MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Georgia County Can’t Find Chain of Custody Records for Absentee Ballots.
Archive for 2020
December 6, 2020
ROGER SIMON: Massive Civil Disobedience Coming to the USA in 2021.
21ST CENTURY MOON RACE: China unfurls its first fabric flag on moon.
A FIRST AMENDMENT PROBLEM WITH THE “STABLE” CRYPTOCURRENCY ACT? To be honest, I read this whole thing as just an entering wedge for a banking industry takeover of cryptocurrency. But this provision struck me as being questionable from a free speech perspective:
(2) USE OF THE TERM ‘DOLLAR’.—A person offering or providing a product or service with respect to a stablecoin may not use the term ‘dollar’ or ‘dollars’ to refer to stablecoin balances unless such reference is pre-approved by either the Comptroller of the Currency or the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
“Refer to?” I’m no finance expert, but if this means that a crypto exchange or wallet program can’t say that an unlicensed stablecoin balance that’s worth 50 dollars is worth 50 dollars, that strikes me as both dumb and potentially unconstitutional. It’s one thing to ban calling something that’s not a dollar (a stablecoin) a dollar, but if something is truthfully worth 50 dollars, I don’t think the government can prevent someone from saying so.
Possible workaround: Coinbase, Binance, etc. just label stablecoin balances as worth “50 bucks” or “50 smackeroos” or whatever, making this pointless.
NEWS I CAN’T USE: Tanning bed use linked to higher risk for endometriosis in study.
THE UNITED STATES SHOULD DO THE SAME: U.K. Grants Five Passports a Minute to Hongkongers as China Tightens Grip.
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME: “Today, it’s Netflix and other major streaming services that play the role which studios did in the nineteen-thirties and forties.” “Like the studios, streaming services control the spigot of viewing, and, like the studios, the major services are vertically integrated, controlling both the means of production and the means of distribution. Netflix both produced ‘Mank’ and is the place where the film will be seen—the company, in effect, owns a thousand-screen multiplex, present in every subscriber’s home. If Fincher, in ‘Mank,’ looks so ruefully at the intersection of media power and political power, it’s because, in the age of streaming, the reign of behemoth studios and their monopoly has, in effect, returned.”
JOHN NOLTE’S MANK REVIEW: Forgettable, Over-Produced Piece of Fake News.
The first 20 or so minutes are actually fun. The dialogue is sharp as we tour Hollywood’s true Golden Era. Tedium sets in pretty quickly, though. Eventually, the relentless witticisms only add to the artificiality of a movie that has so much black and white digital trickery you feel like you’re watching a videogame. Fincher might argue that “artificiality” is the idea. After all, look at the movies from that time, all shot on backlots. Fair enough, but those movies feel real because the backlots were real, in the sense they actually physically existed — which is a far cry from pixels.
Mank and [Citizen Kane co-screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz] are also selling us socialism. The eeeevil Mayer and Thalberg and Hearst are eeeevil Republicans who invent fake news (but only after Mank’s second-worst Forrest Gump moment accidentally gives them the idea) to stop Upton Sinclair, a socialist, from becoming California’s next governor.
“Communism spreads the poverty,” Mank claps back as he speaks-truth-to-power as a guest at Hearst Castle, “While socialism spreads the wealth.”
Talk about fake news.
But back to Welles…
The great hypocrisy in Mank is the tearing down of Orson Welles. Fincher (working from his late father’s screenplay) pretends to be bravely exposing the establishment as too powerful, too much of a monopoly (while working for Netflix LOL), but all he’s really doing is protecting it against renegades and true outsiders like Orson Welles who, for all his flaws, was an iconoclast, an artistic revolutionary, an anti-establishment maverick so far ahead of his time it would take Hollywood a half-century to catch up to Citizen Kane — and Mank still shits all over him, annihilates him, punishes him, and in favor of who? A studio hack. A man who was part of The System. An insider who dined with studio heads, who entertained at Hearst’s table, and who only sold all these people out after he had nothing to lose after he hit bottom.
Read the whole thing. The genius of Citizen Kane is that it was the only time Welles had both full creative control and a top-flight crew of veteran studio craftsmen to implement his innovative ideas. Mank’s screenplay was an important roadmap for laying out Welles’ then-radical experiments with structure and contrasting tones and points of view, but — at least according to Welles himself — the experiment in structure was Welles’ idea:
“I’d been nursing an old notion,” Welles told Bogdanovich, “the idea of telling the same thing several times—and showing exactly the same thing from wholly different points of view. Basically, the idea Rashomon used later on. Mank liked it, so we started searching for the man it was going to be about. Some big American figure—couldn’t be a politician, because you’d have to pinpoint him. Howard Hughes was the first idea. But we got pretty quickly to the press lords.”
Sadly, Mankiewicz’s desultory post-Kane career (he would die at age 55 after a lifetime of alcoholism), anticipated Welles’ own massive dissipation (via gluttony, cigar smoking, and drink) in his later years. As Nolte writes, “If you look closely, the Mank in Mank isn’t bravely biting the hands that feed him or speaking truth to power or risking it all. He isn’t risking anything. All he’s doing is what countless has-beens have done through the ages: dishing dirt on old friends, writing a tell-all because that’s all he’s got left to sell.”
Welles never wrote his own tell-all, but in order to makes ends meet, and raise money for films that never happened, in his last decade, Welles did an enormous amount of selling as well.
ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL LAUNCH FOR SPACEX, ITS 24TH LAUNCH THIS YEAR: You can see the video here. Also the 100th Falcon 9 flight and the 68th successful first-stage landing on the drone ship.
DISPATCHES FROM DEEP WITHIN THE TENTACLES OF THE MSM: Kurt Eichenwald says the GOP, like the Nazis before them, are laughing about the COVID-19 holocaust.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Say what you like about Hitler, he didn’t go around calling his political opponents Nazis!
WELL, PRINCETON ADMITTED IT: Ed Dept. confirms it is still investigating Princeton for systemic racism.
UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY: More Defunding Police–Crime Soars in Major Cities: Libs Call It ‘Safety For All.’
DISCRIMINATION: Texas A&M Students for Trump president ‘required’ to meet with ‘conduct’ office after placing Trump signs on ‘public property.’
Texas A&M has been a real problem school lately. What’s up with the Aggies?
ROGER KIMBALL: The Burden of Proof. “The faith in fairness has been shattered beyond recovery, and the assumption of anything like a shared consensus seems more and more like a naïve pretense when it isn’t just a cynical hustings gambit.”
When you spend decades undermining institutions, people don’t trust them anymore.
SCHEDULED FOR 11:17 AM EASTERN: SpaceX will launch a Dragon cargo ship to the International Space Station for NASA today. Here’s how to watch live.
TO BE FAIR, IT WOULD BE THE PERFECT ENDING FOR 2020: Milky Way galaxy map unveiled as astronomers reveal Earth is heading toward a black hole.
WHERE’S SPACE FORCE WHEN YOU NEED THEM? Chinese Communist Flag Planted on Moon by Unmanned Ship.
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Japanese space capsule carrying pristine asteroid samples lands in Australia.
THE SERIOUSNESS OF THE CHARGES DEMANDS AN INVESTIGATION: 20 House Republicans demand Barr investigate ‘suitcases’ of ballots in Georgia.