Archive for 2020
May 11, 2020
BATTLESPACE PREPARATION: Trump orders federal retirement money invested in Chinese equities to be pulled.
GOVERNOR GRANDMA-KILLER:
WHAT WAS CONCEALED WILL NOW BE REVEALED: BREAKING: U.S. Officials Have Declassified List Of Obama Officials Who Were Involved In ‘Unmasking’ General Flynn.
OPEN THREAD: The people on the street have all seen better times.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: What is England’s Victoria Cross, and Who Qualifies For It (Video)?
Filmed in 2003, the ending packs a wallop. And it’s fascinating to see Jeremy Clarkson being dead-on serious for a change, rather than the exaggerated cartoon character/carnival barker tone he employs on Top Gear and the Grand Tour.
BIG TALK FROM A MAN WHO COULDN’T LAUNCH A WEBSITE WITH $2 BILLION AND TWO YEARS NOTICE: Obama Shreds Trump’s Pandemic Response: ‘Absolute Chaotic Disaster.’
HELTER STELTER: Brian Stelter: ‘It is racist’ for Trump to tell Asian-American reporter Weijia Jiang to ‘ask China’ about coronavirus deaths.
Flashback to Mark Steyn during a previous election year: If you can hear the whistle, you’re the dog.
SEEN ON FACEBOOK:
OLD AND BUSTED: Speaking Truth to Power.
The New Hotness? Scolding Hairdressers: The View Grills Jailed Salon Owner Shelly Luther: Shouldn’t You ‘Apologize?’
In 2015, when the Onion’s otherwise often enjoyable AV Club Website attacked a Michigan restaurateur for symbolically “banning” Hollywood’s Michael Moore and Seth Rogan when the two smeared the late Chris Kyle after Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper proved to be a surprise box office smash, John Nolte of Big Hollywood wrote:
And how does the AV Club respond to this symbolic but righteous protest? By using no fewer than 7 paragraphs to relentlessly mock the Little Guy and his business.
[Restaurant owner Tommy] Brann has come up with the equally deadly revenge of denying him “decent, better than average, but nothing to rave about” fare delivered through “terrible service” amid “dated and kinda dirty” decor, of the sort that Americans must consume daily to live. Rogen and Moore are hereby condemned to slowly starve to death in the Brann’s parking lot, yearning fruitlessly for Brann’s Classic Onion Straw Loaf, the lights of the sign that illuminates their fatal mistake growing dim in their eyes.
Is anyone else old enough to remember when speaking truth to and defying power was the in-thing?
When the American Left reveals who they are really for and against, it is chilling.
Know your place and shut your mouth, little man.
In his 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses, Fred Siegel wrote, “The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s.‘Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class.’”
The Anointed understand that it’s for their own good, of course.
AT AMAZON, spring savings in Automotive.
Plus, deals in Jewelry.
Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar-winning screenplay, among the top ten ever filmed, was much laboured upon, as his archived papers reveal. In the same way that, when Terminator 2 came out, you could actually see (with a sensory satisfaction I’ve rarely savored before or since) every single cent of its then-record $100 million budget onscreen, you can feel Chayefsky’s hard work here, but — and this is key — you are not distracted by it. You enjoy a simmering, simpatico sense of profound appreciation for his craftsmanship every second of Network‘s running time, while simultaneously remaining deeply immersed in the world he’s created.
In this sense, Network is quite like a cathedral: People MADE this, you think, but it is “this,” and not those artisans, which is the actual point. This rare and precarious balance inspires awe. It is what Art is.
But then you’re me, and you notice something.
Read the whole thing. There’s something for all in Network. As Kathy notes in her retrospective, a decade ago, the left was endlessly comparing Glenn Beck to Network’s Howard Beale; a few years later, I described Chayefsky’s film as “Big Media’s How-To Guide for the Obama Era.” To which Trump – whose second career was made by both his CNBC reality TV show and his fawning coverage by Joe and Mika on MSNBC – was, in retrospect, the logical outcome.
WAIT, WHAT? Post-it note left for woman diagnosed with COVID-19 reads no more mail delivery.
On Thursday, she said she found something in the mail that not only shocked her, but added to her stress.
“A little two inch by two inch post-it note from my carrier was in there ,” said Bilbo. “That said they could no longer deliver my mail, because someone had tested positive for COVID-19 at this address.”
Bilbo explained that she worried about her bills and packages including her sisters cancer medication that they normally get through the mail.
“My mailbox is out on the street away from my house. I called Smithville Post office and they couldn’t tell me why except Bastrop police told them to stop my mail,” Bilbo explained.
After not hearing anything from the post office Bilbo contacted KXAN investigators for help.
“The notice to the customer regarding their mail delivery was left in error,” explained Communications Specialist Becky Hernandez in an email to KXAN. “We apologize for any inconvenience that may have been experienced by our customer. As soon as local postal managers were made aware, they took steps to resolve the issue and have confirmed that mail delivery has resumed.”
I hope somebody got at least a tongue-lashing for this.
MATT RIDLEY: We know everything–and nothing–about Covid. The lockdowns were imposed in a state of ignorance. It now looks as if many of the early cases were caught in hospitals and doctors’ offices and nursing homes.
If Covid-19 is at least partly a ‘nosocomial’ (hospital-acquired) disease, then the pandemic might burn itself out quicker than expected. The death rate here [in the U.K.] peaked on 8 April, just two weeks after lockdown began, which is surprisingly early given that it is usually at least four weeks after infection that people die if they die. But it makes sense if this was the fading of the initial, hospital–acquired wave. If you look at the per capita numbers for different countries in Europe, they all show a dampening of the rate of growth earlier than you would expect from the lockdowns.
So if it wasn’t the lockdowns that slowed infection . . . .
It is possible that washing your hands, not shaking hands with others, not gathering in large crowds, and wearing a face mask in public, but no more than this, might have been enough, as Sweden seems to suggest. Forcibly shutting schools and shops and aggressively policing sunbathers in parks may have added little in terms of reducing the rate of spread.
But it did give politicians a chance to order everyone around, so there’s that.
HMMMM: One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest. Did Shi Zhengli’s team’s own virus database get deleted?
Background on “Shi Zhengli, the virologist known as China’s ‘batwoman’ for her work with bat coronaviruses” here: What is China covering up about the coronavirus?
PRESENT TENSE: Jonathan Demme’s 1977 film Citizens Band:
At one point, Blaine cries out in frustration, “Everybody in this town is somebody they’re not supposed to be!” The CB handles are Avatars: you can be anything out there on the air. There is some equivalence to today’s internet technology, to the “bots” spreading disinformation on Twitter or the treachery of anonymous comments sections, but Charles Taylor, in his chapter on Citizens Band in Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You, observes “CBs add what texting and e-mail and instant messaging delete: an immediate human presence. Hearing the voice of another person prevents the inevitable misreadings of tone that characterize online communication, allowing you to hear, right away, the effect of your words on the person you are talking to.” In the world of Citizens Band, people put out their Ids on the air, their ultimate wants, desires, needs. This is true for the Nazi, it’s true for the 10-year-old kid calling himself “Hustler.” It’s true for the nerdy virgin “Warlock”, having CB-radio-sex with Electra on a nightly basis.
Some fantasies are destructive, of course. But when you think of someone who lives in a fantasy world, like Blanche Dubois in Streetcar Named Desire: does Blanche’s fantasy of herself as a Southern belle really hurt anyone? Isn’t it a way to create a moat around her sensitivity, to shield herself from’ cruelty, but also, crucially, to find love and protection? Maybe we should be kinder towards other people’s fantasies. Maybe we should cut people some slack. The blinding light of reality 24/7 is no great shakes. The people of Union have a lot of reality to deal with: economic hard times, frustration, broken hearts, the universal stuff of life. Their CB call handles are protective coloring, but, as Kabuki masters know: the mask may conceal but it also reveals. When Blaine’s father is just Blaine’s father, he lies collapsed in a drunken heap. When Blaine’s father is “Papa Thermodyne”, he’s engaged with others, he’s enthusiastic: in remembering who he used to be, he remembers who he is. Citizens Band is full of such gentle little revelations. It’s a subversively profound movie.
Rejecting the DIY Citizen’s Band era of the Blogosphere for the walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter was a profound mistake. Somebody should write a book about the, err, upheaval caused by that!
WELL, THAT SUCKS IF TRUE: Study: Coronavirus unlikely to fade in summer.
QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Who’s Up For Seeing a Gigantic Digital Joe Biden Avatar Projected Onto the Grand Canyon?
LOCAL MILITIAS ARE BETTER THAN A D-DAY STRATEGY: Herd Immunity Is Misleading. We should aim for augmented immunity instead — and fight a guerilla war against Covid-19 instead of a centrally commanded confrontation.