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INAUGURATION 2029

Marie: I don't know why this video came up on my YouTube recommendations, but it did. I watched it on a large-ish teevee, and I found it fascinating. ~~~

 

Hubris. One would think that a married man smart enough to start up and operate his own tech company was also smart enough to know that you don't take your girlfriend to a public concert where the equipment includes a jumbotron -- unless you want to get caught on the big camera with your arms around said girlfriend. Ah, but for Andy Bryon, CEO of A company called Astronomer, and also maybe his wife, Wednesday was a night that will live in infamy. New York Times link. ~~~

Commencement ceremonies are joyous occasions, and Steve Carell made sure that was true this past weekend (mid-June) at Northwestern's commencement:

~~~ Carell's entire commencement speech was hilarious. The audio and video here isn't great, but I laughed till I cried.

CNN did a live telecast Saturday night (June 7) of the Broadway play "Good Night, and Good Luck," written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, about legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow's effort to hold to account Sen. Joe McCarthy, "the junior senator from Wisconsin." Clooney plays Murrow. Here's Murrow himself with his famous take on McCarthy & McCarthyism, brief remarks that especially resonate today: ~~~

     ~~~ This article lists ways you still can watch the play. 

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.”

 

Contact Marie

Email Marie at constantweader@gmail.com

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Thursday
Feb102011

Rep. Lee Resigns over Craigslist Scandal

CW: I've moved this post up, as there are some updates.

Congressman Christopher Lee (R-NY) in his official photo & in the one he sent to the woman he contacted via Craigslist. Left: Congressional photo; right: photo by Chris Lee via Gawker."A Classy Guy." Maureen O'Connor of Gawker: "Rep. Christopher Lee is a married Republican congressman serving the 26th District of New York. But when he trolls Craigslist's 'Women Seeking Men' forum, he's Christopher Lee, 'divorced' 'lobbyist' and 'fit fun classy guy.' One object of his flirtation told [Gawker] her story.... By email, Lee identified himself as a 39-year-old divorced lobbyist and sent a PG picture to the woman from the ad. (In fact, Lee is married and has one son with his wife. He's also 46.) Read the whole story; Lee at first asserted his e-mail account had been hacked, but Gawker has him dead to rights. ...

     ... This story was going down the page in The Soaps till I read the update. Now it's news: "Three hours after his shirtless Craigslist antics appeared [in Gawker], Rep. Chris Lee (R-NY) announced his resignation from the U.S. House of Representatives."

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post has some info on the political ramifications. Lee represents the 26th Congressional District -- between Rochester & Buffalo -- which went for McCain with 52% of the vote in 2008, the year Lee was first elected. He easily won re-election in 2010.

Jimmy Vielkind of the Albany Times Union runs down what happens next in the 26th Congressional District as best he can, inasmuch as there are lots of complications.

Raymond Hernandez of the New York Times just got an item up -- the story is running on the front page of the Times website, complete with the beefcake picture. I'm sure this schmuck always imagined himself on the front page of the Times, but probably not in just this context. Here's an expanded story by Hernandez that doesn't really cover any new ground. ...

Jill Terreri of the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle has some tidbits: "Conservative radio talk show host Bill Nojay described Lee as a rising star in the Republican Party, and a Boy Scout.... Here's a good one:

At the same time, responding to what may seem like a friendly e-mail or an appealing marketing offer can have serious consequences. Private information and images can so easily be transmitted to friends and strangers alike. -- Christopher Lee, 2009, in an opinion piece in support of an Internet safety bill he was sponsoring

Update. David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post: "House Speaker John Boehner on Thursday called the resignation of Rep. Chris Lee 'the right decision,' but declined to talk about whether he had advised Lee to go.... Boehner also deflected questions about a report in a Capitol Hill newspaper last year, which said he had advised a group of GOP legislators - including Lee - to curb inappropriate behavior with female lobbyists." ...

     ... What Fahrenthold is too delicate to mention is this National Enquirer story, which seems to have legs as it's been reported independently elsewhere. Here's a snippet from the online story; you have to buy the tabloid to read the full story:

Capitol Hill insiders and political bloggers have been buzzing about an upcoming New York Times probe -- detailing an alleged affair that  [John Boehner,] the 61-year-old married father of two, had with pretty Washington lobbyist Lisbeth Lyons. And an ENQUIRER investigation has uncovered a bedroom encounter that Boehner - second in line of succession to the presidency - allegedly had with Leigh LaMora, a 46-year-old former press secretary to ex-Colorado Congressman Joel Hefley.

Danielle Belton of TheLoop21 interviews the woman who outted Chris Lee. ...

     ... Update. The Washington Post's Reliable Source identifies the woman at the center of the scandal as Yesha Callahan, a faculty specialist for the University of Maryland and single mother of a preteen son.

Last year, Roll Call listed Lee among the 50 richest members of Congress:

The churn in the Lee family assets continued last year, and the New York Republican appears to come out a little better off than he was before. After his election in 2008, Lee — who had been an executive in his family’s mechanical parts business — sold numerous assets, and his apparent net worth dropped from a little more than $11 million to just more than $7 million.

Last year, Lee bought and sold dozens of mutual fund accounts in hundreds of transactions, and his reported minimum net worth increased more than $1 million.

Alan Bedenko of WNY News: "The sole member of the New York State congressional delegation to vote against guaranteeing health care and monitoring for the heroes of 9/11 was Chris Lee from NY-26. Lee’s objection? He can’t STAND the government having the job-killing audacity to expect companies making a profit in the United States to actually pay income taxes on those profits. Only the little people pay taxes."

K. Lee of the New York Examiner: Chris Lee was one of the sponsors of H.R. 3, the draconian bill designed to stop funding abortions except in cases of "forcible rape." (Republicans removed the adjective "forcible" from the bill after a public outcry, but the bill itself is wending its way through the House.) 

Brian Stelter of the New York Times argues that Gawker's new "news" format -- widely panned by the site's regulars -- helped drive the Chris Lee story by keeping it in a prominent position on Gawker's main page, wheras in the older blog format the story would have moved down the page as staff posted new stories.

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