technology. In 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement, accusing the tech companies of using millions of articles published by The Times to train automated chatbots without any kind of compensation. OpenAI and Microsoft have rejected those accusations.” ~~~

~~~ Marie: I have no idea what this means for "the Amazon customer experience." Does it mean that if I don't have a NYT subscription but do have Amazon Prime I can read NYT content? And where, exactly, would I find that content? I don't know. I don't know.

Washington Post reporters asked three AI image generators what a beautiful woman looks like. "The Post found that they steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness. Prompted to show a 'beautiful woman,' all three tools generated thin women, without exception.... Her body looks like Barbie — slim hips, impossible waist, round breasts.... Just 2 percent of the images showed visible signs of aging. More than a third of the images had medium skin tones. But only nine percent had dark skin tones. Asked to show 'normal women,' the tools produced images that remained overwhelmingly thin.... However bias originates, The Post’s analysis found that popular image tools struggle to render realistic images of women outside the Western ideal." ~~~

~~~ Marie: The reporters seem to think they are calling out the AI programs for being unrealistic. But there's a lot about the "beautiful women" images they miss. I find these omissions remarkably sexist. For one thing, the reporters seem to think AI is a magical "thing" that self-generates. It isn't. It's programmed. It's programmed by boys, many of them incels who have little or no experience or insights beyond comic books and Internet porn of how to gauge female "beauty." As a result, the AI-generated women look like cartoons; that is, a lot like an air-brushed photo of Kristi Noem: globs of every kind of dark eye makeup, Scandinavian nose, Botox lips, slathered-on skin concealer/toner/etc. makeup, long dark hair and the aforementioned impossible Barbie body shape, including huge, round plastic breasts.

New York Times: “George Clooney’s Broadway debut, 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' has been one of the sensations of the 2024-25 theater season, breaking box office records and drawing packed houses of audiences eager to see the popular movie star in a timely drama about the importance of an independent press. Now the play will become much more widely available: CNN is planning a live broadcast of the penultimate performance, on June 7 at 7 p.m. Eastern. The performance will be preceded and followed by coverage of, and discussion about, the show and the state of journalism.”

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. -- Magna Carta ~~~

~~~ New York Times: “Bought for $27.50 after World War II, the faint, water stained manuscript in the library of Harvard Law School had attracted relatively little attention since it arrived there in 1946. That is about to change. Two British academics, one of whom happened on the manuscript by chance, have discovered that it is an original 1300 version — not a copy, as long thought — of Magna Carta, the medieval document that helped establish some of the world’s most cherished liberties. It is one of just seven such documents from that date still in existence.... A 710-year-old version of Magna Carta was sold in 2007 for $21.3 million.... First issued in 1215, it put into writing a set of concessions won by rebellious barons from a recalcitrant King John of England — or Bad King John, as he became known in folklore. He later revoked the charter, but his son, Henry III, issued amended versions, the last one in 1225, and Henry’s son, Edward I, in turn confirmed the 1225 version in 1297 and again in 1300.”

Page Links

Tuesday

Sep132016

IOKIYAR

By Akhilleus:

We laugh, ruefully, it's true, at the acronym IOKIYAR, because it's almost always lamentably accurate. Things that could destroy a Democrat are often blithely ignored as long as Republicans do them.

One of the most egregious, given the never-ending, sweaty pursuit of Hillary Clinton's emails, a case that has been fine-tooth combed until reduction to component molecules has been achieved, without finding anything but bad judgement, is the strange "loss" of 22 million--that's right, twenty.two.million emails by the Bush 43 administration. Well, you might say, these were probably emails covering things like interstate commerce policy and attendance of a statue unveiling, or what's on the menu for a state dinner to honor the Grand Poobah of Kirabati, or what to eat when watching the Super Bowl so as not to choke and pass out, or perhaps a simple reminder of the importance of subject-verb agreement.

Nope.

The "lost" emails happened to have been sent right around the time The Decider and his chief leg breaker, Darth Cheney, were lying about WMD so they could invade a country that had zippo to do with 9/11. That, and the emails from four years later when Bush and his AG were staging a nation-wide putsch against Democratic attorneys general who dared to stand up to their made up bullshit about election fraud.

A lengthy article in Newsweek finds that...

"Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House 'lost' 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America’s recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. 'It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,' says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. 'If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server?'"

Think Jason Chaffetz (described by one wag as sitting on "...the top of the GOP shitpile in Congress despite the fact that he is dumber than a sack of Louis Gohmerts." Ouch!) will be sending out subpoenas to get to the bottom of this? So a private email server, owned and operated by the RNC was okay for George Bush, a president during a time of "war", but for a Secretary of State, it's permission for Confederates to suggest that she be imprisoned for life and/or murdered?

At the time, if you recall, anyone who dared to look crosseyed at the crosseyed Decider (which, if he ever made eye contact, might have fixed that problem, although he'd still be an asshole...) was charged, by Confederates, with treason.

So, to review, if you're a Democrat and wish to investigate serious criminality on the part of a Republican president, you're a traitor. If you're a Republican and you want to make shit up about a Democratic president and presidential candidate, you're a patriot. Well sure, that seems fair.

With a Democrat in the White House and likely another one on the way, all manner of scurrilous, untrue, and invented charges are allowed to stand and given the power of media sanctioning.

Sometimes IOKIYAR is an embarrassing head-shaker. Other times, it's criminal.

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Reader Comments (3)

Just think, Ak...according to the Newsweek article only five more years until those 22,000,000 Bush/Cheney et al e-mails can be accessed.

It's not just IOKIYAR, there's also IOKIYTBTF (it's Okay if you're too big to fail).

Wells Fargo has over five thousand 'losers' as one big "winner rides into the sunset"

While the bank fired more than 5,000 employees, no one has been charged, and the person overseeing the bank division in question received $124.6 million before leaving the bank.

Crime doesn't pay not nearly as well as"banking"

September 13, 2016 |

MAG

MAG,

You'll be happy to know that the Wells Fargo thing where they fucked over all those clients was not their fault. Not at all. According to the chief executive, John Stumpf (any relation to Drumpf?), it was all the fault of a few bad apples.

Yes, folks, it's those damned "few bad apples" back again. Man, those people are everywhere! They must be in demand.

So Wells Fargo fired their asses, those few bad apples (don't worry, they were all rehired right away by AT&T). All 5,300 of them. Wait. Fifty three HUNDRED? That's a few? Shit, I thought you had to know math and understand relational logic and stuff like that to be a banker. If this guy thinks 5,300 is a few, I'd hate to get a letter from Wells Fargo saying that "we lost a few of your dollars".

But not to worry, Stumpf reminds us that it's all good because he grew up in a place that had a much smaller population than the total of Wells Fargo employees.

Huh?

No, seriously. He said that. How in the hell that relates to the cost of a good criminal lawyer, or a timely bribe to a Republican elected official, I have no clue, but he seems to think it's germane.

So, in a nutshell, Stumpf's review of the Wells Fargo scam goes like this: we lost a "few" of your dollars, but it wasn't really us, it was a "few" bad employees. Fifty three hundred of them. But who's counting? AND I grew up in a place with fewer people than I employ.

Happy now?

Why can't I get a job like that? I can make up crazy shit with the best of them. Well, maybe not Trump, but I'd give the proto-trumpies a run for their ill gotten money.

September 13, 2016 |

Akhilleus

Oh, Akhilleus, how can you be so hostile toward Wells Fargo. Why just a few hours ago, they have reassured us Plebs that they were going to do the 'right' thing:
"Wells Fargo will stop setting the sales goals that bank employees say led to pressure to open millions of fake customer accounts.
The embattled bank says the change, announced early Tuesday, will be effective Jan. 1.
'We are eliminating product sales goals because we want to make certain our customers have full confidence that our retail bankers are always focused on the best interests of customers,' CEO John Stumpf said in a statement.' "

http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/13/news/companies/wells-fargo-scandal-sales-goals/

It's going to take 4 months to stop this criminal practice? Well, yes, because they are so big it takes time to blah, blah, blah. And, they have to recoup the $185 million fine and $5 million to refund customers who were wrongly charged ~ AND the payout of $124 million to Carrie Tolstedt, who led the fake account unit. IOKIYAR, indeed.

AK, as always, thank you for your insight ~ and, the research that backs it.

September 13, 2016 |

Mushiba

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