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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak”:

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning

Mind your own credulity

As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”

They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:

[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”

The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work — and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]

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timetravellingkitty · 4 months

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hi!! I just found out about tumblr having an anti-hindutva tag and I shall be making myself comfortable here! just found your account like a few mins ago and if it’s ok, i wanted to ask some questions (you absolutely don't have to answer if you don't like any of them or even if you don't feel like answering :) ) (edit added, this ask got way too long lol. feel free to skip it! also, you're kinda super cool lol)

I'm Indian, currently outside India, and I've only started learning about the shitshow going on in my 'mahaan bharat' since November (specifically since finding out that we are Irahell's biggest weapons buyer). and the more I find out the more shocked and heartbroken I feel...

like this week i learnt about the immigration ban in US against Chinese women that existed a few decades ago, and the ongoing discrimination against Palestinians in Canadian immigration services... and both the times I was so disgusted and there was this subconscious feeling that India should never be like that. but then an hour ago I learnt about the 2019 CAA and wtf!?

another example being that currently we're seeing israhell's continuous bombing of heritage sites of great cultural and religious significance, that also held so many centuries old records and histories... and learning about how they are bulldozing over graveyards and exhuming them...

and then today I learnt about Akhonji Masjid and Gyanvapi Masjid and of course have known about Babri Masjid for a few weeks now...

and only learnt about Kashmir in november...

and I feel like my whole worldview has shifted from a previous foundation, except it's so drastic and I still don't have a new foundation...

I try to talk to members of my family about this but they're the Indian equivalent of the U.S. liberals, and every single time they'll tell me "whatever news you're hearing is propaganda written by Pakistan/China/U.S./Russia. trust me I have Muslim friends and they're very happy. you just don't know the situation cause you're not in India" and like it sometimes make me think maybe I'm the one losing my mind...

I even read some places about free Punjab and that confused the fuck out of me cause I'm Punjabi (who does not live in Punjab) and I don't have any clue what it's about... I asked my fam, but they just gave me a weird look and told me to stay away from anyone that mentions Khalistan😭💀

(this got way longer than I expected, so sorry) but would you have any recommendations for any blogs/articles/books/podcast resources or any personal recommendations for news publications that are reliable (finding God would probably be easier than finding such publications lmao) like I thought Al-Jazeera is super credible, but then read that they're super credible when it comes to Palestine, not when it's global...

like where tf do I go from here lol

hello nonnie! some news sites I'd recommend are newslaundry (they have a youtube channel too), the wire, scroll.in and newsclick. maktoob media is mostly focused on minority rights in india. hindutvawatch.org is about hindu fascist violence committed against minorities. I still think you should stick to al-jazeera at least when it comes to palestine (they have journalists on the ground there, shireen abu akleh was one of them)

this is a good introduction to anyone wanting to learn about hindutva, this and this are about how india is becoming increasingly unsafe for minorites and is undergoing a democratic backsliding. this and this are about the rss link to nazism

hostile homelands by azad essa is about india's historical relationship with israel and the parallels between hindutva and zionism. the brown history podcast has an episode about how india went from the first non-arab state to recognise palestine to its largest buyer of weapons, featuring azad essa (x). you can also read colonising kashmir by hafsa kanjwal about how india came to militarily occupy kashmir. if you want to learn more about kashmir there are the blogs kashmiraction.org and standwithkashmir (which is um. blocked in india. i wonder why)

i have not read khaki shorts and saffron flags yet but this one is about the history of the rss. i also suggest watching the documentaries ram ke naam and jai bhim, comrade which are about the hindutva mobilisation in the 1980s

for me free punjab is very ?? the indian government is beyond evil as they continue to spy on sikhs abroad (and ofc, how can we forget the 1984 sikh genocide) but i don't think liberation will be achieved through a religious ethnostate. any state formed on the basis of a religion will inevitably turn out to be a disaster. i do encourage you to read lost in history: 1984 reconstructed by gunisha kaur, which is about the human rights violations committed against sikhs during this time and why operation bluestar was in fact not about freeing sri harmandir sahib from "terrorists." all i can say is to stand with sikhs unapologetically as our shitass government continues to commit more and more human rights violations against them

in general, i'd tell you to observe the language used by different news outlets and question it (eg. american news referring to israelis below the age of 18 as children but the same courtesy is not extended to palestinians) and check their sources. if it's from whatsapp university don't even bother

#i really really hoped this poorly drafted response helps #feel free to ask more qs if you have any!#also omg fellow punjabi HIIIII I'M PUNJABI FROM MY MOM'S SIDE #asks #anon #hindutva

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hugheses · 6 months

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The Rise of the Hughes Brothers with Jim Hughes - Nov 3, 2023

transcript below cut ↴

Jeff Marek: Not exactly a secret that, right now the Hughes family, all three of them dominating the National Hockey League. Whether it's Jack with 20 points, whether it's Quinn leading all defenders or whether it's Luke trailing Logan Cooley by a single point in rookie scoring, this is the Hugheses’ NHL. We're just skating in it. Father Jim Hughes is a hockey director of player development for CAA, he joins me now. Jim, how are you today? Thanks so much for hopping aboard.

Jim Hughes: Hi Jeff, how are you today?

Jeff Marek: I'm doing very well. Let me jump in with last night. I'm gonna ask you a few things historically about the kids and growing up and the family and how in the family full of defenders you ended up with, you know, one of the elite forwards in the game. But I want to rewind to yesterday. So, you know, watching Vancouver just take apart the San Jose Sharks, I mean, it's a blowout. It's a, it's a tilted ring, 10 to 2 is the final and I'm seeing Quinn, we all are and he's just piling on points here. And after two periods, I think we're all, you know, rushing to our media guide to try to figure out, OK, what's the most amount of points a defenseman's ever had in a single game. And it's Paul Coffey and Tom Bladen with eight. And I'm thinking to myself, Quinn's got a shot. Here, like Quinn's got a real shot here. And then third period rolls around and you know Carson Soucy’s on the power play and things are sort of Tocchet’s calming everything down. Was there a part of Jim Hughes that said, ‘I want to see if my kid can set a record here?’

Jim Hughes: No, and the reason why we we know we know David Quinn and Wiseman and and and and Gordon, they're they're all on the other bench and I think I think the Vancouver staff know that really well in terms of you know they could have been maybe even goalie interference on Demko at at the end but. Everybody wants that thing to just get going and get out of there and and you know, it was it wasn't an easy night for San Jose, so. I I think it was done, you know in the right way with the right manner and and and I think yeah, I mean I I think it was it was time to put some other people on the ice and give some other people opportunities.

Jeff Marek: Interesting, that is... Listen, you're very much a hockey guy and I understand where that comes from. On my perch here. I just love watching records get broken. And right now, you know, your sons are playing on a different level. And man, New Jersey is must watch television. Vancouver is must watch television and a lot of it is because of your boys. Like when you watch them right now, like what? You know take us behind a father's eyes here. What do you see when you watch all your three kids playing in the NHL right now?

Jim Hughes: Well, listen, it's a it's a, it's a very difficult league. It's a humbling league. It's a really hard league. It's a man's league and... You kind of just keep your feet in the ground and you just go one day at a time. Yeah, they're having success because, you know, the general managers, the coaches, they've done a good job building this team and putting good teams together and adding pieces so. So the journey, you know, Jack's been at this five years now and so they're building it and it's really starting to turn the corner and you know, I feel the same way about Vancouver and Quinn’s situation, but you you're bringing these additional pieces such as Hronek, who's doing a wonderful job with Quinn. A guy like Toffoli that's playing with Jack, who's just a hockey, you know, you know, he's a hockey, hockey, hockey guy, and that's probably why Jack loves him so much because they have so much in common. But Toffoli's got so many… intricacies and he does so many things well as a hockey player, he's a hockey junkie, so. You know they've added really nice pieces and you know, just sit back and you know Ellen and I, we just, we were in the living room last night, we actually had three TV's going. We watched the U17s from Prince Edward Island at 6 o'clock and then we watched Fantilli and Kent Johnson in Columbus, and then we turned on the Vancouver game, and I think we had the Ottawa game on the other TV. So it was like we, it was a busy night here, but we, we sit here and we watch and we're, we're enjoying you know how the kids are playing and. Yeah, they, they work hard in the summers. We have a fantastic group here of about 12 to 15 players. And they get after it three times a week. And we're big proponents of, you know, when you're 20, you got to, you got to make yourself better. When you're 21/22/23, you got to keep improving. You got to keep working on your skill sets and you gotta keep climbing the mountain. You got to keep getting better. So we have this group in the summer with Dylan Larkin and Werenski and Debrincat and Kyle Connor, Beniers, and Copp, and Sanderson. Luke, Jack, Quinn. I mean, so they get going and and really they challenge each other all summer and they just keep getting better. And now that's what you're kind of seeing in, I guess you're seeing in the... In the early part of the season.

Jeff Marek: With Jim Hughes, you know, one of the things, you know, Elliot and I, every year at the NHL Players Media tour. Uh, it's always fun catching up with Jack and one of the things that he always talks about, we always ask him too, you know, how? How were the family competitions in the offseason? How was, you know, the summer golf and summer tennis and whatever games the kids are playing against each other. And I can't help but think. And you can... Can shine the spotlight on this it seems. As if this is a family where all the kids have grown up, not just competing against other kids, other teams, but competing against one another like it, it seems as if you know competition has been at the forefront of their minds. You know, since they were, you know, able to play hockey, golf, tennis, whatever it is. Have they always been like this amongst each other? Like ultra competitive?

Jim Hughes: Always, and even when the kids were living in Mississauga. On a Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, when all the hockey was done, there would be six of them down in the basement. Maybe playing, you know, basement hockey and everybody, everything has a winner and a loser, unfortunately. So if they're out playing tennis or they're playing golf or they're playing pool. There's a judgment. There's a judgment going on. And so I don't, I don't think they're trying to outdo each other but it's... It's a competitive environment and no different than the Tkachuk family or you know, we can go on and on and on, but yeah, they get after it, there's no doubt, right? You know, if it's, if it's golf, they get after it and if it's, if it's tennis, they get after it, and so they probably bring out the best in each other.

Jeff Marek: You know it. It's so fascinating too. And listen, Henry Staal was, you know, was asked, you know, similar questions about his boys as well, you know, is there one sort of common thread that's running through all the kids here? I mean, you've got three kids in the NHL, like getting one to the NHL is remarkable enough. You've got three in the National Hockey League. Like, what's the, we always talk about, you know differences between people. I'm curious what the similarities are between these three kids, that allows them to be top of their field, top of their position in the NHL.

Jim Hughes: It's a very good question. Obviously people see the skating. And we used to drive the Zamboni guys crazy because we'd have six nets on the ice and people said, “We only have two goalies, why do you have all these nets?” But it was all it was, all skating mechanisms. It was all going around nets and and it's a tight turn with explosion and a burst and coming out of the turn faster than you go into it. But I would think that the biggest common threat between the three of them is their work ethic. And I always say that to the young kids and the kids we work with. Is that the work ethic propels and makes everything better. If you have a great work ethic, your skating will get better, your shot will get better, your passing will get better. Your physical training and the gyms will get, everything can get better. If you have a high workload. And so I would say, you know that would be the common thread because you've just got to keep getting better in all areas of your game, and if you got the work ethic ingrained in you then you know, there is a very good chance that you can become the best version of yourself.

Jeff Marek: You played, Ellen played. Jim, I'm curious. You know what that you know, you know, when you, when you snatched the pebble from the master's hand, then you can leave the temple of moment was. Like do you remember the moment where the kids got better than you and what was that like for Jim Hughes?

Jim Hughes: Um, well, we've never played in the league, so [laughs] it's really easy. It's really easy. We just we support, we're we're we're, we're resources and we're- we support and listen with any of these kids in the league that get there, there's a small village of people, it's coaches and strength coaches and NTDP coaches and youth. Approaches and there's a lot of people that are involved with the process as we call it resources and so. You know we try to make friendly suggestions like we there's ups and downs and there's roadblocks and there's highs and lows and. Sometimes we try to bring the temperature down like. You know they're competitive people and Jack will say something and I'll say, you know, Lindy wants what you want. You want what Lindy wants. You want the same thing. Like relax, it's gonna be OK like. You know, like, you know. And so it's their competitive environment, it's their competitiveness. But sometimes you know, not throwing gasoline on the fire is a good idea. And that would be my suggestion to a lot of parents out there that are listening and and we're all guilty of it. And I've been, I've been guilty of it too. But if you can learn how to really message with your child, your kids and bring the temperature down and have common sense conversations and talks. I think it's, I think it'll go further and it's more helpful.

Jeff Marek: You know it's so fascinating when you look at your three boys, there's I think an assumption that everybody makes, which is well, you know what their development has been a straight line. They've always been great. They've always been marvelous skaters. They've always dominated. They make it look easy. It must have come easy to them. I know you talk a lot to hockey parents. Can you share with us some of the setbacks? Because you mentioned like development, you know this, Jim better than a lot of people. Development is not a straight line, it's a bunny hop. It's you know. Two steps forward, two steps back, one forward, three back, four forward, one... You know what it's like, can you share how many setbacks the kids had along the way and how they work through?

Jim Hughes: There's constant setbacks and you can- you can sabotage yourself if you're not careful. Because the world of youth hockey, and youth sports in general is, it's not an easy climb and so you've got to be persistent and hard working. But. It's it's a, it's a. It's a challenge in so many ways of getting there and quite frankly. At an early age, I think we- a lot of people can attest that Jack was a little bit different than a lot of the other kids up in Toronto. But for Quinn and Luke, you know for Ellen and I, all we wanted was hopefully they had an opportunity to go play college hockey in the US. Which both of them wound up going to play at Michigan. But, we were realistic and you know, we weren't. We didn’t have these grand plans of National Hockey League or anything like that. All we're trying to do is just move the kids along and hey, hopefully maybe they're good enough to play in college someday and then, you know, one thing led to another. But we didn't get, we certainly didn't get too far ahead of ourselves and, you know, the NTDP didn't didn't hurt either because it's a place that they value practices and strength conditioning. So it's, it's a good place to really propel, propel yourself if you know, and you see a Norris doing it, a Brady Tkachuk doing it, you see... You know, there's countless guys that have come out of the program that have taken those resources and used them along the way.

Jeff Marek: Between Vancouver and New Jersey, how are your frequent flyer points doing these days?

Jim Hughes: They're manageable because, you know, we went up for the first game in Vancouver and then we were on the first flight the next morning and we caught the- we went right to the arena in Newark and we caught their home opener. And then we- we caught two more in New Jersey and then it happened that Vancouver was in Philly. So we caught five games on the trip and then we come home and now we're just bunkered down and we got our televisions and we're comfortable just watching games on the television, and doing it that way too. And so I think it's important to stay out of their way a little bit. We- we visit here and there and then we get out of the way and let them do their thing.

Jeff Marek: It's got to be the biggest thrill. It's got to be great. Jim, listen. Thanks so much for parking time. I know you're very busy. Not just, you know, watching the kids, but working at CAA. Hockey director of player development. Thanks so much for parking some time with me today. Much appreciated. Congratulations on the early success for the family and all the best in the future. Thanks. So much for doing this.

Jim Hughes: Thanks, Jeff. Talk to you soon. Take care. Bye.

bonus bit from later on in the podcast that was relevant to my interests

Jeff Marek: Listen, I just had a conversation with Jim Hughes, father to the stars. What used to be Henry Staal is now Jim Hughes, and Hughes has the three boys and you know their, Jack Hughes is leading all scorers with 20 points. Quinn Hughes leads all defensemen in points and Luke Hughes trails Logan Cooley by only a single point, like right now, this is domination by the Hughes family. Can you sort of, you know, isolate these three and share what you think about these three players that are top of their field amongst their peer group?

Brian Lawton: Yeah, it's really incredible. We've been talking about it for, it really started quite a while ago, particularly in the US, NHL Network, American kids, you're going to really jump on that. I remember the first time we met Jack at NHL Network. He did an interview at the finals. And Jack was so confident that the guys completely hated him. They were like, “Oh, my God, this kid is so confident, you can't be that confident.” And as time has gone on, they've grown to love him because he doesn't do it in an evil or rude way. It's just who he is. He's a very confident hockey player. He went through hell in a handbasket to get really where he is. I mean, it wasn't easy when he came into the league. But he never stopped believing, he remained with that confidence and obviously now, I mean it's ridiculous what he's doing. So I give him a ton of credit. He's a great kid, he's fun loving. He's a character. His abilities... Everybody always knew he could skate, the first time I really ever saw Jack do anything special was at the prospects game. He got even against the player and blew by him. And it was so unnatural. I was like, that's not natural. Those two guys are equal. He's the weaker player. The defenseman is much stronger, but they're dead even. And he just turned on the jets and I just went, “Oh my goodness, this guy just has a hidden gear that he can call upon any time.” And I believe that that is still what's happening at the NHL level now. He's earned respect. Where if you go back and you watch his overtime winner against the New York Islanders, Ryan Pulock backs off him. Gives him time and space. He walks to the middle, shoots it in the net, end of game and he never looked like he wasn’t concerned about anything, and that's that confidence. But he's earned a little bit of room and now you give him an inch and he's taking a mile. So that's his greatness, plays the game with his head up way faster than you think. Not super strong. Seems abnormal he's doing as great as he is because of that. But he's no longer small. Or frail. And we saw that early on for him. He's over the hump. He's going to be a great player. He's proving it every single night and everybody seeing.

Quinn on the other hand is just magically gifted, also with the player that plays his head up. Jim did a great job with his kids teaching them that. But his skating is so incredible, his IQ. There was a play last night he made for Van where he's out at the blue line. He backs his body outside the blue line, extends the space in the offensive zone for himself to create a little time and space. And ends up just absolutely geeking the forward out that was covering him, where he's looking for his jockstrap as Quinn blows by him to the outside, comes in and takes the slapshot, ends up in the back of the net. The magic in that is the feet and also the ability to play with the head up and then, I'll say it again, another very confident hockey player. You're the last man back with the checker at on you at the blue line. If you turn it over, it's a breakaway and it's on you. Absolutely no fear, I feel like he could make that play 9 out of 10 times, if not 10 out of 10, that's special. Luke, on the other hand, we haven't got a good read on, watched him a lot at Michigan. I watched a guy, quite frankly, struggle defensively, particularly turning to one side. He really had an issue with that in college where guys were blowing by him. He appears to have really cleaned that up. Now his feet are taking root. He's really the biggest of the three brothers. His potential is untapped. I don't know why we'd expect him to come in and dominate more than Jack did his first couple years. Quinn was a little bit of a freak. He stayed a little bit longer at college. He was able to come in and really be effective if truths been known, Quinn could have left college a year earlier. He just couldn't really get the type of assurance as he wanted to, to leave Michigan. So he stayed another year, grew his game, walked in and was really dominant. Luke, on the other hand, I think it's just a matter of time. I don't know who will be the best of these kids, but you're right, this is hockey's version of royalty right now for a family that's just dominating in the league.

Jeff Marek: You know it's interesting, Lawts, because I mentioned to Jim, I'm watching the Vancouver game yesterday and after two periods, I'm looking at this and saying well, hang on a second, if Quinn gets, you know, three more points here in the 3rd and we've seen him pile up before and he's playing against San Jose. With all due respect, he's getting into that, Paul Coffey, Tom Blade and you know. Either tying or setting a new record for points in a game by a defenseman. And I asked Jim if, you know, he thought that, you know, if he wanted to go see, you know, wanted to see his son, you know, set a record last night, would Quinn have liked that? And he said absolutely not. And it's because it was a blowout and it's respect to David Quinn and no one likes being on the end of these blowouts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, this is a guy that, I mean, that's a very hockey answer. I get it. I personally when you're, I think you I think when you're close to a record, you owe it to the game to try to try to break it like, you owe it to hockey. You know what I mean, Brian, like you owe it to hockey to try to break that record. And the other example that I cited last year was a December game between Buffalo and Columbus, when you know all of a sudden bam bam, bam, bam bam, you know we're halfway through the game and Tage Thompson has six points and we're all wondering about Darryl Sittler in 1976. And then, you know, his ice time diminished and held back and stopped shooting et cetera, but I always have felt that when a player gets close to a game record, regardless of what the score is or how the other team may be offended, I think that you owe it to hockey to try to break it, to give it a really good shot because these records have stood for a long time and when you get close, you should really go for it. Do you have a thought on that one, whether Quinn Hughes should have said, or Rick Tocchet for that matter, should have said my guy’s close to a record that's stood for a number of years, I'm going to give him a chance to break it, or you say hold on a second here. It's a 10-nothing blowout. Let's pump the brakes a little bit.

Brian Lawton: Well, from the coaches perspective, you're trying to create accountability in the room and that rises one individual above the rest of the group. And that's not inherently normal or accepted in hockey. Now, from a player's perspective, I can tell you that they're aware of these things. They'd like to do these things, but they're never going to come out and say that. I don't think Wayne Gretzky, you know, is really openly gonna say, “I went into game 39 knowing I needed five goals to get 50, so I did it. You know, I didn't really care if we won or lost.”

Jeff Marek: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brian Lawton: You know, so it. But make no mistake, having been a player, if there's something that you're aware of, of course you'd love to do it, but you're never going to hear that from players and quite frankly, hockey players. You know, I used to be a sports agent. We used to have all sports at Octagon, they still do. They had basketball players, football players, baseball players, a lot, I've got a lot of great athletes from other sports. But I'm biased, of course, but I didn't- I, one time. I won't say who it was I met, who was supposedly the nicest guy in another major sport. And went to a charity event that he had, was really excited to meet him and he would have been like the 700th nicest guy in the NHL. Like I was just blown away. He was not a super great, nice guy. So I've always had this thought. It's not true about all players. That was a bad sample size, but it's a very known player who's still playing to this day. He really had that line and don't try to guess because I don't want to get into that and embarrass him. But hockey players are just brought up differently. Things are, you know, now it's changing when I say, you know, people at NHL Network, or a few of the guys, I shouldn't say people, were not thrilled when meeting Jack. Jack's a great kid, youth. But what's different about him than other players at that age that maybe had that kind of success is they will tell you more what they think. Whereas in my era you were really, that wasn't happening. It was not happening, Jeff. And personally, I think it's a good thing. Jack Hughes is a great kid. The fact that he's going to tell you what he thinks and that's maybe different than what was 30 years ago does not make it wrong. As a matter of fact, I think it's better for hockey. I really do. So you gotta let these kids express themselves.

#much to ponder!#the brady and josh mention... ntdp polycules never die #the nhl network guys hating jack at first but then realizing hes nation's princess and bending the knee... yup!#jim hughes #jack hughes #luke hughes #quinn hughes #transcript

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emmawatsonupdates · 6 months

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7 years ago today, Emma Watson switched talent agencies from WME to CAA and a new headshot was released.

See at the source

#emma watson #emmawatson

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the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 7 months

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by Dion J. Pierre

Jewish and Israeli students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have warned in a new letter to university president Sally Kornbluth that radical anti-Zionism and intimidation of Jewish students on campus has become intolerable and reminiscent of Nazi Germany on the eve of the Holocaust.

The letter, shared on X/Twitter by MIT professor Retsef Levi, recounted an incident from Thursday in which students from the MIT Coalition Against Apartheid (CAA), a campus anti-Israel group, “physically prevented” them from attending class by forming a “blockade” of bodies in Lobby 7, a space inside the main entrance of the university. Non-students were invited to attend CAA’s demonstration, and together the entire group spent hours chanting “Intifada” — a term used to describe violent Palestinian uprisings against Israel — and declaring solidarity with Hamas.

“Instead of dispersing the mob or de-escalating the situation by rerouting all students from Lobby 7, Jewish students specifically were warned not to enter MIT’s front entrance due to a risk to their physical safety,” wrote the MIT Israel Alliance. “The onus to protect Jewish students should not be on the students themselves.”

Even after being threatened with suspension should they not disperse, the letter continued, CAA remained in Lobby 7, inviting more non-student protesters, which caused the university to issue through its emergency notification system a directive to “avoid” the area. The students added that a high-level official of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning vowed, in defiance of official orders, to protect any CAA students who continued the demonstration.

The MIT Israel Alliance said that by the end of the day, Jewish students were told to enter the university through its back entrance and avoid the campus’ Hillel building.

“On the 9th of November, on the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, which marked the beginning of the Holocaust, Jews at MIT were told to enter campus from back entrances and not to stay in Hillel for fear of their physical safety,” the group concluded. “We are seeing history repeating itself and Jews on MIT’s campus are afraid.”

When asked for comment, an MIT spokesperson told The Algemeiner that the school is closed in observance of Veterans Day, but MIT President Sally Kornbluth addressed the incident late Thursday after the MIT Israel Alliance issued its letter. Her statement did not mention antisemitism.

“I am deliberately not specifying the viewpoints, as the issue at hand is not the substance of the views but where and how they were expressed,” Kornbluth said, noting that Jewish and pro-Israel counter-protesters were also present in Lobby 7 and that all students were recently reminded of guidelines forbidding holding protests in the building. “Today’s protest — which became disruptive, loud, and sustained through the morning hours — was organized and conducted in defiance of those MIT guidelines and polices. Some students from both the protest and counterprotest may have violated other MIT policies, as well.”

Kornbluth added that protesters who remained after being told to leave will receive a non-academic suspension.

#mit #campus antisemitism #not safe for jews #sally kornbluth #hillel

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dailyanarchistposts · 1 month

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We have been debating tirelessly on different ways to abolish caste and other social evils which permeate the society that we have today. Raising voices against oppression, forming political parties and contesting in elections and also trying to force the government to form and implement policies which will give the Bahujans their fundamental rights. We have come a long way through decades of struggle in gaining rights, but the present political scenario of the country is not looking hopeful to the Bahujan aspirations for breaking away the shackles of caste.

With the diluting of labour laws and enabling state sanctioned exploitation of Bahujan labour, implementation of NEP which further marginalize the Bahujan children and extinguish their hopes of upward social and economic mobility, a proposed EIA which will rob the Bahujans and Adivasis of their land and livelihood, implementation of CAA and NRC to deprive the status of citizenship, privatization of key public utilities and destroying the already weakened public healthcare system, the government is openly showing its motives as a corporate stooge which dances to the whims of Adani, Ambani and other Brahmin Bania masters.

Armed with a grass roots organization like RSS and corporate funded media outlets, they have complete dominance in creating narratives they want the public to believe and they also have a well-oiled IT cell to spread fake news against any dissenters who dare to raise voice against them. Even though there are voices in the society which are raising against these government policies, there is a lack of grass root organization and common vision is sometimes lacking. This doesn’t mean that all the opposing forces against the fascist regime, which is murdering our democracy, should be centralized under one political entity. Instead it is time to think about exactly the opposite, the expansion of the idea of democracy from merely being a political tool used while casting vote once every 5 years to inculcating an idea of democracy in all aspects of life — political, social and economical and decentralization of all aspects of society.

Anarchism is a political philosophy which rejects all coercive and oppressive forms of hierarchy, be it caste, class, color, creed, clan, gender, age, orientation or country. It says that every system of power hierarchy should be scrutinized and made to justify its existence, and any system which fails to justify itself and is trampling the freedom of the individual will have to be abolished. The idea of questioning oppressive power structures is inherent to the idea of anarchism. It prohibits a system where even a party or a few leaders decide on how the society will function. Instead it focuses on decentralizing power to local bodies and communities so that decisions are made at the lowest level possible, thus eliminating the concentration of power into a few hands. It also shares the view that people who are most impacted by policies and decisions are the ones who are most capable of making them.

Historically, humans have developed to live in societies which didn’t have the kind of huge inequalities as it exists today. There is an intrinsic instinct to cooperate and help each other which is visible when a disaster strikes or the self-organization that appears out of nowhere in organic movements against oppression. Solidarity and mutual aid are the foundations of an anarchist society. The “right to well-being” of all human beings, meaning “the possibility of living like human beings, and of bringing up children to be members of a society better than ours” (Kropotkin, 1892). Two of the examples of societies which function close to anarchist principles today are Zapatistas of Mexico (Nacional, 2002) and Rojava in Syria (Democracy, 2018). Extreme corruption, colonization and environmental exploitation forced the indigenous people of Mexico to form an autonomous region where people directly form communities and decide the policies. Similarly, the people of Rojava, battered by the civil war, have formed an autonomous region with direct democratic ambitions based on an anarchist and libertarian socialist ideology promoting decentralization, gender equality, environmental sustainability and pluralistic tolerance for religious, cultural and political diversity based on democratic confederalism. One of the principles of direct democracy is that there are no elected representatives for a fixed term, any member who is elected will just be a spokesperson of the community and can be withdrawn immediately if he goes against the decision taken by discussion and deliberations. The means of production will be owned by workers and run by worker councils. Conflict resolution mechanism and alternative systems of judiciary exists within the community run by the members. There won’t be police or other systems which grant power to one person or group to take away the life and liberty of an individual, rather power will be distributed equally or rotationally which is controlled by the community. During the current times of BLM protests all over the world, it is clear that the police institution is just a tool employed by the ruling and propertied class to control the lower class and there is mass class for defunding the police and transferring the resources to community welfare projects.

We need to look at how these communities organize themselves in the face of an oppressive regime and come up with innovative ways to decentralize and create institutions which we are brainwashed to assume will work only if they are centralized. Decentralized community gardens provide food for the community which is maintained by them. Systems of education, community defense, criminal justice systems, industry and healthcare can be decentralized and we need to focus our efforts in building such grassroot level communities which function along the principles solidarity and mutual aid. We already have systems of mutual aid in our communities, all we need to do is to transfer these tendencies to all the systems we live by.

The Indian social mentality of following a leader or waiting for a savior needs to change. Any system which can consolidate power in the hands of the few can change into authoritarianism. Even if the leaders are benevolent and have the will to serve the people, there are systems of coercion which exist in our society, where economic, political and social power resides in the hands of the few, that they will bind the leaders from doing their duty to the Bahujans. The leaders and parties we look up to keep failing and disappointing us time and again. Now, action needs to be taken directly at grass root level by the Bahujans by creating communities and networks of solidarity and mutual aid and practicing decision making and direct participatory democracy. The culture of outsourcing decision making to politicians or other ruling class needs to stop. This has to start at all sectors of industry, agriculture and services too, and also within family.

We can’t turn to the state for protection anymore as it the state apparatus which is being systematically abused by the ruling castes to exploit Bahujan labour to create their wealth. Along with the efforts to educate Bahujans through social media and other means to sensitize them of their exploitation, effort needs to be focused at the bottom most level to inculcate the habit of participatory democracy at individual, family and community levels, respecting the liberty of the individual. The fight for annihilation of caste cannot be won, unless all unjust power structures in the society cease to exist and power is decentralized and distributed to the people directly, where individuals themselves can organize and make decisions about their life without being coerced or exploited to create wealth for others.

References

Democracy, N. (2018, July 6 ). The Communes of Rojava: A Model In Societal Self Direction. Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDnenjIdnnE

Kropotkin, P. (1892). The Conquest of Bread. Paris.

Nacional, E. Z. ( 2002). A Zapatista Response to “The EZLN Is NOT Anarchist”. Retrieved from The Anarchist Library: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ejercito-zapatista-de-liberacion-nacional-a-zapatista-response-to-the-ezln-is-not-anarchist

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homomenhommes · 7 months

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THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more …

1884 – Born: James Elroy Flecker (d.1915); English poet, novelist and playwright. Born in London, and educated at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, where his father was headmaster, and Uppingham School, he studied at Trinity College, Oxford, and Caius College, Cambridge. While at Oxford he was greatly influenced by the last flowering of the Aesthetic movement there, under John Addington Symonds.

He died of tuberculosis in Davos, Switzerland. His death at the age of thirty was described at the time as "unquestionably the greatest premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of Keats".

His Collected Poems (1916) were published the year after he died at age 30. His poetry shares one trait in common with that of his contemporary, Rupert Brooke: the sexuality is ambiguous. There is no question, however, that Flecker was Gay. His lover was the classicist J.D. Beazley, one of the world's great authorities on Greek vases.

His most widely known poem is "To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence". The most enduring testimony to his work is perhaps an excerpt from "The Golden Journey to Samarkand" inscribed on the clock tower of the barracks of the British Army's 22nd Special Air Service regiment in Hereford.

Bryan Lourd (R) and husband Bruce Bozzi

1960 – Bryan Lourd is an American talent agent. He has been partner, managing director and co-chairman of Creative Artists Agency (CAA) since October 1995.

Lourd was born in New Iberia, Louisiana. His brother, Blaine Lourd, is an investment advisor. He attended New Iberia Senior High School, where he played the lead in several high school musicals. He earned a degree from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in 1982.

Lourd and actress Carrie Fisher were together from 1991 to 1994. They have one daughter, actress Billie, born in 1992. Lourd married Bruce Bozzi, the co-owner of The Palm, on October 12, 2016, and Lourd legally adopted Bozzi's daughter, Ava. They divide their time between a penthouse apartment in the West Village, in Lower Manhattan, New York City and a house in Beverly Hills, California.

Lourd was elected to the board of trustees of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. He was appointed to the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 2009 by President Barack Obama and to the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2015.

Lourd 's clients include George Clooney, Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt, Robert Downey, Jr., Drew Barrymore, Jimmy Fallon, Matthew McConaughey, Sean Penn, Madonna, Naomi Watts, Natalie Portman, Robin Williams, Arnold Schwarzenegger, David Duchovny, Helen Hunt, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, Taraji P. Henson, and Peter Jöback.

1969 – The Homosexual Information Center protested at the offices of the Los Angeles Times to protest the newspaper's refusal to print the word "homosexual" in ads after it refused to print an ad announcing a group discussion on homosexuality.

1983 – Andrew Hayden-Smith, born Andrew John Smith, is a British actor and television presenter best known for his work with CBBC.

Auditions for popular CBBC children's serial drama Byker Grove were held at his school and he won the part of Ben Carter, making his first appearance in the eighth series of the show in 1995.

Initially just using the name Andrew Smith, he appeared as a guest on Saturday morning CBBC show Live & Kicking with several other characters from the show. Smith soon became a regular guest on the show. This led to appearances on other shows and also in teen-magazines, as well as two pantomime appearances. In 2001 he applied for Equity membership and was accepted under the name Andrew Hayden-Smith (Hayden being another surname in his family), as the name Andrew Smith was already taken.

In 2004, the ex-Byker Grove actor and CBBC presenter Andrew did the unthinkable for a young man on kids' TV - he told the world he was gay. At the risk of being outed by a newspaper, he beat the tabloids to the punch and did an interview with Attitude magazine:

"Coming out is pretty scary. It's bad enough when you're almost certain that the majority of people around you will be totally cool with it. I was 21 and presenting kids TV at the time and was commended for what everyone kept saying was such a brave step."

It did his career no harm, and he's proved an inspiration - and eye candy - for young gay men across the country.

Andrew has since appeared regularly on stage and in Doctor Who. Hayden-Smith appeared in the episodes "Rise of the Cybermen", "The Age of Steel" and "Doomsday" as Jake Simmonds in the 2006 series of Doctor Who. He returned to CBBC having completed the filming, but decided that he wished to concentrate on acting. His final day of presenting was on 7 July 2006, the day before his third and final Doctor Who appearance.

1985 – The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed legislation to protect people with AIDS from discrimination.

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