The Ledes

Saturday, August 2, 2025

Washington Post: “A manhunt is underway for a person authorities believe shot and killed four people at a small-town bar in Montana on Friday morning. The shooting took place at approximately 10:30 a.m. at the Owl Bar in Anaconda, home to fewer than 10,000 residents in the southwestern part of the state, the Montana Division of Criminal Investigation said. Local law enforcement identified the suspect, whom they believe to be armed and dangerous, as Michael Paul Brown, 45.” 

The Wires
powered by Surfing Waves
The Ledes

Friday, August 1, 2025

CNBC: “Nonfarm payroll growth was slower than expected in July and the unemployment rate ticked higher, raising potential trouble signs for the U.S. labor market. Job growth totaled 73,000 for the month, above the June total of 14,000 but below even the meager Dow Jones estimate for a gain of 100,000. June and May totals were revised sharply lower, down by a combined 258,000 from previously announced levels. At the same time, the unemployment rate rose to 4.2%, in line with the forecast.”

New York Times: “Known to many as Mary K..., Dr. Gaillard, who died on May 23 at 86, was the first woman hired by the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley, and later became a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. But much of her groundbreaking work occurred earlier, during a long stint as an unpaid visiting scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, a laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border.”

Help!

To keep the Conversation going, please help me by linking news articles, opinion pieces and other political content in today's Comments section.

Link Code:   <a href="URL">text</a>

OR here's a link generator. The one I had posted died, then Akhilleus found one, but it too bit the dust. He found yet another, which I've linked here, and as of September 23, 2024, it's working.

OR you can always just block, copy and paste to your comment the URL (Web address) of the page you want to link.

Note for Readers. It is not possible for commenters to "throw" their highlighted links to another window. But you can do that yourself. Right-click on the link and a drop-down box will give you choices as to where you want to open the link: in a new tab, new window or new private window.

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

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
Sunday
Dec082024

The Conversation -- December 8, 2024

Marie: Okay, a few more days in Reality Chex limbo. However, it's quite a decent limbo, as contributors have linked to some very good articles in the Comments section yesterday and the day before. The result is sort of what I originally envisioned for Reality Chex when I started it in 2008 -- that is, that there would be only about five or six articles we should all read every day to know what was going on. What happened, however, was that the right wing went really crazy really fast in 2009, so that government-as-usual, both of the federal and local levels, became crazy enough to gain attention. The result was that often I couldn't keep up with the news, because the right was sending up dangerous flares everywhere. Millions of Americans still don't get it (RAS found one good reason why in yesterday's links), but those warnings of what could happen were real. Some of the dangers have come to pass, and a much bleaker future seems imminent.

⭐AP: "The Syrian government collapsed early Sunday, falling to a lightning rebel offensive that seized control of the capital of Damascus and sent crowds into the streets to celebrate the end of the Assad family's 50 years of iron rule. Syrian state television aired a video statement by a group of men saying that President Bashar Assad had been overthrown and all prisoners had been set free."

AP: "As the search for UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson's killer goes on, investigators are reckoning with a tantalizing dichotomy: They have troves of evidence, but the shooter remains an enigma. Police don't know who he is, where he is, or why he did it, though they are confident it was a targeted attack instead of a random act."

Comments Off

Reader Comments (12)

"Now Is the Time for Courage
By Marc Elias

One month after the election of Donald Trump I feel more certain about who he is and what he aims to achieve but less certain about who stands in opposition to him. Trump is an aspiring dictator who aims to aggregate his power to reward his friends and punish his enemies.

When he was 28 and living in the Jim Crow South, King gave another, less famous speech that speaks to our times. He spoke about the need to confront fear with courage.

Courage breeds creative self‐affirmation; cowardice breeds destructive self-abnegation. Courage faces fear and thereby masters it; cowardice represses fear and is thereby mastered by it. So we must constantly build dykes of courage to ward off the flood of fear."

December 8, 2024 | Unregistered CommenterRAS

RAS,

Thanks for the "Democracy Docket" link. I didn't know of it.

Here in the blue part of WA ST as we await the coming storm, it's hard for me to know what to do. The storm is still off the coast, gathering strength, but it hasn't yet hit our shores, so it's hard to know what actions to take to prepare for it or to fight it off.

I see one sign of things to come in my morning emails that tell me the vanguard has already arrived. Beyond and behind and below the headlines that we all see about the loony nominations, the Pretender acting presidential on the world stage, and the endless Truth Social rants are the deluge of right wing mails that now litter my inbox, mails that heretofore either missed me entirely or ended up in my spam folder where they belonged.

Why or how that's happening to me I don't know, but if it's a common experience, it might mean something, and that something is not good.

Splendid isolation has its limits and mine have been electronically breached.

December 8, 2024 | Unregistered CommenterKen Winkes

Anne Applebaum, in The Atlantic, on how Assad’s fall offers the possibility of change.


"When Putin talks about a new world order or a 'multipolar world,' as he did again last month, this is what he means: He wants to build a world in which his cruelty cannot be limited, in which he and his fellow dictators enjoy impunity, and in which no universal values exist, not even as aspirations.

This kind of cold, deliberate, well-planned cruelty has a logic to it: Brutality is meant to inspire hopelessness. Ludicrous lies and cynical propaganda campaigns are meant to create apathy and nihilism.
....
But all such 'eternal' regimes have one fatal flaw: Soldiers and police officers are members of the public too. "

December 8, 2024 | Unregistered Commenterlaura hunter

Ken,

Yeah, Elias is always in the middle of so many of the good fights to protect our rights. It is hard to keep up with all the separate sources for information these days. A lot of time I come across individual articles at meme orandum. Some of them are interesting and some of them are right-wing trash.
And yeah, the right-wing has plenty of tricks to get their trash in front of you no matter how hard you try to avoid it. I somehow got on the NRA's mailing list this last year. They keep sending me requests to sign up and pay dues. It's annoying.

December 8, 2024 | Unregistered CommenterRAS

For the Holiday Season

George Santos Claus

December 8, 2024 | Unregistered CommenterRAS

Just another reason to keep Florida politics and politicians in Florida and off the national stage

https://floridapolitics.com/archives/710746-florida-pauses-federal-move-to-increase-family-eligibility-for-kidcare-insurance-program/

December 8, 2024 | Unregistered CommenterBobby Lee

We’ll try it without the html link…

More gobbledygook from an imbecile.

So the murderous tyrant Assad has fled. It’s a standard part of the autocrat’s playbook. After years of torture, murder, oppression, pocket lining, imprisonment of dissidents, when karma comes calling, run away.

And here’s the Fat Fascist, on the cusp of his own dictatorship babbling nonsense about Syria, Russia, the US, Ukraine…and oh yeah, “China can help.” Help what?

First it sounds like Assad’s demise is a good thing, but oh-oh, Russia can’t help, even though they want to? Should? Who knows? Fatty sez it’s Ukraine’s fault that Russia can’t help Assad. Wait…I thought it was a good thing Assad is gone. No? Yes?

This moron has no fucking clue what he’s talking about. He gibbers non-stop ragtime even as he’s in Paris pretending to be a great world leader.

I remember when the Bushies had no idea of the differences between Shiites and Sunnis. This idiot has never heard of either.

But now he’s in charge.

But hey…China can help.

Jesus.

Can’t wait for our tyrant to flee. I guess “flee” is maybe not the right word. How about waddles?

https://digbysblog.net/2024/12/08/president-babble/

December 8, 2024 | Unregistered CommenterAkhilleus

Assad has arrived in Moscow.

Putin has arranged for him to have a very nice hotel room. High up. Great view. Lots of windows.

December 8, 2024 | Unregistered CommenterAkhilleus

NOT a gift link (gift links don't seem to be available on photo essays)
Alan Taylor, in The Atlantic

Photos: Syrians Celebrate the Fall of Assad

"After enduring years of civil war, Syrians took to the streets to celebrate the sudden fall of Assad, both in their own country and in huge refugee communities that have grown across the Middle East and Europe."

December 8, 2024 | Unregistered Commenterlaura hunter

I saw several outtake clips of the DiJiT-Welker interview today, off and on as I was doing chores. I saw several of them more than once. I was reminded of something but couldn't put my finger on it.

Until this evening listening to the NBC news, where they repeated some of the snippets.

Interviewing DiJiT is like playing with a Magic 8 Ball. A response floats to the surface, sort of off-kilter and murky, but the words can in no way be described as "an answer."

Four more years of this crap? What can't be cured must be endured.

December 8, 2024 | Unregistered CommenterPatrick

I hate like hell that the doddering, blubbering, dithering piece of s*** that the morons in this country elected is out there pretending to be a chief executive. I hate like hell that apparently the president of France invited him. Does no one know that Joe Biden is the president? Some outfit said that Biden declined to go, and sent his wife. Ye gods. There is more action happening here about the murder of an unfortunate CEO of a certain health outfit (mine, unfortunately) and that is more important that the overseas appearance of the Worst Pig In The World who doesn't have a clue what is happening anywhere. This is all about as random as anything can be. The Idiot pretends to know that Notre Dame burned six years ago, and he is wondering why this is a big deal to be opening again. Yes, idiot, this is not a grocery store opening. I don't think I can bear to think any more tonight about this Filthy Piece of Crap.

December 8, 2024 | Unregistered CommenterJeanne
Comments for this entry have been disabled. Additional comments may not be added to this entry at this time.