AND THE COVETED VODKAPUNDIT SEAL OF APPROVAL: Parents Are Pretty Excited About This ‘Happy Hour Playset’ for Toddlers.
Archive for 2016
December 12, 2016
GUN CULTURE: Gun Control Thriller ‘Miss Sloane’ Has One of the Worst Opening Weekends Ever.
Miss Sloane‘s story follows a lobbyist, played by Chastain, who joins a firm working with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence to get new federal gun control measures passed despite opposition from the “gun lobby.” The movie has garnered mixed reviews, with praise for Chastain’s performance despite complaints that the plot is too unrealistic. The film currently has at 69 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The poor opening did not stop the Brady Campaign from championing the film in a live-streaming event on its Facebook page. The organization featured discussion with Kris Brown, one of the group’s lobbyists, about how the movie compares to real-life lobbying for gun control.
The group, which consulted on the production of the film, said they were open to participating in more projects with the makers of Miss Sloane as the movie continues in theaters.
Brendan Kelly, press secretary for the Brady Campaign, said the group’s work on Miss Sloane represents a new frontier in its work to influence Hollywood on gun issues.
If the Brady Campaign and Hollywood want to continue dumping money and effort into “gun control thrillers,” then who are we to stop them?
OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Democrats and the Power of Delusion — are you prepared for the goatiest of rodeos?
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Lending a hand: Student 3-D prints functional, affordable prosthetic.
THE DEATH STAR IS JUST MISUNDERSTOOD: In Rogue One, there is no dark or light side.
Judging from the trailers, Rogue One commits to a view of war that will not reduce to one-on-one lightsaber battles or the “honorable” logic of duels. It intends to be messy, all shades of gray. Director Gareth Edwards’ goal — aesthetically and ethically — was to make the standalone film “gritty” in the style of other in-the-trenches movies that favor following the grunts on the ground over the power players (or the Jedi samurai warriors). Edwards, who previously directed Monster and Godzilla, has cited footage from Vietnam, World War II, and the Gulf War as inspirations, and hired cinematographer Greig Fraser (Zero Dark Thirty) to achieve a look that’s as grimy as it is epic. The aim? To reflect the ways in which war is messy, visually and morally. “It’s been very easy in the past to label it as we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys.”
I have a bad feeling about this.
RANDY BARNETT: Abandoning Defensive Crouch Conservative Constitutionalism.
As Tushnet helpfully previewed, had Clinton been elected, thirty years of “conservative” tinkering-at-the-margin was going to be swept away and much, much more. No doctrine of stare decisis or “precedent” would have stood in the way. The left side of the Court has never conceded the precedential value of the past 30 years of “conservative” decisions. In constitutional law, the doctrine of stare decisis is a ratchet and ratchets only go one way, and that way is towards increased national power, and delegation to the Administrative-Executive State–qualified only by judicially-selected “fundamental rights” and protected “suspect classes.”
But Tushnet was right in principle. As I have long maintained (see here), the law of the Constitution should take priority over the mistaken rulings of previous justices. What Tushnet and I disagree about is what the Constitution means. He thinks it means progressive results; I think it means what it says. If New Deal, Warren and Burger court decisions were–in Tushnets words–“wrong the day they were decided,” then they should be reversed and replaced by the original meaning of the Constitution itself. . . .
It is high time for conservative justices to follow Tushnet’s advice for progressive judges and reconsider cases they know full well to be in conflict with the Constitution’s original scheme (as amended). If they conflict with the original meaning of the Constitution, these cases were “wrong on the day they were decided.”
Yes. And I think Randy Barnett would be an excellent Supreme Court appointment.
THESE ARE ALSO GOOD FOR DISASTER PREP: How Solar-Powered Lights Are Brightening A Himalayan Village.
WAYBACK MACHINE POLITICIZES ITSELF, FUNDRAISES AGAINST TRUMP:
Dear Wayback Machine Patrons:
We need your help to make sure the Internet Archive lasts forever. On November 9, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change*. This is a firm reminder that the Internet Archive must also design for change. So we set a new goal: to create a copy of our collections in the Internet Archive of Canada**. This will cost millions. For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and perpetually accessible. It means preparing for a Web that may face greater restrictions. It means serving patrons when government surveillance may be on the rise. The Internet Archive is a non-profit library built on trust. Reader privacy is very important to us, so we don’t accept ads. We don’t collect your personal information. But we still need to pay for servers, staff and rent. If everyone reading this gave $50, we could end our fundraiser right now. If you find our site useful, please give what you can today. Thank you.
Well, you’ve just eliminated half your potential donors, so, no thanks.
* I’m so old, I remember when Bay Area Democrats didn’t view “radical change” as a pejorative.
** Wait, Trump is going to destroy Internet servers in San Francisco? Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
IF IT WASN’T FOR DOUBLE-STANDARDS, THEY’D HAVE NO STANDARDS AT ALL: Gutless Liar, Harry Reid, Smears James Comey As A ‘Partisan’
READER BOOK PLUG: FROM AUDRA COLDIRON: The Amishland Storyteller: Battling cancer with family, friends, and faith.
I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Passing Around a Fireball Is the Best Way to Spend Chemistry Class.
THEY DON’T CALL HIM THE “LITTLE IDIOT” FOR NOTHING: Singer Moby After Trump: ‘Americans are Either Really Stupid or Incredibly Bigoted….Really, Really Dumb People.’
I’m so old, I remember when musicians tried to increase their fan base through flattery, rather than deliberately making their appeal “more selective,” as legendary fictitious manager Ian Faith would say.
Moby’s star power has diminished significantly over the last decade, but if the media are going to rail against “Fake News,” his recommendations that the left deliberately lie to voters in 2004 are worth taking a second look at:
“No one’s talking about how to keep the other side home on Election Day,” Moby tells us. “It’s a lot easier than you think and it doesn’t cost that much. This election can be won by 200,000 votes.”
Moby suggests that it’s possible to seed doubt among Bush’s far-right supporters on the Web.
“You target his natural constituencies,” says the Grammy-nominated techno-wizard. “For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you’re an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion.
“Then you go to an anti-immigration Web site chat room and ask, ‘What’s all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?’”
As Jonah Goldberg wrote in February of 2004, shortly before Andrew Sullivan endorsed Kerry and permanently broke from the right, “A couple of weeks ago, several liberal bloggers announced that they wanted their readers to deliberately make up fake emails and send them to NR because they found the real emails we were posting in the Corner too unhelpful to their cause. So far they’ve all been way too stupid to fool us, but that could change. And now, last night, Andrew Sullivan received an email that he — and I, and a lot of our mutual readers — think was made up. Whether it was or wasn’t, it now seems safe to predict that the Moby-Moore fringe of liberalism is ratcheting-up it’s ends justify-the-means approach to political discourse. Get ready for the Age of Mobyism, it won’t be pretty.”
The Age of Mobyism flowed pretty seamlessly into the Age of Vox; and along the way, a surprising number of Democrat operatives with bylines were willing to admit they had no problem with deliberate lying and obfuscation to advance the DNC-MSM cause. If the MSM really does want end the scourge of “fake news,” theirs is an awfully big swamp to drain.
(Classical reference in headline.)
CURRENTLY $1.99 ON KINDLE: Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile. I found it interesting and useful.
JEFFREY TOOBIN: Gawker’s Fall & the Trump-Era Threat to 1st Amendment.
For decades, the news media benefitted from the deference paid by courts to the judgments of newspaper editors. The judge in federal court treated Gawker’s editors as if they were running a newspaper, and he declined to second-guess them about what constitutes the news. The jury in state court did the opposite. The question now is whether the law, instead of treating every publication as a newspaper, will start to treat all publications as Web sites—with the same skepticism and hostility displayed by the jury in Tampa. The new President and his fellow-billionaires, like Thiel, will certainly welcome a legal environment that is less forgiving of media organizations. Trump’s victory, along with Hulk Hogan’s, suggests that the public may well take their side, too.
I’m not sure exactly what “Trump-Era Threat” is supposed to mean. There doesn’t seem to be a threat from Trump, who knows exactly how to get what he wants out of the press. Are we supposed to feel threatened by an “era” merely because of its unseemly namesake? Perhaps then “Trump-Era Threat” is in the headline just to generate pageviews.
Who knows?
So then a more important question is, would the New Yorker have headlined a “Clinton-era threat” in Gawker’s wake had Hillary won the election?
Let’s talk about that Clinton-era threat — hypothetical, thank goodness — because it seems certain that there would have been one.
Hillary Clinton was the subject of the movie in the Citizens United case, which as a candidate she promised to see overturned — silencing political filmmakers for generations to come. It was on Clinton’s behalf (following her blunder at Benghazi) that an innocent YouTube videomaker was jailed for nearly a year. Just last week it was Clinton who urged “that Congress should take action against” purveyors of what she deems to be “fake news.” And forget mere threats, what about two years ago when Democrats tried to repeal the First Amendment? That, too, was backed by Hillary Clinton.
Whatever you might think of Donald Trump or the merits of the Gawker verdict, Hillary Clinton’s record on freedom of speech is atrocious — for which she has never been held accountable by the very press she has sought to control.
Even if Trump were to somehow turn out to be as hostile to free speech as Clinton is, at least he’d have Jeffrey Toobin et al. to hold him to account.
UPDATE: From the comments:
Was this summer the Era of Trump? First everything was George W Bush’s fault, even after he left office. Now it’s all Trump’s fault, even before he’s formally elected President.
Obama hasn’t even left the White House and it’s already like he was never there.
Faster, please.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: The rise of “sapiosexuals.” So when the robots get smarter than humans, will they turn into robosexuals?
POLITICO: Democrats fear another Trump trouncing: Leaderless and lacking a strategy, top party officials worry they’re not ready for Trump’s first 100 days. I’m so old I can remember when Trump was a sure loser and it was the GOP that was in disarray.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: John Grunsfeld has a plan that uses Red Dragon to return Mars rocks to Earth.
Grunsfeld’s idea goes like this: Instead of sending the high-power SEP spacecraft to an asteroid, reconfigure it by adding a communications satellite, an imager, and ground-penetrating radar. The SEP spacecraft could then go to Mars and provide all of the power the radar needs to map the entire planet’s water sources over the course of a Martian year. With the radar’s work done, the SEP spacecraft could then undock, leaving NASA with a brand new communications and imaging satellite.
Meanwhile, in 2024, another spacecraft could launch to Mars—perhaps one of SpaceX’s Red Dragons, Grunsfeld said—carrying a small rover and a Mars ascent vehicle. This rover would have the primary purpose of collecting Martian rock samples cached by the Mars 2020 rover and then returning to the ascent vehicle. After launching back to Mars orbit, the ascent vehicle would dock with the SEP spacecraft and return to Earth.
Consider the potential achievements of this two-mission strategy. By 2025 NASA would have a new, high-bandwidth communications and imaging satellite in orbit around Mars; found all the water humans would need there; demonstrated solar electric propulsion; proved the capability of conducting a roundtrip flight to Mars before sending humans and; finally, have conducted a Mars sample return mission, the highest priority of the planetary science community.
Until there’s a permanent Martian colony big and advanced enough to launch satellites indigenously, they’ll all have to originate from Earth.
EVEN YAHOO (GRUDGINGLY) ADMITS, “YES, COLIN KAEPERNICK IS HURTING NFL RATINGS.”
There’s a simple solution for the NFL, but it would require the league to admit its more conservative fans have a valid point. I’m not sure how well that would play at the cocktail parties nearby the league’s Park Ave. HQ.
Related: Levi’s Stadium is depressingly empty for Jets-49ers; ‘Fire Baalke’ banner flown.
DAVID HARSANYI: The 5 Stages Of Losing An Election To Donald Trump. “Of course, there will always be overarching theories about why Republicans win elections – like assuming half the country are racist. The Left is so enveloped by its identity politics, it may not understand that the other half of the country is sick of it. But, while I’m no fan of Donald Trump, Democrats have been demanding I panic over every cabinet pick, every statement and the things that are 1) the sort of things that were completely ok with them during the Obama administration and 2) the types of things that any mainstream Republican would engage in. Now, I’m not in the business of concern trolling, but before we shift to yet another conspiracy theory, it might behoove Democrats to look inward to explain their historic losses since the passage of Obamacare in 2010.”
The meltdown really has been epic.
UPDATE:
WELL, GOOD: Trump’s early appointments have climate change activists panicking.
To be fair, they’re always in a panic over something.
OOPS: A big change to U.S. broadcasting is coming — and it’s one Putin might admire. Note the headline that tries to imply that Trump’s presidency will be Putin-like. But there’s this:
The Obama administration — perhaps anticipating a Hillary Clinton presidency — supported these changes.
And, so, once again:
UNEXPECTEDLY! Trump’s Popularity Rising Post-Election.
IF IT WASN’T FOR DOUBLE-STANDARDS, THEY’D HAVE NO STANDARDS AT ALL: Roger Simon on the Democrats’ Nauseating Putin Hypocrisy.