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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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Tuesday
Sep142010

The Commentariat -- September 14

CW: I confess. I didn't know the Boner had a "budget plan." He does, and -- no surprise -- it's extremely simple-minded, extremely radical & extremely loopy. Edmund Andrews of the Fiscal Times reports, "House Republican Leader John Boehner’s plan for rolling back nonsecurity government spending to 2008 levels as part of an overall economic strategy would force cuts in many domestic programs far deeper than Republicans and Democrats have been able to agree on in decades.... If the Republicans' proposed domestic spending cuts were spread evenly through all the affected programs, they would require deep cuts in basic services and big projects, according to budget policy experts."

It became very apparent to me shortly after crossing the border that the government and many of my superiors had no idea what they were doing.... We turned up, took away a country's infrastructure and its law and order with absolutely nothing to put in its place. -- Col. Tim Collins, Irish Brigade

The Guardian: Col. Tim Collins, "a prominent veteran of the Iraq war," said "Britain's government and military leaders had 'absolutely no idea' what to do in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.... Tony Blair, and US president, George Bush, had given Saddam Hussein 'an offer he couldn't understand' and even the Iraqi dictator probably did not know what he was required to do to avoid war, said Collins."

Maybe Happiness Is the Best Revenge. David Leonhardt of the New York Times: although black Americans have not made significant economic progress in the past decades, they are -- unlike whites -- much happier with their lives today than were black Americans in the 1970s.

Martin Luther King, Jr., arrives at Memphis Airport April 3, 1968. He was assassinated the next day. CW: many believe the FBI was involved. Photo by Ernest C. Withers.

I had access to Martin Luther King because we grew up together, came up together in the same social setting. He was comfortable with me.... As a photographer, you've got to be trusted by the people that you come in contact with. One thing I had was a level of moral life of honesty and integrity. -- Ernest C. Withers

New York Times: "Ernest C. Withers, one of the most celebrated photographers of the civil rights era ... was a paid F.B.I. informer." AND here's the Memphis Commercial Appeal story, well worth a read.

Almost all of these confessions looked uncannily reliable. I had known that in a couple of these cases, contamination could have occurred. I didn’t expect to see that almost all of them had been contaminated. -- Brandon Garrett

Dan Balz of the Washington Post: "In the primaries, Republicans have borne the brunt of the anti-establishment fervor that has swept the country. But come Election Day on Nov. 2, say strategists in both parties, Democrats will probably bear the brunt of that anger." ...

... Update. Charles Mahtesian of Politico on what to watch for in Tuesday's primaries.

Jim Tankersley in the National Journal: "Americans offer tepid support for much of the Republican Party's domestic agenda, including repealing the new healthcare law and extending tax cuts for the wealthy, according to the latest Society for Human Resource Management/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, conducted with the Pew Research Center."

"I Did It." John Schwartz of the New York Times: Prof. Brandon Garrett of the University of Virginia uncovers how non-guilty subjects confess crimes to interrogators.

We did not learn the larger lesson of the 1930s: that when the distribution of income gets too far out of whack, the economy needs to be reorganized so the broad middle class has enough buying power to rejuvenate the economy over the longer term. -- Robert Reich

New York Times graphic.Michael Luo of the New York Times: "Outside groups supporting Republican candidates in House and Senate races across the country have been swamping their Democratic-leaning counterparts on television since early August.... Driving the disparity in the ad wars has been an array of Republican-oriented organizations that are set up so they can accept donations of unlimited size from individuals and corporations without having to disclose them. The situation raises the possibility that a relatively small cadre of deep-pocketed donors, unknown to the general public, is shaping the battle for Congress...."

Bob Herbert reviews some of the bad news in Robert Reich's new book Aftershock on the effects the economy's downturn has on ordinary Americans.

Michael Fletcher of the Washington Post: "The number of former workers seeking Social Security disability benefits has spiked with the nation's economic problems.... Policymakers ... suspect the current surge has less to do with any worsening in the health of the workforce than with the poor health of the economy."

Habiba Nosheen of NPR: "Some Jews, Muslims and Christians are abandoning Yahoo and Google and turning to search engines with results that meet their religious standards. Shea Houdmann runs SeekFind, a Colorado Springs-based Christian search engine that only returns results from websites that are consistent with the Bible. He says SeekFind is designed 'to promote what we believe to be biblical truth' and excludes sites that don't meet that standard." CW: my friend Ned writes, "Since the NPR story ran the poor little dears have had to close their SeekFind site. It got broke. Or something. But I'm sure it will make its return if only to, you know, keep satan away from spreading lies to impressionable Christian children about the real world." Here's the audio:

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