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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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Monday
Mar142011

The Iraq War Was All Your Fault

Found this portrait of Douthat on the Internet. Seems appropriate.What a surprise. The Times moderators scrubbed my comment on Ross Douthat's column. I don't think my comment was abusive, as no doubt the Times trolls did. I think Douthat was abusive. You be the judge. I am purposely not linking to his column. The citation below is what irked me. My response to it follows:

The Iraq war became known as George W. Bush’s war after Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction didn’t turn up, because at that point no liberal wanted to take responsibility for the conflict. -- Ross Douthat

 

You've written a lot of malarkey in your columns, Mr. Douthat, but this little throwaway line is a stunning new low.

The Iraq War "became known as George W. Bush's war" because it was George W. Bush's war.

Saddam's WMDs didn't "turn up"? In this clever little phraseology, you have made the inanimate WMDs responsible for not creating themselves, then marching into our sights waving white flags. Yup, it's all their fault. The fact that the Bush Administration & their enablers in the CIA just invented WMDs to try to justify an unjustifiable war is all the WMDs' fault. They failed to "turn up." 

"No liberal wanted to take responsibility for the conflict"? Why would a "liberal .. take responsibility" for getting us into the Iraq War since no liberal had anything to do with it. Yeah, quite a few quasi-liberals voted to allow Bush to take military action against Saddam's regime, but they did it based on Bush & George Tenet's "slam-dunk" assurances that Saddam was building bombs & cooking up chemical weapons in the basement. When the IAEA couldn't find any nuke production, the Bush Administration just said they hadn't looked hard enough. Meanwhile, Bush and Co. were tarring people like me as "unpatriotic" because we opposed the war. Bush thought the whole scheme was so hilarious that when WMDs failed to "turn up," he did a little skit where he looked for them under his desk. Funny. Too bad all the people killed in Iraq couldn't laugh along with him.

I didn't read the rest of your column, Mr. Douthat. Maybe it says something brilliant. I'll never know. But when you tar the left for not taking responsibility for a war that was a total Bush job, you completely discredit yourself. Nothing else you write matters. Ever.

Apologize.

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