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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.

The Wires

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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.”

Page Links

Wednesday

Mar092016

The Party of Racists

For good reason, Donald Trump & his cadre of white supremacists, flagrant & muted, have dominated the discussion of the GOP's racist leanings. But there's another, equally pernicious form of racism that further defines the GOP. Since Mitt Self-Deportation Romney lost the 2012 election, many party elders looked at the exit polls, discovered the party had a problem attracting Latino voters, & openly (or anonymously) admitted it. (Black voters they don't care about so much because Republicans imagine -- revealing the limited scope of their imaginations -- that blah people are all hanging out in their welfare hammocks chatting on their ObamaPhones about food stamps & other "free stuff.")

But what to do? Rather than robustly supporting immigration reform, for instance, which would appeal to many Latinos but horrify the GOP's white racist base, the poobahs got together & decided to back a symbolic Latino. That is, the white Republican elites thought Hispanic voters would be just thrilled to Dump the Dems in favor of one of their own whose boyhood lusts happened to make him a Latino-by-marriage. Sure enough, Jeb! proved he could speak to the little brown ones, in gringo-accented Spanish, of the horrors of "multi-culturalism" & of "anchor babies," too. But, really, he's one of them: the family eats tacos at home! Problem solved.

A funny thing happened on the way to the primaries. Despite his giant party-raised campaign chest, which put him on the early-state teevee all the time every day, nobody voted for Jeb! "After spending $2800 per vote in Iowa, Jeb Bush and his super PAC, Right to Rise, have continued the spree by paying $1,150 per vote in New Hampshire." Wow! New Hampshire was a bargain!

When Jeb! dropped out of the race after the next round of primaries, GOP elites looked around & turned their lonely eyes to a certified Spanish-speaking Latino, whose name (first AND last) ends in a vowel rather than an exclamation point. This is where the party's inherent racism becomes obvious. Not only do the party elder's think they can shove a guy out front just because he can rumba, but its base of more open, visceral racists have rejected the dancing guy, no doubt because he can rumba.

You can attribute Jeb!'s favored status among party leaders to his family connections, but the old boys' come-lately allegiance to an equally-flawed Hispanic candidate shows their true colors: white, white & whitey-white. It never occurs to them to change the party platform to make it more appealing to Latino voters; it never occurs to them that Hispanic voters may have unique concerns; it never occurs to them that substance matters. What matters is that their new model looks great in a respectable Republican suit & Cuban heels.

There are all kinds of ways to demonstrate racism, & the GOP knows them all. The more genteel among them share their prejudlces in "quiet rooms"; the more honest (if ignorant) ones complain Rubio would grant "amnesty" to Puerto-Rican Americans. The Republican party is the party of racists, from top to bottom.

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Marie,

Party of Racists, indeed. And yet you still hear Confederate apologists try to disprove blatant facts by screaming that Lincoln freed the slaves and he was a Republican and that the KKK was founded by Democrats, ergo, it's impossible for Republicans to be racist. Sure. So Joe Whitey-White can't possibly be racist because his great, great grandfather, who grew up on a farm in Georgia in the 1850's never owned slaves. Also, something, something, something, other guys with hoods but not me.

Makes sense, don't it?

This is still the party of Lee ("nigger, nigger, nigger") Atwater, Philadelphia, Mississippi, site chosen specially by Reagan to kick off his presidential bid, the party of the Southern Strategy, the party of Willie Horton ads, a party whose majority whip, Steve Scalise, was an honored guest speaker at a convention of white supremacists. Did party big wigs decide a guy who is held in high regard by avowed racists maybe shouldn't be their whip? Hell no. They doubled down on him. This is a party who finds the nastiest, most disgusting thing they can say about Barack Obama is that he is from Kenya (even when he's not). This is a yuuuge giveaway. This party is the one that benefited enormously from the organization of the conservative movement, a movement once headed by William F. Buckley who stated as clearly as he could that blacks are an inferior race.

And this is a party which has been directing its dog whistles at both Bull Connor thugs and country club bigots whose only knowledge of other races comes from jostling past dark skinned busboys in hoity-toity restaurants and stiffing black servers with small tips.

This is the party that was once so scared of blacks that Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, passed strict gun ownership laws to keep those scary black men from getting their paws on weaponry, the same party that years later decided that every white man needed a gun to kill those uppity, raping nee-groes if they came sniffing around their women or their property.

The only difference between Reagan and Trump is that the dog whistles are now passé.

They don't even bother trying to hide it anymore.

March 9, 2016 |

Akhilleus

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