21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Robotic Crab meat extraction to bring more revenue back to Canada.
Archive for 2017
October 28, 2017
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Married substitute teacher, 26, accused of ‘bathrobe man cave sex’ with her teen boy student. “Bathrobe man cave sex?” Who does she think she is, Harvey Weinstein?
THEN: A Trump Meltdown For The Ages:
It was a display that will renew questions about the suitability of Trump’s temperament for the presidency, and at a time of increasing tensions around the world that will exacerbate fears he will be unable to control his emotions at a time of crisis as commander-in-chief. . . .
“This week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?”
NOW: George Washington’s Church Says Plaque Honoring The First President Must Come Down.
WELL, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN TOO AWKWARD WITH AN ACCUSED RAPIST SHARING THE WHITE HOUSE WITH HER: Amber Tamblyn Doesn’t Think the Harvey Weinstein Allegations Would Have Come Out if Hillary Clinton Had Won.
HARVEYWOOD BACKLASH SINKS GEORGE CLOONEY: Suburbicon Opens to Humiliating $3 Million.
Things are so bad, the 2017 year-to-date box office is trailing behind four of the last five years and barely ahead of the catastrophic year that was 2014.
The news, however, is especially bad for Clooney. Prior to Suburbicon, the director’s 2011 The Ides of March was his worst wide-opening ($10 million) as a director. This $3 million opening is also the worst opening ever (in over 2,000 theaters) for star Matt Damon.
Working against Clooney is his politically divisive personality and his track record. In this age of an ever empowered new media, the Hollywood bubble and mainstream media no longer have the power to con American moviegoers into believing he’s a modern-day Cary Grant and genius auteur. The movies he directs are just not very good. Fans of 2002’s Confession of a Dangerous Mind should be reminded that Clooney did not write that script.
Also working against Suburbicon is its Harveywood problem. Both Clooney and Damon got their start with Harvey Weinstein. Damon’s affiliation with the alleged serial-predator is so strong it is impossible to think of one without the other.
Although both men were close Weinstein colleagues at the height of his power during the golden age of Miramax, their protestations of knowing nothing were widely met with social media skepticism. Damon certainly did not help himself or Suburbicon with his conflicting statements.
As Hollywood journalist Richard Rushfield recently told Jonathan Last of Weekly Standard, “the studios are waking up to the fact that it’s getting harder to wrench people away from their Netflix and into the theaters, and somehow Hollywood seems to be forgetting how to do that.”
As with Colin Kaepernick beginning the NFL’s potential slow death march last year, the Harvey Weinstein story (and related stories of appalling behavior by other Hollywood tyrants) arrives at the worst possible time for the industry that John Nolte dubs “Harveywood.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
OOF: Texans owner Bob McNair on anthem protests: ‘We can’t have the inmates running the prison.’
Historically, the phrase has always been “we can’t have the inmates running the asylum,” which is much less racially loaded, and in this case, would have suggested the NFL as America’s collective funny farm rather than its penal colony. It’s the difference between North Dallas Forty and American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson.
Of course, referring to “the inmates running the asylum” would have likely triggered the SJW crowd nearly as much. But hey, not my job to defend McNair; the NFL worked very hard to alienate guys like me who want to keep politics out of sports. They’re now fully in bed with the side of the aisle that believes the teams who don’t hire Colin Kaepernick are led by plantation owners, have Bletchley Park-level grievance detectors and continually update the Newspeak Dictionary. The “fun” will be increasing exponentially from here on in, Roger Goodell & company.
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ACTRESS ANNABELLA SCIORRA: Harvey Weinstein violently raped me. “A new bombshell from Ronan Farrow and the New Yorker. Remember, NBC could have had all of this.”
SINCE HARVEY WEINSTEIN’S DEFENDERS HAVE MANAGED TO TURN DISCUSSION FROM A “LOOK HOW AWFUL HARVEY WEINSTEIN IS,” INTO “LOOK HOW AWFUL ALL MEN ARE,” IT’S WORTH REVISITING THIS BY CONOR FRIEDERSDORF: The Understudied Female Sexual Predator: According to new research, sexual victimization by women is more common than gender stereotypes would suggest.
Only the 2010 report provides data on the perpetrator’s sex. It found that over their lifetime, women were vastly more likely to experience abuse perpetrated by men, as were male victims who were penetrated without their consent. “But among men reporting other forms of sexual victimization, 68.6% reported female perpetrators,” the paper reports, while among men reporting being made to penetrate, “the form of nonconsensual sex that men are much more likely to experience in their lifetime … 79.2% of victimized men reported female perpetrators.
Next they turn to the National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This survey focuses on violent crime. After pooling and analyzing the data gathered in the years 2010 through 2013, the authors found female perpetrators acting without male co-perpetrators were reported in 28 percent of rape or sexual assault incidents involving male victims and 4.1 percent of incidents with female victims. Female perpetrator were reported in 34.7 percent of incidents with male victims and 4.2 percent of incidents with female victims.
To study nonconsensual sex among the incarcerated, the authors draw on data collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics under the Prison Rape Elimination Act. (Their paper focuses on surveys of previously incarcerated inmates in state prisons; Stemple told me that the patterns they related are similar to data collected from those held in a broad range of prisons and jails.) Noting the high prevalence of “sexual victimization committed by female staff members and female inmates,” the authors report that women are “much more likely to be abused” by other women inmates than by male staff.
They add that “for women prisoners and girls in detention, staff perpetrators are overwhelmingly male, and for men and boys the staff perpetrators are overwhelmingly female.” Women are disproportionately represented among all staff abusers because men and boys are so disproportionately incarcerated overall.
Among adults who reported sexual contact with prison staff, including some contact that prisoners call “willing” but that is often coercive and always illegal, 80 percent reported only female perpetrators. Among juveniles, the same figure is 89.3 percent. Queer men and women were two to three times more likely to report abuse. “The disproportionate abuse by female staff members does not occur because women are more often staffing facilities,” the authors write. “Men outnumber women by a ratio of three to one in positions requiring direct contact with inmates.” . . .
The authors also note a 2011 survey of 302 male college students. It found that 51.2 percent reported “at least one sexual victimization experience since age 16.”
About half of the victims reported a female perpetrator.
I know, doesn’t fit this week’s narrative, but the science is settled.
I HAVE NO WORDS: University of Wisconsin-Madison Students Protest Abraham Lincoln Statue Because ‘He Owned Slaves’.
Maybe “higher education” means you have to be really, really high.
THAT SLY COME-HITHER STARE THAT STRIPS THEIR CONSCIENCE BARE. Alt-Left Insanity: Sciency Liberals Actually Believe In Witchcraft.
Hey, it is Washington Post approved, you know.
How did Gillespie almost steal Virginia’s senate seat from Warner? The key was outreach in communities outside the Republican Party’s normal comfort zone, Gillespie says, emphasizing his own experience as a first-generation American. “I am the son of an immigrant myself, and would make that point in these communities,” Gillespie recalls. “My father came here as a boy from Ireland. My grandfather was a janitor, and I got to grow up to be counselor to the president of the United States of America.” He used that experience as an entrée to these communities, emphasizing his desire to duplicate it for their families. “I want the same opportunities for future generations,” he told them during his campaign.
Gillespie also focused on themes and issues that resonated across community lines, emphasizing “upward mobility and job creation, economic growth, lifting people out of poverty, and higher wages,” as well as “education, a reform-and-replace plan for ObamaCare, energy production, and more affordable energy.” More important than the message itself was where and how Gillespie communicated it.
“I went into the black churches in Prince William, and to places a lot of Republicans have not gone,” he says. County Republican Party vice chair D. J. Jordan, a leading African American conservative in Prince William, corroborates this. “Grace Church Dumfries is a church that Ed Gillespie visited in October 2014,” Jordan recalls, “and he was very well received. They welcomed him from the pulpit and he was able to talk to those who were out in the lobby afterwards.”
Related: ‘Reeks of subtle racism’: Black Democrat omitted from campaign fliers in Virginia.
UPDATE: Gross: A Former Hillary Spokesman Published the Worst Tweet of the Week.
REMINDER: IF YOU CAN HEAR THE DOG WHISTLE, YOU’RE THE DOG. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: Trump’s Use Of ‘Strong On Crime’ Is A Racial Dog-Whistle.
More so than when MSNBC claimed “golf” and “Chicago” were racist GOP dog whistles in 2012?
More so than when Tony Blair of the UK Labour Party used “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” as his party’s slogan in the 1990s?
(Classical reference in headline.)
I WOULD SAY “FASTER, PLEASE” BUT THIS IS PRETTY DAMN FAST: Watch This Street-Legal 2700-HP Ford GT Hit 292 MPH.
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SECRETARY OF DEFENSE JIM MATTIS: North Korea’s nuclear threat is accelerating.
In remarks in Seoul with South Korean Defense Minister Song Young-moo at his side, Mattis accused the North of illegal and unnecessary missile and nuclear programs — and vowed to defeat any attack.
Mattis said North Korea engages in “outlaw” behavior and that the U.S. will never accept a nuclear North.
He added that regardless of what the North might try, it is overmatched by the firepower and cohesiveness of the decades-old U.S.-South Korean alliance.
“North Korea has accelerated the threat that it poses to its neighbors and the world through its illegal and unnecessary missile and nuclear weapons programs,” he said, adding that U.S.-South Korean military and diplomatic collaboration thus has taken on “a new urgency.”
Here’s some of the firepower SecDef Mattis mentioned. In the air: a B-52 over Guam preparing to exercise with Asian allies. On the ground: a multiple launch rocket system conducting a live fire exercise on a South Korean range. The Trump Administration also employs other forms of threat diplomacy.
I’M NOT SAYING THAT IT’S ALIENS. BUT IT’S ALIENS. Astronomers Are Watching an Interstellar Object That’s Appeared in Our Solar System: Where did it come from?
FASTER, PLEASE: Newly discovered molecule may hold promise in HIV vaccine.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Yale ‘decolonizes’ English dept. after complaints studying white authors ‘actively harms’ students.