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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

Page Links
Wednesday
Dec292010

The Commentariat -- December 30

** Paul Krugman & Robin Wells in the New York Review of Books: President Obama has totally fucked up the hoped-for economic recovery: "Democrats need to make it clear that if Obama isn’t going to be the leader of the Democratic agenda — and all indications are that he can’t or won’t — they will advance that agenda anyway, with or without his help. They have to be ready to delink their political fate from Obama, and make it clear that they won’t tolerate further undermining of their goals by deluded calls for bipartisanship."

** Revolving Door. Zachary Goldfarb of the Washington Post: "The president's recently departed budget director is joining Citigroup. The New York Federal Reserve Bank's derivatives expert is joining Goldman Sachs.... The vast overhaul of financial regulations and the renewed intensity of investigations into white-collar crime has been a boon for regulators, prosecutors and financial policymakers looking to cash in on their government experience and contacts. In recent months, prominent officials from the White House, Justice Department, SEC, banking regulators and other agencies, both federal and state, a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/29/AR2010122902721.html?hpid=topnews" target="_blank">have been walking through the proverbial revolving door to join Goldman, Citi, other financial companies and top law firms in Washington and New York." ...

... Lisa Rein of the Washington Post: "The federal internship program that President Obama plans to shut down in March has been criticized by union leaders for 'abuses.' ... But what were abuses to some ... were to many managers a welcome system of recruiting the best talent to their agencies. And they say scrapping the program in favor of one geared solely to recent school graduates will leave them at a big disadvantage." ...

... ** Michael Fletcher of the Washington Post: "As they return home to the worst labor market in generations, the veterans who are publicly venerated for their patriotism and service are also having a harder time than most finding work.... While their nonmilitary contemporaries were launching careers during the nearly 10 years the nation has been at war, troops were repeatedly deployed to desolate war zones. And on their return to civilian life, these veterans are forced to find their way in a bleak economy where the skills they learned at war have little value."

Pitchfork & Torches Time. Arthur Delaney & Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post: Glenn Beck advocates for the return of the 19th-century (& before) poorhouse. President Obama seems to like the idea. ...

... Paul Rosenberg elaborates in Open Left: "Barack Obama [is] sleepwalking us back to Grover Cleveland-land, as he articulates more and more of the age-old conservative Republican mindset."

Ruth Simon of the Wall Street Journal: "Some big U.S. banks are starting to increase their lending to businesses as demand for loans rises and healthier banks seek to grab customers from weaker rivals. After declining steadily for most of the past two years, the amount of commercial and industrial loans held by commercial banks inched upward during the past two months, according to the Federal Reserve.... An uptick in business lending is an optimistic sign for the economy...."

New York Times Editors: "... new Republican rules will gut pay-as-you-go because they require offsets only for entitlement increases, not for tax cuts. In effect, the new rules will codify the Republican fantasy that tax cuts do not deepen the deficit."

Tom Jackman of the Washington Post: "A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that noncitizens in criminal cases must be advised of the possible consequences of a conviction has sparked a flurry of appeals by defendants who claim that they didn't know that conviction would lead to deportation.... Judges and lawyers across the country have scrambled to deal with the ramifications of the U.S. Supreme Court's March ruling in Padilla v. Kentucky, which clarified a defendant's Sixth Amendment right to counsel."

Eric Schmitt of the New York Times: "The Obama administration is expressing alarm over reports that thousands of political separatists and captured Taliban insurgents have disappeared into the hands of Pakistan’s police and security forces, and that some may have been tortured or killed.... The concern is over a steady stream of accounts from human rights groups that Pakistan’s security services have rounded up thousands of people over the past decade, mainly in Baluchistan, a vast and restive province...."

Carlotta Gall & Ruhullah Khapalwak of the New York Times: "The inauguration of a new [Afghan] Parliament in just weeks threatens to worsen ethnic tensions and instability and to drive an important part of President Hamid Karzai’s political base into the arms of the insurgency, Afghans and foreign officials warn."

David Barboza of the New York Times: why Shanghai students outperform students 65 other countries -- "discipline, rote learning and obsessive test preparation." ...

... BUT Jiang Xueqin, a deputy principal of Peking University High School, wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the regimentation that produces high test scores also has meant that Chinese students "... cannot work independently, lack the social skills to work in a team and are too arrogant to learn new skills."

Behind the Scenes. President Obama signs repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell:

Crackpot News

David Catanese of Politico: "Former Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell issued a remarkable statement Wednesday night, accusing both political parties in Delaware and the Vice President of the United States of trying to destroy her political career through charges she misused campaign funds." Catanese includes O'Donnell's complete statement. ...

Philip Rucker & Krissah Thompson of the Washington Post: House Republicans will institute new rules that (1) will require opening the Congressional session by reading the Constitution aloud. (2) "And then they will require that every new bill contain a statement by the lawmaker who wrote it citing the constitutional authority to enact the proposed legislation. Call it the tea party-ization of Congress." ...

... I think it's entirely cosmetic. This is the way the establishment handles grass-roots movements. They humor people who are not expert or not fully cognizant. And then once they've humored them and those people go away, it's right back to business as usual. It looks like this will be business as usual -- except for the half-hour or however long it takes to read the Constitution out loud. -- Prof. Kevin Gutzman, a conservative libertarian

... Related: Frivolous News

Republican Presidential Contenders Fight about Flab. Jason Horowitz & Nia-Malika Henderson of the Washington Post: "Sarah Palin has taken to assailing Michelle Obama's anti-obesity initiative on her reality show and elsewhere, while former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, the Republican Party's resident authority on obesity and a potential Palin rival, has been defending it from Palin's salvos. Two other possible GOP presidential contenders, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.), have also praised Obama's efforts.

Michael Shear of the New York Times recalls the most famous refudiations of their earlier positions made by politicians in 2010. P.S. Looks like Sarah Palin can't tell a "p" from a "d." Okay, a "p" is just an upside-down lower-case "d." CW: she's Ginger Rogers. She types upside-down. While wearing heels.

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