The Ledes

Thursday, July 3, 2025

CNBC: “Job growth proved better than expected in June, as the labor market showed surprising resilience and likely taking a July interest rate cut off the table. Nonfarm payrolls increased a seasonally adjusted 147,000 for the month, higher than the estimate for 110,000 and just above the upwardly revised 144,000 in May, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday. April’s tally also saw a small upward revision, now at 158,000 following an 11,000 increase.... Though the jobless rates fell [to 4.1%], it was due largely to a decrease in those working or looking for jobs.”

Washington Post: “A warehouse storing fireworks in Northern California exploded on Tuesday, leaving seven people missing and two injured as explosions continued into Wednesday evening, officials said. Dramatic video footage captured by KCRA 3 News, a Sacramento broadcaster, showed smoke pouring from the building’s roof before a massive explosion created a fireball that seemed to engulf much of the warehouse, accompanied by an echoing boom. Hundreds of fireworks appeared to be going off and were sparkling within the smoke. Photos of the aftermath showed multiple destroyed buildings and a large area covered in gray ash.” ~~~

The Wires
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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.

Help!

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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Thank you to everyone who has been contributing links to articles & other content in the Comments section of each day's "Conversation." If you're missing the comments, you're missing some vital links.

INAUGURATION 2029

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.”

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.”

NPR lists all of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners. Poynter lists the prizes awarded in journalism as well as the finalists in these categories.

 

Contact Marie

Email Marie at constantweader@gmail.com

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Wednesday
May112011

The Banality of MoDo

Maureen Dowd writes about how much Osama bin Laden reminds her of Norma Desmond, one of the major characters in "A Star Is Born." Or something.

Following is an e-mail a friend sent to Kate Madison, Karen Garcia & me this morning re: his thoughts on some of the comments to MoDo's column. I have the writer's permission to share the letter with you. I've redacted a few personal notes, including the opening paragraph in which the writer briefly mentions the banality of Dowd's column.


Kate did a nice job of calling out MoDo on her use of the "Bin Laden Slipped Away" meme, trotted out by the MSM, the Neo-cons and just about, well, everyone. He didn't, as Kate declares, "slip away". The Bushies took their eyes off the ball because they were too busy plotting world domination. Bush wasn't kidding when he said he really didn't think much about Bin Laden after the initial furor. He was thinking of blood and glory and killing brown people and re-making the Middle East in his own stunted, half-thought out image. Maybe that's why it's so fucked up now.

I did notice an interesting strain running through several comments, specifically, Marie's and Gemli's. They both refer to the banality of evil. It's funny, I was reading an essay in Hannah Arendt's Life of the Mind the other day. Arendt sat in on the Eichmann trial. She coined that phrase “banality of evil” to describe what Marie notes as Eichmann's seemingly innocuous and pleasant nature. How could such a nice little man be responsible for so much horror? You can say almost the same thing about Bush, except I don't think anyone would describe him as all that pleasant and polite (he's an arrogant, snotty little shit) but his public demeanor is one of good ol’ boy, back slapping, joke telling, occasionally pain in the ass frat boy. But here he goes, in full sociopath mode, initiating not one, but TWO, count 'em, TWO wars. You have to go back to FDR for that kind of two-fer (at least he didn't start the actions in the European and Pacific theaters).

But even closer to home, Gemli's comment called to mind that we are very close to that sort of thing (total evil in a “guy next door” package) right here in the US of A. Karen mentioned the Frontline piece “Capture/Kill” and right at the end there's an interview with an up and coming killer. This guy is the real deal. A hater, a murderer, a guy who made his bones by blowing up scores of civilians with a pipe bomb; someone to whom reason, hope, love, political expediency, national pride, money, power -- nothing -- matters. Only killing. He says that there can be no discussion, no negotiation. He says, revealingly, that this war that Bush started (and Obama continues) is like a sweet dessert for him and his kind. If a day or two go by and they haven't killed someone, they're antsy and restless. Ready for more blood.

It's not a stretch to take that checkered scarf off his head and put on a greasy trucker's cap with NRA or NASCAR stitched on the front, and put him in the mountains of Colorado ready to start a-shootin' guvmint men comin' to steal his freedoms!

I remember that I was reading Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1975 when I heard that Arendt had died. I was just getting into hard core philosophy and I distinctly recall a passage talking about Eichmann discussing his love of Kant and relating that he tried to live his life according to Kant's moral philosophy. Arendt of course rips him a new one for only reading one sentence and ignoring the rest of the 467 pages in the book, but I was struck at how dangerous philosophy could be to lamebrains, or smart, canny, unscrupulous people like David Brooks or Glenn Beck who can use it to provide support for the insupportable, cover for what should never be covered up. Eichmann focused on Kant's rejoinder to the rest of us to obey the law (he was specifically referring to the moral law). But think for a minute. Why did Bush and his legal assassins like Yoo and Gonzalez and Cheney's bully boy Addington, work so fucking hard for so long to provide legal cover that would allow them to attach electrodes to a man's testicles, pour water on him and turn on the juice. They were OBEYING THE LAW.

This is part of Brooks' obsession with those in the Baby Boom generation who (like all of us) questioned authority. A while back Brooks quoted from the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, specifically a book called Metaphors We Live By. Brooks, of course, didn't read it all the way through, probably only scanned for quotes so he could look smart. Unfortunately, I don't have that gene. I actually read the fucking thing. If Brooksie HAD read it, he would have come across the primary, seminal metaphors that describe the way the right and the left work politically, in this country. I believe it has gotten much worse since L and J wrote their book, but the gist of it is that the right wants a patriarchal society in which the Daddy calls the shots and we all dance. He dishes out assignments as quickly as punishment and we all have to take it. This goes along with the idea of why so many on the right (a total puzzlement to most lefties) so frequently vote against their own best interests. They are happy suffering as long as their enemies (mostly, us) suffer too. As long as Daddy spanks us hard, they'll take the lash too. The defining metaphor for the left tends to be much more matriarchal, nurturing and supportive. This, of course, drives the right to distraction.

Anyway, the point here is that there is so much going on under the hood that remains barely noticeable and certainly not thought out. Our news cycle (Marie and Karen, you both must feel the stress of getting things out there in a timely fashion in order to remain relevant -- the other day Marie sent a link to a piece about the disclosure of the Bin Laden killing. Ten minutes made the difference between a scoop and a left-in-the-dirt, also-ran condition) does not allow for thoughtful analysis of what's happening to make us this way. Granted, plenty of people who are making things happen don't have anything close to the type of analytical skills necessary to do more than celebrate surface victories.

But we are getting further and further away from any kind of thoughtful consideration of where we're headed and why or, more to the point, WHO, is pointing us there.

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