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INAUGURATION 2029

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.”

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.”

NPR lists all of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners. Poynter lists the prizes awarded in journalism as well as the finalists in these categories.

 

Contact Marie

Email Marie at constantweader@gmail.com

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Friday
Apr082011

The Wunderkind Wizard of Washington

Paul Krugman tears Paul Ryan's "ludicrous and cruel" plan to little bitty shreds.

Once again, my comment was iced, so here it is:


Karen Garcia aptly labeled Paul Ryan and his plan Cheez Whiz, but I have another Whiz in mind -- the Wizard of Oz. Ryan has somehow managed to wrap into his persona the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion & the Tin Man.

The Scarecrow may be a stretch, for you have to assume that Ryan doesn't have a brain. If you take him at his word -- that he really believes he has devised a great plan that will be good for the country -- then he is the Scarecrow. As Krugman and other analysts have illustrated these past few days, Ryan's numbers, especially those based on Heritage Foundation projections, are unbelievable. Ryan isn't above contradicting himself, either -- accepting some CBO numbers while rejecting others. So if you believe Paul Ryan is an honorable man, you have to assume he doesn't have a brain -- like Frank Baum's Scarecrow.


The Cowardly Lion is an easy one. Even in this newspaper, columnists have been calling Ryan "courageous" and "brave." If Ryan were courageous, he would have told the truth when he rolled out his plan. Instead, he concentrated only on the spending cuts in his roll-out video with its charts and graphs. Had he even mentioned the big ole tax cut part -- which the cowardly Mr. Ryan did not -- he would have completely undermined his argument that these humungous cuts in essential services were necessitated by the deficit. You just can't say in the same breath you are going to cut programs for the neediest Americans and cut taxes (to below the middle-class tax rate) for the richest Americans without somebody catching on. Ryan roars, all right, but he is a Cowardly Lion. He doesn't dare tell the truth about his own program.

And the Tin Man? The Tin Man -- just like Paul Ryan -- lacked a heart. I don't know what has made Mr. Ryan so craven, but perhaps he thinks of each of us as just a number. (Probably shouldn't be the Social Security number -- deep in his heart, Ryan wants to gut Social Security, too, but he's saving that part of his plan for another day.) If Ryan thought of us as living, breathing people rather than as abstract numbers, he would have to think of the people under age 55 whose retirements he plans to decimate. He would have to think of the disabled people he will leave to fend for themselves. He would have to think of the poor, sick people who would not be able to get medical help until it was perhaps too late. He'd have to think of the deserving students who couldn't get low-interest financial aid for college. If Ryan had a heart, he couldn't sleep at night. He couldn't look at himself in the mirror. So I can only conclude he isn't sleeping, doesn't have a mirror -- or, more than likely, he doesn't have a heart. He's the Tin Man.

In Baum's story, it turns out the Scarecrow really had a brain, the Cowardly Lion really had courage all along & the Tin Man did indeed have a heart. But real life isn't as neat as fiction. In real life, we got Paul Ryan, a man devoid of those characteristics that define us as honorable women and men.

Wunderkind? I'm not sure Ryan even qualifies as humankind.

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