REALITYCHEX.COM - Constant Comments - The Commentariat -- September 16

The Wires

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.

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

Thursday

Sep162010

The Commentariat -- September 16

Note: Internal links have been removed.

** Michael Moore, with a true history lesson on the lead-up to the Iraq War: "We invaded Iraq because most Americans -- including good liberals like Al Franken, Nicholas Kristof & Bill Keller of the New York Times, David Remnick of the New Yorker, the editors of the Atlantic and the New Republic, Harvey Weinstein, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and John Kerry -- wanted to."

Random Reflections from the Mouse Brain of O'Donnell:

American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they're already into this experiment. -- Christine O'Donnell, 2007

And then there's also the issue of murder with Vincent Foster. That's a much more serious charge than failing to seek legal advice, and yet we're all just blowing that off, and everybody's trying to focus on Newt Gingrich like a witch hunt, to bring him to the stake and burn him, because they don't like the policy that he's behind. -- Christine O'Donnell, 1996

... Let's agree on this: "the Republican party has kicked out the moderates":

Christine O'Donnell is a sideshow freak.... O'Donnell is a creature of an age in which politics have no meaning beyond performance art.... Her résumé is so thin as to be opaque, and a lot of it seems to be a lie. She seems to be something of a deadbeat, and 'U.S. Senator' seems to be her idea of an entry-level position. This morning, she stands one step away from the job. She is what politics produces when you divorce politics from government.... She is what politics produces when you turn it into a game show and the coverage of it over to a generation of high-technology racetrack touts. -- Charles Pierce, Esquire

... The Starfish Eats the Spider, Creepy Metaphors for Creeps:

When you can't compete on ideas..., you try to delegitimize the other guy.... They're attempting to delegitimize one of the most talented men to enter politics in three generations. They did the same thing with Bill Clinton. -- Joe Biden, on the "Republican playbook"

... Rachel Maddow talks to Joe Biden about the upcoming election, and the "garbage" Newt Gingrich repeats:

... AND about the candidates for his Senatorial seat:

... Kate Zirnicke of the New York Times tries to figure out what the relationship between Republicans & the tea party is. She identifies South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint as a likely "bridge" between the two. ...

... John Dickerson in Slate: "Democrats now believe they have a body of evidence -- eight Senate races in which Tea Party candidates won the Republican nomination -- that allows them to argue that the Republican Party has gone nuts." ...

... "The Daily Show" panel of political experts discusses how the Democrats will fuck up the November elections:

Bloomberg: "The U.S. poverty rate rose to the highest level in 15 years in 2009, government data show, underscoring the toll the recession took on household incomes and adding fuel to an election-year debate over the Obama administration's economic poliies."

Fred Kaplan in Slate: the war on corruption in Afghanistan is as important as the war against the Taliban.

President Jimmy Carter in a New York Times op-ed: "During my recent travels to North Korea and China, I received clear, strong signals that Pyongyang wants to restart negotiations on a comprehensive peace treaty with the United States and South Korea and on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."

Jeff Israely of Time has some background on Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the British Isles. For one thing, he won't be arrested.

ABC News: Justice Stephen Breyer ... said he wasn't convinced the First Amendment protected the burning of the Koran:

... NEW. Dahlia Lithwick, in Slate: maybe Stephen Breyer should stop talking on the teevee; it sure got the history of jurisprudence wrong in his musings with Stephanopoulos.

Steven Chu: How to Save the World. Really!

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy ride on one of the firstdesegregated buses. Montgomery, Alabama, December 21, 1956. Photo by Ernest C. Withers.

Whitney Johnson of The New Yorker publishes more photos by Ernest C. Withers, whom the Memphis Commercial Appeal exposed last week as an F.B.I. informant.

Comments Off

Permalink

Email Article