OPEN THREAD: Comment like it’s Saturday night.
Archive for 2019
April 27, 2019
DO TELL: Michael Isikoff: Media Should Have Had ‘More Skepticism’ About Steele Dossier. “We knew that Steele compiled it, but that Steele did not hear these allegations himself. Somebody else heard them from others and then passed them along. That’s third-hand stuff, which is not usually the kind you want for publishing.” Unless you’re desperate to run anything negative about Trump. This is the picture of reckless disregard.
IF THEY GET THERE FIRST THEY CAN HOG THE WATER: China Plans to Build a Moon Base Near the Lunar South Pole. Beating them should be a priority.
THE EVOLUTION OF LEFTIST POLICIES:
What’s hilarious is, this is entirely because Democrats — wrongly — believe that Facebook cost Hillary the election. If they thought it had won the election for her, they’d be 180 degrees different.
LIFE AMONG THE BARBARIANS: Anti-Christian Violence Surges in Egypt, Prompting an Exodus.
PAUL KRUGMAN ON ELECTION NIGHT: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”
CNBC LAST NIGHT: S&P 500 and Nasdaq close at record highs after strong GDP report. “The economic expansion will set new records for longevity in July and it looks like there is no stopping this economy.”
This never gets old. . . .
IT WAS A BETTER L.A. THAN THE PRESENT ONE: How ‘Rocketman’ and ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ uniquely re-create a lost Los Angeles. Decline is a choice, and California has chosen . . . poorly.
WE NEVER SEE WORRIES ABOUT “THE STATE OF OUR DEMOCRACY” WHEN THE LEFT IS WINNING:
SAN DIEGO COUNTY SHERIFF PROVIDES AN UPDATE ON THE POWAY SYNAGOGUE SHOOTING: “Although the situation is still fluid, we know a white, middle aged male used an ‘AR-style’ firearm to carry out the attack. The number of rounds fired is still unknown. Four people were taken to Palomar Medical Center, including one female juvenile, two adult males and an older female. The older female succumbed to her injuries. The other three individuals are in stable condition. According to [San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore], an off duty Border Patrol agent came across the suspect, opened fire on him but did not hit him.”
Related: “President Trump said Saturday the shooting at a synagogue in California was an apparent hate crime. ‘My deepest sympathies go to the families who were affected,’ the president told reporters at the White House. ‘Looks like a hate crime. Hard to believe … looks like the person was apprehended.’”
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Caffeine Gives Perovskite Solar Cells An Energy Boost, Study Says. “UCLA professor Yang Yang’s lab chock-full of coffee drinkers spent several years searching for a stability-enhancing additive to turn famously unstable perovskite PV cells into a useful product. Then, on a lark, Yang’s graduate student Rui Wang suggested they try adding caffeine to the mix. To the team’s surprise, caffeine produced longer lasting and more powerful solar cells.”
HOW TINA FEY’S 30 ROCK PREDICTED TRUMP’S RISE:
“The last season his family comes to visit, and we’re treated to shockingly elitist picture of how the Tina Fey’s of the world view flyover America,” Davis says. “It’s extremely clear watching this final season that Fey knew exactly the influence television programming could have on electoral politics and polling, and she was very deliberate about using her platform to stump for Obama with that in mind. It’s not subtle or hidden. It’s not something you have to ‘dig out’ of the plot. It is blatant and unapologetic.”
“30 Rock” ended after its seventh season, several years before a fellow NBC personality rocked the political landscape. Donald Trump’s ascendancy offers an intriguing footnote to “30 Rock’s” world view.
“It’s quite amusing and satisfying to hear Tina Fey self-righteously wax poetic about how half the country is now and forever irrelevant, knowing that in just a few short years she and her ilk will be shaking their fists at the sky and wondering how they all could have gotten it so very, very wrong,” Davis says.
ENJOY IT WHILE YOU CAN: WHY AVENGERS: ENDGAME COULD MARK END OF MARVEL’S PRE-WOKE ERA.
Avengers: Endgame is the unofficial end of the series’ first wave of films. We’ve seen a few disappointments so far (think Iron Man 3 and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2), but the level of excellence has been breathtaking.
Consider the giddy pleasures of the Ant Man series, or the creative splendor on display in Black Panther.
What’s missing? Hollywood’s progressive groupthink. These films focused on storytelling, great characters and themes that resonate across the culture. Heroes. Villains. The power of sacrifice. The nobility of fighting for a common good.
The stories didn’t stop cold to send a message or dabble in virtue signaling. That’s what we often see across the pop culture landscape. TV shows routinely slip pro-gun control messages into their narratives, for example. And boy, does it show.
The MCU didn’t do that, but that could be changing.
Including (and I can’t believe I’m about to type this) “body positive” superheroes. As Ace of Spades adds, “It’s pretty likely that most of the Real Avengers won’t be back except in cameos in future movies, and I expect interest in this franchise to diminish quite a bit. So I guess I don’t really care. But I will enjoy the future headlines, like, ‘Where has Marvel’s magic gone?’”
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? “This screenshot is from The New York Times website on April 25, 2019. It was nestled among other stories. So, how do you think this lede got by the brain of the person who posted it alongside this photograph? Really?”
Read the whole thing, which describes what the Times is writing off these days as yet another “error of judgment.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
And while some Republicans are gleeful that the Democrats are acting so crazy because they think it helps Trump in 2020, remember that even if that’s true, sooner or later the Democrats will be back in power.
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CORRECTING SOME ERRONEOUS IMPRESSIONS: God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades.
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: The New York Times’s latest error of judgment: this anti-Semitic cartoon.
What the Times should have said was:
‘We ran a blatantly anti-Semitic cartoon. At a time when anti-Jewish violence and incitement is at levels not seen since 1945, we chose to place gutter racism on our pages. We did this because plenty of our editors share the prejudice of this cartoon; if in doubt, look at our unsigned editorials.
‘We’re so soaked in this that none of us thought that it might be an error to publish a cartoon with clear precursors in fascist, communist, Arab nationalist and Islamist propaganda. Rather than explain this away in the passive tense, we’re going to name the editors who signed off on this cartoon, and fire them.’
Of course, the Times will do none of this. There won’t be a comparative demonstration of why this kind of imagery is so obnoxious, because the Times is histrionically sensitive to giving offense to any group except the groups that it identifies as objects of contempt: Republicans, white Southerners, Easter worshippers, people who like Brexit, and ‘Zionists’, a euphemism which one recent survey counted as 92 percent of American Jews.
Nor will there be any kind of acknowledgment that the publication of this cartoon reflects the unexamined moral rot of the left in Europe and the United States, in which anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, whether about Jews or Russian ‘collusion’, play so central a role.
As Erielle Davidson of the Federalist writes, “Pause to consider that the same reason the anti-Semitic cartoon in the international New York Times made it past several editors is the same reason the Left loves Ilhan Omar. They don’t care about anti-Semitism. They condone it… It’s all the same reason. And the Left knows it. Anti-Semitism is justified by the aims of cultural Marxism.”
CHANGE: 11 New Pocket Pistols for 2019. I’m kinda disappointed that we’re 20% into the 21st Century and I can’t get a .75 recoilless or a gaussgun.
BETTER A FAKE ONE THAN A REAL ONE: NASA Is Preparing for a Fake Asteroid Impact. Though maybe we should . . . oh, never mind.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. “If Your Big Issue to Fight Racism is Kate Smith singing God Bless America… then we must conclude that actual racism in the United States of the sort that prevents people from living one’s life and bettering one’s position is practically non-existent.”
OUT: MICRO-AGGRESSIONS. In: Micro-Cheating. Meh. Micro problems demand micro solutions.
Related: No, Micro-Cheating Isn’t A Real Thing. “After reading a series of articles from Buzzfeed, Thought Catalog2, Business Insider, and more, needless to say I have some opinions on the concept of ‘micro-cheating’. And why, specifically, it’s bullshit. . . . This is, to use the technical term, mindf*ckingly absurd. . . . In and of itself, this is the material of Overly Obsessed Girlfriend memes.”