GAIN OF FUNCTION: Wuhan Lab Publishes Study Manipulating H7N9 Virus To Be More Lethal.
AUSTIN BAY: America’s Next Wars.
THAT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE GARBAGE PEOPLE ON A POWER TRIP:
BY JOVE, I THINK HE GETS IT:
The people who are responding that he should just concentrate on doing tech stuff don’t get it. Nowadays you need a bodyguard of lawyers just to go about your business.
DAN MARKEL UPDATE: Wendi Adelson And Luis Rivera Take The Stand In The Retrial Of Katherine Magbanua In Dan Markel’s Murder.
I’ve been remiss in covering the trial this week, but Paul Caron has everything rounded up.
OPEN THREAD: When explanations make no sense, when every answer’s wrong. You’ve got to find a way to say what you want to say, break out.
Calling parents who disagree with educrats “terrorists” is a bad look. But it’s beyond looks. People should be prosecuted for what was done here.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY, SUPPLY CHAIN EDITION: Merchant mariners stranded on ships in Shanghai during COVID lockdown.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: On National Security | Drawing lessons from the first ‘commercial space war.’
Plus, from the comments: “America is in deep trouble if state universities think they did the right thing in censoring this man’s reasonable, learned speech.”
We either need better people running state universities, or to get rid of state universities.
THE CURSE OF CUOMO LINGERS: Hochul’s racial huckstering after Buffalo ignores NY’s violent-crime surge.
THE WOKE TSUNAMI IS RECEDING: Hurrah for new HBO boss uncanceling J.K. Rowling.
WE FOLLOW THE SCIENCE, EXCEPT WHEN IT MIGHT HURT UPSCALE WOMEN’S FEELINGS: Talk about deadly obesity risks in America? Fat chance.
OLD AND BUSTED: The Hawaiian Judges.
The New Hotness? Louisiana Judges! “A Louisiana federal judge blocked the Biden administration on Friday from winding down Title 42—a pandemic-related border restriction that allows for the immediate expulsion of asylum-seekers and other migrants.”
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY: Embarrassing! He Brought a Knife to a Gunfight. “Everyone knows the Chicago Way: They pull a knife, you pull a gun. Then there’s the Florida Way: You pull a knife and he pulls a gun while his wife helpfully videos the whole thing for the police to use as evidence against you.”
WOKE POLITICS, EXPLAINED:
THUG LIFE WRIT LARGE: Mountains of grain left to rot as Vladimir Putin ‘blackmails the world.’
YOUNG-ADULT WEBSITE* VOX.COM: The Depp-Heard trial has played right into the hands of far-right extremists.
Conservative media outlets have also promoted a one-sided narrative of the case; Vice recently reported that Ben Shapiro’s popular conservative news platform the Daily Wire has spent nearly $50,000 promoting ads about the trial on Instagram and Facebook — most of it trashing Amber Heard. The presence of these bad actors has, if anything, only exacerbated the vitriol Heard has received within the mainstream.
* * * * * * * *
To be clear, this isn’t an easy story of good and evil. It’s impossible to completely absolve Amber Heard, who has her own alleged history of violence, or frame Depp as a monster incapable of kindness, charity, and the positive energy that amassed him millions of fans to begin with. Yet you don’t need to do either of those things to acknowledge that this is a case about the deeply unfunny topic of intimate partner abuse and that the major points of this trial have already been decided in one court of law. The judge at the first trial in 2020 found Heard had proven 12 of 14 allegations of abuse. So far none of the trial testimony has substantially contradicted anything in Heard’s original claim of being a domestic violence survivor.
Culture critic Ella Dawson has a Twitter thread compiling reporting on the myriad ways in which this trial is not only destroying years of progress made against domestic abuse in the US, but also laying the groundwork for a culture in which bots and bad actors harass, vilify, and eviscerate all other prominent women who publicly name their abusers — like Gamergate, but times tens of millions of participants, and gleefully endorsed by people all across American culture.
That, above all — above the TikTok cat memers mocking Heard and Saturday Night Live dismissing the whole trial as “for fun” — is what’s absolutely jawdropping here. This trial, which amounts to a simple yes/no question over whether Heard had the right to call herself a victim of domestic abuse in a single sentence from that 2018 opinion piece, has somehow united far-right misogynists with middle-of-the-road liberals and geeky progressive fandom acolytes of Depp.
Evergreen:
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Biden Judicial Pick Lied About Cop Killings. Now She Claims She Didn’t.
HISTORY: The Great Shooting Stance Feud.
WOEING: The New Air Force Ones Are Late, So the Old Planes Need More Cash, Official Says. “Air Force acquisition chief cites 2- to 3-year delay, which Boeing blames on subcontractor and supply problems.”
STAY FASHIONABLE: Leather Ratchet Belt 2 Pack. #CommissionEarned
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: James Baker buries Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann in probe.
A former FBI official delivered devastating testimony Thursday against former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann — saying he’s “100% confident” the defendant denied acting “on behalf of any particular client” when he handed over since-debunked information linking Donald Trump and Russia.
“I think it was pretty close to the beginning of the meeting. Part of his introduction to the meeting,” former FBI general counsel James Baker told jurors in Washington, DC, federal court.
Baker’s account directly supports the sole charge against Sussmann as a result of special counsel John Durham’s probe into alleged law-breaking in connection with the FBI and Robert Mueller’s probes of purported Trump-Russia ties.
Sussmann, 57, is on trial on a single count of lying to the government during a Sept. 19, 2016, sit-down with Baker at FBI headquarters.
Ouch.
PREDICTABLY ENOUGH, THEY’RE TRYING TO GIN UP A BOGUS SEX SCANDAL ON ELON MUSK. HE’S TREATING IT WITH THE SERIOUSNESS IT DESERVES:
When you’re targeted by a clown show, the only proper response is to point and laugh.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Energy Officials Issue ‘Sobering’ Warning About Widespread Summer Blackouts Triggered by Closure of Fossil Fuel Plants.
BEING AROUND YOUNG, HEALTHY MEMBERS OF THE OPPOSITE SEX EXTENDS LIFE AND FERTILITY: New research finds that male pheromones may improve health of females’ eggs. If I recall, there was an experiment with fruit flies that showed male fruit flies living longer and being more fertile when exposed to young female fruit flies.
HE’S A UNITER! Even Democrats Are Getting Sick of Presidentish Joe Biden.
ALL OUR INSTITUTIONS ARE CORRUPT: Two Secret Service agents sent home after off-duty incident in Seoul.
Flashback: The Secret Service’s history of sex and alcohol scandals.
Also: Secret Service agents in Biden detail reportedly part of bribery scheme.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: The left hates Elon Musk because he’s a twin threat that doesn’t tolerate BS.
Why does the left hate Elon Musk?
It’s simple, really: Because he can’t be controlled, and because he doesn’t tolerate BS.
The left can’t stand either. It insists on control, to the point of systematically eliminating or co-opting anything that might serve as an independent power center. (Their fear is justified: “Music clubs” turned out to be a major factor in Czechoslovakia’s 1989 anticommunist Velvet Revolution.) And it insists on not merely spreading BS, but on requiring people to repeat and endorse its BS as a sign of submission.
Musk is thus a twin threat. As the sometime richest man in the world, he has a lot of power, and it’s not under anyone else’s control. And he’s a nerd, with a nerd’s low tolerance for bull. Where more socially “polished” people would go out of their way to show fealty to leftist tropes popular among the Gentry Class regardless of their absurdity, Musk is happy to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
The naked emperors who want to rule us hate that. (Bumped).
UKRAINE WAR: Putin’s Latest Brilliant Masterstroke. “Three months into this stupid war, there’s zero sign of restraint or wisdom in either Moscow or Washington.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Shortage of contrast dye for medical scans leads to rationing, delayed procedures.
HMM: MONKEYPOX THOUGHTS from 2021.
CHANGE? Fifth Circuit Court Starts Dismantling The Administrative State. “The Securities and Exchange Commission’s in-house judges violate the U.S. Constitution by denying fraud defendants their right to a jury trial and acting without necessary guidance from Congress, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday.”
DON’T GET COCKY: Dems in Disarray: Internal Polling Looks Devastating. “Down eight points within battleground districts. In their own polling. Which means that some ‘tossup’ races are just gone for them, and other ‘reach’ races for Republicans may very well be on the board. And if battleground congressional races mirror Senate battlegrounds, the DSCC must also have bad indigestion right about now.”
READER FAVORITE: Nisaku Hori-Hori Weeding and Digging Knife. #CommissionEarned
WHEW: Starliner successfully launches, reaches a stable orbit. “The Boeing spacecraft is presently targeted to dock with the International Space Station at around 7:10 pm ET on Friday.”
THE GEORGE FLOYD GRAVY TRAIN IS RUNNING OUT OF STEAM: Netflix scraps two Ibram Kendi shows: ‘Antiracist Baby’ show meets the chopping block.
CRITICAL RACE THEORY WAS EXPLICITLY DESIGNED TO UNDERCUT EQUALITY AND FREE SPEECH: Prof calls diversity of thought ‘white supremacist b******t.’
JOE ISN’T UP TO THE JOB: Jill Biden sent on diplomatic mission to save the Summit of the Americas.
YES, THEY’LL COVID TEST AT THE DROP OF A HAT BUT IT’S LIKE PULLING TEETH TO GET A FLU TEST: How Many Influenza and RSV Cases Go Untreated Because They Had a Negative COVID Test?
The CDC tells readers the best protection against influenza is the flu vaccine. Unfortunately, this year’s flu vaccine is only 16 percent effective against contracting influenza. The CDC influenza surveillance report goes on to say, “There are also prescription flu antiviral drugs that can be used to treat flu illness.”
But, as I pointed out in my April 18, 2022 blogpost, the prescription antiviral, Tamiflu, must be started within the first two days of the onset of influenza.
Unfortunately, rapid influenza tests that give results in about 15 minutes can only be performed by health care practitioners at urgent care centers or in doctors’ offices. The Food and Drug Administration has thus far only approved at‐home self‐administered flu tests that must be sent in to laboratories that provide results in about 2 days—often outside the window for effective antiviral treatment.
Well, the FDA. But there’s finally progress: “On May 18 the FDA announced it approved a new at‐home, self‐administered test that can detect COVID, influenza, and RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus—11 percent mortality in adults) off of one specimen. The test is available without a prescription and can be obtained online from Labcorp or at retail stores. This new test is an important breakthrough.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Private College Tuition Discount Rate Hits All-Time High Of 54.5%.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Nationwide Gas Prices Could Hit Staggering New High By August, Top U.S. Bank Analyst Says.
Flashback: Biden admin cancels massive oil and gas lease sale amid record-high gas prices.
The Biden administration canceled one of the most high-profile oil and gas lease sales pending before the Department of the Interior Wednesday, as Americans face record-high prices at the pump, according to AAA.
The DOI halted the potential to drill for oil in over 1 million acres in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, along with two lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico. The move comes as Biden has taken a few actions to combat high gas prices, despite his administration’s generally hostile approach to the oil industry.
“Due to lack of industry interest in leasing in the area, the Department will not move forward with the proposed Cook Inlet OCS oil and gas lease sale 258,” a DOI spokesperson told FOX Business in a statement Thursday.
“The Department also will not move forward with lease sales 259 and 261 in the Gulf of Mexico region, as a result of delays due to factors including conflicting court rulings that impacted work on these proposed lease sales,” the spokesperson added.
The spokesperson also told FOX Business that “there are 10.9 million acres of offshore federal waters already under lease to industry,” and “of those, the industry is not producing on more than three-quarters (75.7% or 8.26 million acres).”
Federal law requires DOI to stick to a five-year leasing plan for auctioning offshore leases. The department had until the end fo the current five-year plan – due to expire on June 30 – to complete the sales.
A source familiar with the Cook Inlet lease confirmed to FOX Business that the DOI received no comments indicating specific company interest in leasing during the scoping period.
Within his first week in office, President Biden signed an executive order temporarily suspending new oil and gas leases on federal lands. The administration resumed the new leasing last month following court challenges against the ban. The administration is appealing a ruling in which Judge James Cain, a Trump appointee, struck down the ban.
Earlier: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden: As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.
Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned
DEAL OF THE DAY: Swimming Goggles. #CommissionEarned
DON’T GET COCKY: Yet Another Omen of Impending Democrat Doom in the 2022 Midterms. “John Couvillon, the founder of MC Analytics & Polling, has analyzed voter turnout in the ten states that have run primaries so far in 2022, compared it to 2018 (the last midterm election, in which Democrats won back control of the House), and found massive shifts toward Republican turnout in all but one of them.”
EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED: How FBI bigwig aided and abetted Hillary Clinton plot.
GEORGE WILL DISCUSSES HERIOT & MULDER: In the Washington Post and in newspapers without pay walls.
HMM: Britain offers smallpox vaccine as monkeypox cases spread in Europe. Odds are this will fizzle, but expect poor compliance with public health measures, as the public health apparatus has lost credibility due to its behavior with Covid.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Network News Ignores Biden’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ and Its Quick Demise, Study Finds.
YOU SPELLED “HEROES” WRONG: Washington Post blames ‘far-right influencers’ for tanking Biden’s Disinformation Board.
REMEMBER MURPHY BROWN? It was three decades ago when then-Vice President Dan Quayle defended the traditional family and was rewarded with a sustained assault led by Candace Bergen nee sitcom star “Murphy Brown.”
Quayle’s sin, Issues & Insights reminds us this morning, was to extoll the intact family unit with a father and mother in the home to raise kids, instill positive values in them and maintain the sort of social cohesion required to preserve a healthy community.
“Quayle lamented that those controlling the commanding heights of the culture often send the wrong message. He specifically faulted the CBS-TV sitcom Murphy Brown for depicting its lead character as ‘mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.’ Quayle concluded his remarks by inviting a ‘national debate’ over these issues to ‘roar on.’
“The roar went on for months. Quayle was immediately denounced by Diane English, Murphy’s creator and producer. Hillary Clinton called Quayle ‘out of touch.’ The controversy reached a crescendo when the series returned for a fifth season that fall. Its season premiere was devoted to the Quayle speech with its star character lecturing the audience about the merits of nontraditional family structures.”
The intervening years have certainly provided abundant evidence of who was right and who was truly out of touch with human reality.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Will Hillary Clinton Ever Take the Fall for Being Pure Evil? “The latest doings in the Durham probe are getting so close to Hillary that she’s probably hitting an extra box of Franzia for breakfast every day.”
NO SIMILAR FIGURE ON THE RIGHT EVER DID THIS WITH RBG: NYT Writer Urged Activists To Escalate Protests Targeting Kavanaugh.
AND IT WAS AN ACT OF PATRIOTISM: A Confession: I Did, Indeed, Mock and Attack Nina Jankowicz and the DHS.
These people are unAmerican and awful, and they should be chased out of their jobs and humiliated until they learn better. If, as all the best people have assured us, it’s okay to punch Nazis then these people deserve no slack.
OH MY: Clinton Lawyer Marc Elias Sings Like a Canary at Sussman-Durham Trial. “Elias confirmed in his testimony that he hired Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. He also testified that he would share “the fruits of their work” with senior Clinton campaign officials, and that Fusion GPS was also working for the DNC as part of its support for Hillary’s campaign.”
PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Why the next big solar storm might hit Earth without warning. “A big solar storm could fry the internet, but at least space weather forecasts would give us a day or two to prepare. Or maybe not, because physicists have just discovered a new kind of solar storm that strikes without notice.”
A really big solar storm would fry more than the Internet.
PEOPLE WHO JUDGE WRITERS BY THEIR SKIN COLOR, SELF-IDENTIFICATION OR SEX LIVES ARE…. WHAT’S THE WORD? Fisking a GQ article – Why won’t men read my preachy literati bullshit?
Oh, yeah. Idiots. Also racist, sexist, misandistrists and a bunch of other nonsense. But mostly idiots.
However, this idiot also worships at “literary” which is — listen to me — just a marketing genre. It has no inherent virtue. It’s like someone getting upset over someone liking Westerns or …. oh, yeah, she gets upset at her boyfriend like science fiction.
Fortunately we have a Larry Correia to fisk that.
BEFORE CANDLES THE SOCIALISTS USED ELECTRICITY: Blackouts… Because Climate Change! Blame Natural Gas!
HOW IS IT THOSE EMAILS ARE TURNING UP EVERYWHERE BUT MSM NEWS SITES? Newly Leaked Hunter Biden Emails Point to Possible White House Corruption.
NASA’S PANIC WASN’T NEARLY AS BAD AS THE PANIC OF THE GUYS WEARING THE HELMETS: Panicked NASA cancels spacewalks after ISS astronaut’s helmet ‘fills with water’.
CANADA LEADS THE WAY IN KILLING THE POOR: Why is Canada euthanising the poor?
You know, lives unworthy of living….
SINCE SHE’S FRIENDS WITH SOME VERY OLD ENEMIES OF MY PEOPLE IN SF/F, I LAUGHED SO HARD I HURT MYSELF: Wicked witch of the woke Nina Jankowicz resigns as Disinformation Governance Board is put on ‘pause’.
IT’S NOT JUST THAT DEMOCRATS LIE. IT’S THEY ALSO BELIEVE THEIR OWN LIES: The “Texas Sharpshooter”.
THEY ALSO FIGHT WHO CALL THEIR LAWYERS: Pushback: Two Alaska Airlines flight attendants fired for asking questions file lawsuit.
AND THE OTHER HALF ARE IN IT FOR THE MEMES: Audit Reveals Half of Biden’s Twitter Followers are Fake Accounts.
BETTER TAKE A DUMBRELLA: Now a university in England has rejected the sonnet as too white and Western.
It’s stupid out there.
THE PROBLEM IS THEY’RE ALL FABULISTS. ALL OF THEM: If the Palestinians say it, they print it.
BEHOLD! MY SHOCKED FACE: Census screw-up favors blue states? Shocking.
OKAY, THE MAN IS A MILE A MINUTE GAFFE MACHINE: George W. Bush Slams Putin’s ‘Wholly Unjustified and Brutal Invasion of Iraq’ Instead of Ukraine.
But becoming Clinton’s bestie has done him no favors.
KEEP LOOKING FOR WHITE SUPREMACISM UNDER YOUR BEDS IDIOTS: House Passes ‘White Supremacism’ Domestic Terrorism Bill After Buffalo Shooting.
You won’t like it if you create it.
To be fair, I think they’re sincere in this. Not that it makes any sense, but the same way that they meet accusations their books aren’t fun with “that’s because you don’t want minorities to write!” (This usually said by affluent white women, mind) the left can’t imagine anyone opposing their insanity unless they’re “white supremacists.”
Because wanting formula for your baby, not wanting your kid sexually molested by weirdo teachers, and wanting to have money to eat, must mean you’re a racist, yo. Not rational and sane.
So they associate things like a crazy communist shooting people with “White supremacy.” Because, you know, if they keep shoveling, they’ll find a pony under all the sh*t.
KEEP BRACING FOR VIOLENCE FROM THE RIGHT, FOR THE THOUSANDTH TIME: DHS Reportedly Bracing for Violence From the Right and ‘Abortion-Rights Proponents’ if Supreme Court Overturns Roe.
They don’t realize what it would be like, should it be unleashed. And if they ever manage to flip that switch, chances are they never will.
IT’S ALMOST LIKE BIDEN’S WAR ON ENERGY IS WORKING! Gas Prices Hit ‘Record Highs Each Day This Week’, All 50 States Average $4 a Gallon.
Let’s go Brandon!
I’M GOING TO GUESS IT’S MADE UP: Just as Elon Musk Becomes a Hot Story a Report Surfaces of an Old Sexual Harassment Claim.
Though to be fair, it’s also possible that he simply didn’t read the context very well. He has the hallmarks. And these days, to be a man attempting to date you need to be part mind-reader and part lawyer.
May 19, 2022
OPEN THREAD: Never say never.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: DIU selects nuclear-powered spacecraft designs for 2027 demonstrations.
NEXT IT’LL BE IMPOSING A SEX ON THEM BY SKELETAL ANALYSIS: AI Can Predict People’s Race From X-Ray Images, And Scientists Are Concerned. “The findings raise some troubling questions about the role of AI in medical diagnosis, assessment, and treatment: could racial bias be unintentionally applied by computer software when studying images like these?”
Assuming the AI is accurate, how can it be racially biased? The article doesn’t make that clear.
THEY SHOULD SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THAT WILL DISCOURAGE FUTURE EFFORTS OF THIS SORT: Justice coming for the ‘Dirty 51’ Hunter Biden laptop liars.
One of the most galling aspects of the Hunter Biden laptop saga is that the 51 former intelligence officials who played such a critical role in suppressing The Post’s stories and giving Joe Biden cover before the 2020 election have never been brought to account.
The “Dirty 51” lied by painting our stories as Russian disinformation in an Oct. 19, 2020, letter they signed and delivered to Politico five days after The Post exposé and three days before the final presidential debate of the election campaign.
They used the institutional weight of their powerful former roles to legitimize partisan political propaganda designed to smear The Post and everyone associated with the story and dissuade the rest of the media from looking deeper into the laptop.
The letter, titled “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden emails,” and signed by former CIA Directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Mike Hayden, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and other ex-spooks, claimed the material on Hunter’s hard drive “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” although not one of them had seen it.
Their lie “probably affected the outcome” of the 2020 presidential race, as former Attorney General William Barr has said, describing the letter as “partisan hackery,” “baseless” and signed by “a coterie of retired intelligence officials who had lost their professional bearings.”
Yet they have never apologized or retracted their lie.
I’m glad Trump’s siccing lawyers on them. Lessons must be taught.
WOW, I’VE HAD LOST BAGGAGE BEFORE BUT THIS IS RIDICULOUS: Moth last seen 110 years ago found at Detroit airport.
THE EMERGING REPUBLICAN MAJORITY: STUDY: Testosterone Treatment Turns Democrat Voters More Conservative. “Someone tell Brian Stelter.”
Flashback: Buzzfeed Crew Shocked To Learn They Have Low Testosterone Levels.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Menopause symptoms may interfere with sexual activity.
INTRODUCE THEM TO NANCY PELOSI AND SEND THEM SCAMPERING BACK TO THEIR HOME STAR SYSTEMS? What could we realistically do to stop an alien invasion? Sufficiently violent neolithic tribes were able to keep out Europeans for centuries, but it helps that they didn’t have anything much worth taking.
CONFORMITY IS DIVERSITY: CRT Symposium Speaker Calls Diversity of Thought ‘White Supremacist’ Excrement.
RIP: Vangelis, composer of Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner soundtracks, dies aged 79.
Vangelis had continued his film score work throughout the 1970s, but it was in the 1980s that this reached its commercial heights. Chariots of Fire became inextricable from Vangelis’s timeless theme, and the music became synonymous with slow-motion sporting montages. “My music does not try to evoke emotions like joy, love, or pain from the audience. It just goes with the image, because I work in the moment,” he later explained.
His score to Blade Runner is equally celebrated for its evocation of a sinister future version of Los Angeles, where robots and humans live awkwardly alongside one another, through the use of long, malevolent synth notes; saxophones and lush ambient passages enhance the film’s romantic and poignant moments. “It has turned out to be a very prophetic film – we’re living in a kind of Blade Runner world now,” he said in 2005.
Later in the decade he scored the Palme d’Or-winning Costa-Gavras political drama Missing, starring Jack Lemmon; the Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins drama The Bounty; and the Mickey Rourke-starring Francesco. He worked again with the Blade Runner director, Ridley Scott, on 1992 film 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and elsewhere during the 1990s, soundtracked Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon and documentaries by Jacques Cousteau.
I saw Blade Runner three or four times during its initial 1982 run, in no small part due to Vangelis’ jaw-dropping synthesized score, which along with Peter Gabriel’s III and IV albums, were a preview of were music would be going in the 1980s.
WE BATTLE THE LEFT BY STANDING UP FOR FREE SPEECH, STANDING UP FOR LIBERALISM:
Obviously, Team Biden figured out that the creation of this new Department of Homeland Security agency was bad politics for them heading into the midterm elections, along with a dozen other obstacles they will have come November.
But this move was also an acknowledgment that people aren’t going to put up with being dictated to by the woke mob anymore, which has seemed to control much of social media, entertainment, and the Democratic Party for the past few years.
I shared this tweet. It went viral.
Much of the replies came from conservatives confused or even offended by my use of the word “liberal.” This is understandable. In modern American politics, “liberal” has long been used to identify people on the Left, Democratic voters, Green Party voters and so on.
What I meant is a definition my fellow libertarians and certain types of conservatives would also recognize. In the simplest terms, the Oxford dictionary defines “liberal” as “willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own.”
In the cultural battle over free speech in the US right now, it is libertarians, conservatives, and a minority of old school progressives standing up to protect free expression, both public and private, and an increasingly authoritarian Left that clearly does not “respect or accept behavior or opinions different” from their own. They want to label speech they don’t like as “disinformation” and cancel anyone who disagrees with their narrow vision of what is socially acceptable in today’s America.
The contemporary Left is not liberal. It is becoming more illiberal by the day. I’m not saying conservatives have never been guilty of similar censorious attitudes, because some Republican politicians still do push illiberal speech policies.
The left’s adoption of the world “liberal” in the 1920s because Woodrow Wilson had so debased “Progressivism” in the previous decade is one of the greatest stolen bases in history.
SHE’S NOT A WOMAN — SHE’S THE TERMINATOR: Is Anna Wintour human?
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Would George Carlin Be Bill Maher … or Howard Stern 2.0 … Today?
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