The Wires
powered by Surfing Waves
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.

Thank you to everyone who has been contributing links to articles & other content in the Comments section of each day's "Conversation." If you're missing the comments, you're missing some vital links.

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

Thursday
Dec302021

"How to Steal an Election"

Senator Doctor Rand Paul is a well-educated man. Admittedly, his undergraduate degree is from a southern university where trustees later thought it would be a good idea to select Ken Starr as its president & chancellor. But despite Li'l Randy's flirtation with the little-known god Aqua Buddha (a religious episode he later could not recall), and despite the fact that he wasn't actually graduated from Baylor University, Duke University's School of Medicine found him good enough to accept into its program, possibly as a legacy (Li'l Randy's doctor-congressman father Ron Paul was a graduate of the same school of medicine).

All that education notwithstanding, Rand Paul does not seem very bright. I haven't the space to catalog all of stupid ideas Rand has shared with the public. A Google search for "stupid things Rand Paul has said" elicited about 4.7 million hits. And the hits just keep on coming. Steve Benen of MSNBC wrote Tuesday,

"The American Conservative website published this piece [by William Doyle] last week, which described the Democratic electoral strategy in Wisconsin this way: "Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results."

Rand Paul then republished Doyle's observation in a tweet, describing it as a lesson in "how to steal an election."

As Akhilleus wrote in Wednesday's Comments thread, "This is how democracy works." Benen agrees: what Democrats were doing "was simply democracy at work: Democrats targeted a competitive battleground state — a state the Democratic ticket has won in eight of the last nine presidential election cycles — implementing a strategy that involved messaging, access, and legal voter participation. There was nothing nefarious or untoward about it."

If you parse Doyle's sentence & Paul's analysis, you will no doubt come to the same conclusion Akhilleus & Benen did. But there are clues -- dogwhistles, you might say -- in Doyle's description of just how he and Randy believe this Democratic "election stealing" works:

Doyle describes Democrats "harvesting and counting the results." "Harvesting" is a loaded word. "Ballot harvesting" is a practice in which a partisan group distributes and collects ballots and takes them to polling locations. Particularly unscrupulous "harvesters" might "accidentally lose" any ballots they believe could be for the "wrong candidates."

AND built into Doyle's construction is the implication that it was Democrats who were doing the counting, not polling machines & elections officials.

Doyle also writes in that loaded sentence that ballot harvesters were "convincing potential voters to complete [ballots] in a legally valid way." In other words, harvesters were coaching voters on how to fill out their ballots so that they marked their votes for Democratic candidates.

In addition, Doyle describes this Democratic activity as taking place in "an area heavy with potential Democratic votes." That of course makes sense; Democrats would seek out Democratic voters & let Republicans get their own voters to participate in the election. But Doyle also is building in racist and ageist implications: those "areas" "with potential Democratic votes" are apt to be neighborhoods with a majority ethnic minority population, or -- in the case of Madison -- with lots of "leftist" students.

Doyle also is particularly exercised over the cost of the Democrats' outreach programs, which he addresses at the top of his article. He charges that a "shadow campaign" was secretly financed by none other than ... Mark Zuckerberg. and his wife Priscilla Chan. Zuckerberg is Jewish & Chan is Buddhist (but not Aqua Buddhist!). So besides leftist kids & Black people, we're to assume that an international cabal of non-Christians financed the "big steal."

While there was no evidence of vote harvesting in Wisconsin during the 2020 election (that I could find in a Google search), evidently Wisconsin Democrats mounted a robust GOTV effort in the 2020 election, one made crucial by the coronavirus pandemic. What Rand Paul, William Doyle and other right-wingers find galling is that GOTV activities tend to bring out more Democratic-leaning people: people who may not have time to stand in line to vote, may be preoccupied with student activities or may not have ready transportation to the polls. Or, as Rand Paul himself put it more euphemistically earlier this year, "The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for."

Reader Comments (2)

Rand Paul: "The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for."

Lil' Randy couldn't have said it better. If you believe you are the country, anything and anyone else is necessarily "traitorous," and "un-American."

And, of course, that makes you king.

In Randy's (or the Pretender's) case, a very dumb one.

December 30, 2021 | Unregistered CommenterKen Winkes

The bottom line is that preening, whining traitors like Li’l Randy believe that any electoral victory for Democrats is illegitimate because only Republicans should be allowed to rule. Trump and his brownshirts and their sycophantic supporters and fellow conspirators like Gym Jordan, Bannon, et al, have taken that belief to its post-logical conclusion, making not just allowances for violence in overthrowing Democrats who have been fairly elected, but making violence a requirement for restoring authoritarian, viciously anti-democratic rule by the Party of Traitors.

And once again, they’re saying the quiet part out loud. The fetid Fat One is now screaming that the January 6th commission is looking for evidence of criminal wrongdoing,

Exactly. Think he’s afraid they’ll find it? Why else keep running to judges begging for protection?

But this isn’t a one-off. This is a prologue. Much more of this to come.

December 30, 2021 | Unregistered CommenterAkhilleus
Comments for this entry have been disabled. Additional comments may not be added to this entry at this time.