CHILD ABUSE: Open the Schools. Keeping kids out of classrooms indefinitely will do them considerable harm.
Archive for 2020
June 19, 2020
FAKE NEWS ON FILM: Finally, a Dramatic Film Tackles Walter Duranty’s Lies in the New York Times.
Once in Moscow, Jones realizes that Stalin’s collectivization is a fraud perpetrated by a criminal government and propped up by sympathetic journalists from the West. These include one Walter Duranty, the oleaginous, established correspondent for The New York Times. Duranty is played to slimy effect by Peter Sarsgaard, who coincidentally also played Charles Lane, the editor of the exposed New Republic fabulist Stephen Glass, in Shattered Glass (2003). Duranty strikes entire pages of copy that don’t uphold the official Soviet view. The journalist Joseph Alsop once called Duranty a “fashionable prostitute” for the Bolsheviks, and to British writer Malcolm Muggeridge, who was blackballed by many British newspapers after reporting the truth from Russia, Duranty was “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism.” But the Soviet sympathizer won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his exclusive interviews with Stalin. To defend everything from mass starvation to the show trials of 1928, 1934, and 1936, Duranty had a simple response, parroting Robespierre: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
A hedonist who walked with a cane after losing a leg in a train accident, Duranty is shown throwing parties filled with jazz, opium, and lots of naked bodies. One of the funniest and most unsettling scenes in Mr. Jones comes when Jones is confronted by a naked Duranty at one such bacchanal. Duranty, irritated that Jones keeps asking the wrong questions and isn’t interested in sleeping with one of the women at the party, calls him a nobody. “I must be somebody,” Jones retorts. “I’m standing in front of the naked Moscow correspondent of The New York Times.” Director Holland conveys claustrophobic environments well, whether in a parlor-room party or a train packed with starving Ukrainians.
Read the whole thing. Further thoughts from Christian Toto, with a video assist from PJM co-founder Roger Simon.
Mr. Jones is available for streaming starting today at Amazon. Hopefully it will eventually be available in other formats and/or platforms.
With Mr. Jones, and the 2017 black comedy The Death of Stalin (currently available on Netflix), a few of Hollywood’s missing movies are finally being tackled.
(Updated to reflect its availability on Amazon and bumped.)
ONLY 55? Poll: 55% Believe That Biden Potentially Has ‘Early Stages Of Dementia.’ Also, early stages?
VIA AN INDUSTRY NEWSLETTER I GET, NIELSEN REPORTS ON THE RECOVERY IN ON-PREMISES BOOZE SALES:
Here are some key insights from the Nielsen CGA RestauranTrak dataset, powered by Check-Level Insights Pool (CLIP), for the week ending June 13:
. At a total U.S. level (so not just limited to the aforementioned 4 states)
. Sales velocity (average dollar sales per the average on-premise outlet in Nielsen CGA measurement) in the on-premise channel has improved to -23% vs. the pre-COVID norm for the week ending June 13.
. Compared to March 28, when the on-premise shutdown commenced, sales velocity is +175%.
. Sales velocity is +18% for the week ending June 13 vs. the week ending June 6.
. Almost every day in the past two weeks delivered double-digit sales growth compared to the previous week.
. Average purchase/transaction value is also continuing its upward trajectory and is now only -8% compared to pre-COVID norms, up from -50% at its lowest.
Breaking things out by four major states, Texas and Florida are recovering much faster than New York and California, which is unsurprising.
I DOUBT THEY’D HAVE MADE THIS CHANGE IN RESPONSE TO OTHER SCHOOLS: After 7 Of 8 Ivy League Schools Drop SAT/ACT For Class of 2025, U.S. News Will Start Ranking Test-Blind Colleges.
DON SURBER: Cancel Culture Just Got Fun:
Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon may lose their gigs as late-night hosts on ABC and NBC respectively for skits they did in blackface on national television.
Kimmel’s skits were on Comedy Central’s Man Show. Fallon’s were on Saturday Night Live on NBC, which proves even the people at NBC don’t watch SNL because it is an institution, not a comedy show.
The blackface skits are not relics of an earlier age. They are bad decisions by comics and TV networks that should have known better.
The Daily Mail reported, “Jimmy Kimmel has announced that he is taking a break from his late-night show over the summer, to spend more time with his family.
Exit question:
BUT THE OTHER 70% HAVE BEEN BULLIED INTO KEEPING THEIR MOUTHS SHUT: Just 30% Say Black Lives Matter More Than All Lives.
DID THE MASSIVE RALLIES OF THE PAST FEW WEEKS REALLY HAPPEN: The Washington Post has this story, about foreign bigwigs being astounded by what the article describes as the Trump administration’s inept handling of the coronavirus, and what they see as the U.S. giving up on containing it. I don’t think any of our elites come off especially well in how they have handled the virus, but I do seem to recall this series of events, which is entirely absent from the Post article: (1) Hundreds of thousands of people coming out in the streets with little social distancing in defiance of all previous public health guidance; (2) various mayors and governors who had been among the strictest in fining, denouncing, and generally bullying anyone who defied social distancing guidelines not only not trying to break up these gatherings, not only leaving them alone, but actually (3) attending them, encouraging their attendees, and praising them; (4) various respected public health experts, who had previously been adamant about banning large public gatherings, at best not saying anything (with very few exceptions) and in many cases actually praising the gatherings as a net benefit to public health; (5) leading to even more people coming out on the streets in defiance of all prior public health guidance on social distancing, tens of thousands at a time all over the country; (6) leading to the utter breakdown of obedience by the rest of the population to any distancing guidelines, as many people who had been banned from attending church, funerals, opening their businesses, and so on figured that the people who had been insisting on strict social distancing were frauds and liars.
But since the Washington Post couldn’t find a single foreign observer to comment on such a remarkable chain of events, and since in any event they can’t be blamed on Trump, they must never have happened, must be my imagination.
SO YOU’RE SAYING THE PEOPLE RUNNING OUR UNIVERSITIES HAVE GOTTEN DUMBER? SEEMS PLAUSIBLE. Is support for free speech correlated with intelligence? 3 studies on that question all point to the answer: yes!
YOU MAY NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOU: Massachusetts Restaurant Bans Elected Official Over Alleged Anti-Black Lives Matter Comments.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Tips On Sheltering In Place.
WHY NOT TAKE A BREAK FROM THE SERIOUS NEWS FOR A FEW MINUTES? Florida Man Friday: Machete-Tattooed Machete Attacker Exposed.
I know I needed the break.
REMINDER: Flattening the curve always meant having higher hospitalizations now.
To recap, here are the graph features — and where we are as of June 18:
Dark black line: Hospital bed capacity, “approximately 25,000”
Red peak: The “minimal action” projection: hospitals overwhelmed by an order of magnitude, approximately 225,000 hospitalizations by the peak in late April
Orange peak: The “social distancing” projection: hospitals overwhelmed by a much smaller magnitude, approximately 90,000 hospitalizations by the peak in mid-May
Blue peak: The “stay-at-home” projection: hospitals never overwhelmed, approximately 12,000 hospitalizations by the peak in early July
June 18: Real-time data as of June 18, after recording the 10th record number of hospitalizations this month: 857 hospitalizations
These figures are for North Carolina, but it’s been more or less the same everywhere. Covid-19 has underperformed. To be fair, so has our political/journalistic class.
WHY I SIGNED “THE STATEMENT ON SOCIAL JUSTICE & THE GOSPEL:” No, I’ve not caved to the SJWs, quite the contrary. But knowing there are legions of professing Christians among Instapundit’s fine readership, many of whom are concerned about the “critical theory” turbulence currently afflicting the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention and the wider evangelical community as well, just wanted to make my position clear. Be sure and read the whole statement, as it covers the waterfront of issues that are convulsing the whole nation.
WEIRD HOW ALL THIS “ANTIRACISM” SEEMS TO COINCIDE WITH A DRAMATIC RISE IN ANTISEMITISM: Fury at Florida State University After New Student Senate President’s Antisemitic Statements Revealed. “Ahmad Daraldik — who is Palestinian-American — recently replaced a previous president of the Student Senate who was expelled for expressing conservative Catholic views.”
A BIGGER QUESTION IS HOW DID THE EXPERTS GET THE DEMAND SO WRONG? The Great Ventilator Rush: Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, engineers launched extraordinary crash programs that produced scores of ventilator designs. What will happen to them now?
BUT IT GETS A PASS BECAUSE REASONS: A Farrakhan Supporter Led the LA Black Lives Matter Rally That Became a Pogrom. “It’s no coincidence that the riots here escalated in Fairfax, the icon of the Jewish community. I saw the Watts and the Rodney King riots. They never touched a synagogue or house of prayer. The graffiti showed blatant antisemitism. It’s Kristallnacht all over again.”
THIS IS HOW THE MOVIE STARTS: Scientists use Neanderthal genes to grow tissue in a Petri dish.
WELCOME TO YEAR ZERO: Portland protesters topple statue of George Washington.
As Robert Heinlein has been quoted as saying, “A generation that doesn’t know history has no past; and no future.” And that’s just the way the “Start from zero” left likes it.
TWITTER + CNN = COMEDY GOLD: Clown World: Twitter Fact-Checks Hilarious Trump Tweet Meme on Behalf of CNN.
Sorry if you had been told there would be no math.
WEIRD, NOT MINNESOTA? Arizona, California, Texas account for bulk of heat-related deaths in U.S., CDC says.