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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

Page Links
Saturday
Mar032012

Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot ...

... And Al Franken is a Senator who can subpoena him.

I have some additions to make to the published comments on Rush Limbaugh.

A reader writes that a friend of hers reminded her,

Rush Limpballs was reprimanded immediately after a broadcast of Monday Night Football after making a racist comment about Donovan McNabb, quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles a few years ago. He was immediately fined and taken off the air and very soon afterwards FIRED from his newly hired and long desired position of being a broadcaster for the National Football League and the sweet position of being given MNF. Clearly, one race related comment during one MNF game is worse than the toxic ugly words he has used to once again downgrade women and the strong Georgetown student during the course of this week.

The problem of course is that there is no one to fire Rush from his radio show. His show is syndicated and airs on about 600 radio stations, including the Armed Forces Services Network. Yes, indeed, your tax dollars are supporting Rush's effluvient Santorum. Petitions and letters asking Congress to remove Rush from the AFSN have been unsuccessful. There are only two routes to having him removed: sponsor by sponsor and station by station. This process has been somewhat successful in limiting Glenn Beck's airtime. When sponsors dropped their backing of Beck's Fox "News" show in response to public pressure, Roger Ailes canned him. And he lost his radio audience in several markets -- New York & Philadelphia among them -- when local stations dropped his show.


Another friend of Reality Chex, who is a prominent psychiatrist, tells me that he feels not enough attention has been paid to Rush's suggestion to tape college students having sex and post the videos on the Internet for viewers to "enjoy." This is symptomatic of Rush's objectification of women (ah, those four wives) and a sexual preference for porn (and masturbation?). The doctor describes pornography as "a sexual fetish -- preferring sexual stimulation by inanimate objects." Rush likes his women pixilated and in two dimensions. The psychiatrist also notes that 40 percent of sex addicts have associated chemical addictions. Could that possibly apply to Oxycontin Man? And Rush may be a sick-o, but do his fundamentalist Christian disciples really approve of compulsive masturbation to sexual imagery? How about you, Rick Santorum? Why do "entertainers" get a special pass to have sex "that is counter to how things are supposed to be"?

Finally, this, which is P. D. Pepe's comment come to life on the itty-bitty screen:

Comment1 Comment

Reader Comments (1)

Someone should do some pro-bono work in the interest of Democracy and get a legal suit going against Rush in the young lady's behalf. A well publicized law suit could keep this Republican defamatiom of women in constant view until well after the election.

March 4, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterCarlyle

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