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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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Saturday
May172014

The Commentariat -- May 18, 2014

CW: It pains me to owe an apology to Charles Murray, the charlatan "scholar" of the American Enterprise Institute, but it rends me in two Rumpelstiltskin-style to owe a big mea culpa to David Fucking Brooks. But I do, I do. Yesterday I linked as straight news a satirical article about Murray that claimed he said women had smaller brains than men -- which explained why there were no great female philosophers. He did make the assertion about female philosophers, but he never claimed women had teeny-weeny brains. So, Charles Murray, I apologize. Gulp. And David Brooks, I'm vewwy, vewwy sorry. I am sorriest for misleading readers who trusted me not to lead them astray. Thanks to contributor Lisa for setting me straight.

Annals of Journalism, CYA Edition

NEW. Ravi Somaiya of the New York Times: "Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The New York Times, released a statement Saturday afternoon detailing his decision to fire the newspaper’s executive editor, Jill Abramson. He was responding to a growing controversy over accusations by Ms. Abramson’s supporters that gender played a role in her dismissal."

... Sulzberger's statement is here. CW: Nothing about her smallish brain. The Times is all for gender equality, Sulzberger sez.

NEW. Dylan Byers of Politico: "New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger fired executive editor Jill Abramson after concluding that she had misled both him and chief executive Mark Thompson during her effort to hire a new co-managing editor, according to two sources with knowledge of the reason for her termination."


Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times on the early history of the Koch brothers' political involvement in politics. CW: I was interested to see they were among those influenced by the Powell memo.

David Ferguson of the Raw Story: "Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) said in an interview Friday that he is ready and willing to serve on the House Republican committee slated to investigate the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.... In appearance on Rev. Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show on Friday night, Grayson said, 'I would be their worst, worst nightmare. I’d be their worst and last nightmare.'”

Maureen Dowd, following up on Tim Egan's most recent column (linked here May 15), writes an excellent essay about Condoleezza Rice.

Senate Race -- Mississippi-Style

AP: "Authorities say a conservative Mississippi blogger went into a nursing home, photographed the bedridden wife of Republican U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran without permission and posted an image online. Rose Cochran has lived at St. Catherine's Village since 2000 and has dementia. Madison police say 28-year-old Clayton Thomas Kelly of Pearl was arrested Friday and charged with a felony, exploitation of a vulnerable adult. He remained jailed Saturday under $100,000 bond." ...

... Josh Marshall of TPM: "I'm inclined to say this is what happens when you've got a Tea Party candidate who dabbles in neo-confederate and supremacist politics. But boy is this one weird and dirty. Here are the key facts. Incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran's wife has been in a nursing home for more than a decade. Precise details are sketchy but she appears to suffer from some form of advanced dementia and is in precarious health. The Tea Party candidate McDaniel has been dishing out an avalanche of oppo over recent days including a very weird article in Breitbart which in the guise of talking about spending on congressional trips was clearly intended to suggest that Cochran is having an affair." ...

... CW: Excuse me. Are voters supposed to be horrified that a man whose wife has been hospitalized with dementia for 10 years has a relationship with another woman? Is Jane Eyre really relavant in 21st-century Mississippi? Maybe so.

Comments Off

Reader Comments (7)

Marie: what you posted about Charles Murray may not have BEEN true, but it sure FELT true to one who has read about his views or seen him in action ( he was on Bill Maher's show recently). It had the quality that Colbert described so well: truthiness. In abundance.

May 17, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterVictoria D.

Marie,

I'm with Victoria on this one. Just the fact that you thought it could be true is bad enough.

And no apology is necessary to Brooks. You didn't say anything about him that wasn't true. He DOES think Charles Murray is a genius. A couple of years ago, Brooks was beside himself after mainlining Murray's latest claptrap in which he claimed that blacks weren't the only low IQ troublemakers out there. Po' white trash types had, according to Murray, descended the evolutionary tree to sit in the mud alongside blacks because they had been taking handouts from the government, which, of course, shrinks your brain (but not as to the size of the conservative's).

Brooks wondered, in his usual waste of space in the Times, if anyone else that year could possibly write anything equally profound.

So, no. You don't owe that asshole anything. And you're equally correct that Brooks would have to be caught trading kiddie porn with online pedophiles before the Times would get rid of his worthless ass.

And it doesn't matter if the piece was satirical or not. The best satire is good because it's at least somewhat believable. Murray is a discredited imposter, an ideological grifter, and a racist pig-dog.

I get why you need to set the record straight, but this for him, and this for the horse he rode in on.

May 18, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterAkhilleus

@CW: I'm with Victoria and Ak. You don't owe that pair of slimeballs an apology. But you did apologize. That shows you have class and integrity. I don't think that applies to either of them. As I've said before, when I see Brooks on the teevee, he reminds me of some kind of rodent. (How 'bout a rat?) As far as Murray is concerned, he definitely has no integrity.

May 18, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterBarbarossa

Thanks, Ken. We are citizens of the world first and foremost. Good mojo is best shared.

And today, yes, I guess we see why MoDo has got a job.

May 18, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterCitizen625

Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

You needn't apologize to someone because what you said about him COULD have been true? Using that measuring stick George W. Bush doesn't owe anyone an apology for Iraq.

I agree that the apology to Brooks was unnecessary, and that the apology to both Brooks and Murray showed a good deal of class and demonstrates integrity on the part of the CW. But the apology to Murray was certainly warranted.

Just because Murray is six different kinds of asshole doesn't mean we can lie about him, intentionally or not. Kudos to the CW for maintaining that standard.

May 18, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterNoodge

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/drone-pilots-reaper-photo-essay

Wanna be a drone pilot? Elijah Solomon Hurwitz in "Mother Jones" describing what it's like. This post was from last June, but it still applies.

To me, there's something creepy about killing from 7,000 miles away.

May 18, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterBarbarossa

Noodge,

I think if you go back and read what I wrote you'll see that I was not suggesting that it was okay to lie about Murray or that an apology was not called for (I did say that setting the record straight was the way to go), but that I could see how someone might be taken in by the suggestion because of Murray's history. But just because something could be true doesn't make it okay to claim or suggest that it is.

Murray has said and written quite enough for me not to hold him in any kind of esteem, but spreading disinformation about him or anyone else is not something I hold with.

When I wrote "you don't owe that asshole anything" I was referring to Brooks, not Murray.

May 18, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterAkhilleus
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