OUT SOON FROM CHARLIE STROSS: Quantum of Nightmares (Laundry Files Book 11).
Archive for 2021
December 28, 2021
HARRY REID, FORMER SENATE MAJORITY LEADER, DEAD AT 82.
Flashback: “Reid is everything the national political media claims to hate, but they can never quite fully denounce him.”
As NRO’s Dan McLaughlin notes, “Harry Reid fundamentally & permanently altered the Senate, created America’s current political landscape, paved the way for Donald Trump, & made it possible to put Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, & Barrett on the Supreme Court.”
UPDATE: Harry Reid is proud he lied about Mitt Romney’s taxes. “‘They can call it whatever they want. Romney didn’t win did he?’ Reid said during a wide-ranging interview. So, in Reid’s world, it is perfectly acceptable to make a defamatory charge against an opponent to damage his campaign.”
(Updated and bumped.)
ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN):
Via a friend, and sad, but kinda fair.
OPEN THREAD: Get on up and get down tonight.
MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM PRESIDENT KLAIN: Pennsylvania Gets Christmas-Day Delivery of Illegal Aliens From Biden Claus.
As a Cuban, I’m offended by the casting of Spanish actor Javier Bardem as the most famous Cuban entertainer of all time, Desi Arnaz, in the new film, Being the Ricardos — but only in an alternate woke universe. In the real world, I’m totally fine with it. And I was born in Santiago and lived one block from the former Arnaz family home. Everyone else outside the echo chamber of Hollywoke could also not care less about the Bardem-Desi “controversy.”
“Casting a Spaniard to play a Cuban in a film that literally features a scene about how the two identities are not interchangeable might actually constitute a previously uncharted level of gringo f–kery,” wrote Laura Bradley in the Daily Beast. The Industry’s slavishness to such shallow, foolish, counterproductive sensitivity will soon be the death of it. For evidence, see the year’s biggest bomb — Steven Spielberg’s politically corrected West Side Story.
* * * * * * * *
But in West Side Story, Spielberg literally went woke for broke — down to long stretches of Spanish dialogue with no English subtitles, and his painful justification for it: “I felt that subtitling the Spanish was disrespectful to the second language of this country,” Spielberg said. “It would make English the dominant language, because then there would be two being spoken: the English by the characters speaking and the English that would [be written] underneath the spoken Spanish words.” It also helped convince potential moviegoers to avoid the picture like the plague.
Spielberg bespoke a madness that makes Hollywoke not just toxic to the normal people it abhors but an object of derision. Power players like him can decry the casting of white Natalie Wood as a Puerto Rican “Juliet” in the 1962 classic all they want. Wood’s beauty, grace, and performance will continue to inspire young Latinas long after the culturally appropriate new Maria, Rachel Zegler, has been forgotten.
Unlike his simplistic virtue-signaling colleagues, Being the Ricardos writer-director Aaron Sorkin, for all his leftism, understands the complexities of art, and defiantly stood by his casting of Bardem as Desi. “It’s heartbreaking and a little chilling to see members of the artistic community resegregating ourselves,” Sorkin said. “This should be the last place there are walls. Spanish and Cuban are not actable. If I was directing you in a scene and said: ‘It’s cold, you can’t feel your face.’ That’s actable. But if I said: ‘Be Cuban.’ That is not actable. Nouns aren’t actable. Gay and straight aren’t actable. You can act being attracted to someone but can’t act gay or straight. So this notion that only gay actors should play gay characters? That only a Cuban actor should play Desi? Honestly, I think it’s the mother of all empty gestures and a bad idea.”
“Unexpectedly,” the very un-woke Spider-Man: No Way Home is printing money at the box office this month: Nolte: Woke-Free ‘Spider-Man’ Crushes Box Office With $50M Thursday.
UPDATE: The horror! Spanish actor plays a Cuban-American. Plus, “The plot centers around (1) the marital problems of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and (2) the turmoil stemming from reports that Ball once registered to vote as a Communist. There’s also a heavy dose of feminism, which is natural in a film about a female television pioneer in the 1950s. The anti-anti-communism is another matter. Seventy years after the fact, the same people who wanted an investigation of possible Russian influence in the outer reaches of social media are still incensed that, at the outset of the Cold War, Congress investigated, with reasonable cause, possible Soviet influence in Hollywood — the utterly dominant force in American culture at the time.”
HOW’S THAT WELCOME WAGON PROGRAM COMING ALONG? The American Dream is on Life Support in the Bay Area:
This is not a “f**k SF” post. This is a lament of what has been lost, and a wistfulness for what could have been.
A year ago I was smirking at the people moving out of the Bay Area. I thought these were fairweather citizens, silly for moving to political train-wrecks like Texas or Florida.
Twelve months on, my wife and I find ourselves packing our life into boxes. Not to run towards a place where we feel greater love, but just to leave. The pendulum has swung hard in the last twelve months.
I didn’t think this change in my mindset would happen, or so quickly. I wanted to share the journey, in part because I’ve been in both camps at various points, and I hope those on most parts of the spectrum will consider this a reasonable, balanced perspective.
In summary — there have been many wonderful things about the Bay Area environment and local tech ecosystem. Some of those things persist. But enough challenges in quality of life have emerged and accelerated in recent years that the benefits are very clearly far outweighed by mounting frustrations.
* * * * * * * *
Tech” (and what a broad brush that is) is constantly accused of being the problem. Google and Facebook buses are stoned. Zuckerberg was asked to lend his name to a hospital in an effort to encourage other philanthropy… only to have the BOS censure him for it years later because they suddenly felt they didn’t like a tech billionaire’s name on a building. Gifted programs in STEM fields are being eliminated in schools. One of the greatest entrepreneurs of our generation (imperfect though he may be) being told “F**k you, Elon Musk” by an elected official.
Privilege and success, instead of something to merely be mindful of and thoughtful about, has become something to be ashamed of. Those who had the gall to build successful companies are vilified for “exploiting the region” and “not paying enough in taxes” despite living in the highest income tax regime in the entire country. Anyone who hails from a tech background is instantly painted as an enemy of the people, even if all they care about is fixing problems.
Exit quote: “The Bay Area has bled the golden goose dry.”
Which echoes a line from Kevin Williamson’s book on Detroit: its fall to ruin was “a case of the parasite having outgrown the host.”
Speaking of the Bay Area and tech: The entire Bay Area has become a large declining tech company
(Updated and bumped.)
LOL, JEN RUBIN:
UPDATE: From the comments:
Democrats have done their polling. They know the “pandemic” will drag the party down in the 2022 elections. So they are trying to tie the pandemic to state governors, over half of whom are Republicans.
The marching orders have gone out to all the propagandists in the MSM, which is almost all of them.
Jen Rubin has her orders and she’s tweeting stupidity as fast as she can.
Let’s Go Brandon!!
LGB. Maybe we should make it “Let’s Go Brandon, Today, Quit!” so people will be confused when they see LGBTQ posters and think the groundswell for a Biden resignation has exploded. . . .
REPORT FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Michelle Wu defends vaccine mandate for Boston city workers as pregnant police officers push back.
FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: The Famous Fossils Scientists Got Incredibly Wrong.
THOUGHTS ON SCIENCE AND CHAINSAWS:
I think I’m right on these things, though I recognize that future evidence might say otherwise. I’m grateful for the scientists who developed the vaccines but strive to maintain an open mind on all scientific matters, along with a sense of humility and a generous spirit toward those who disagree with me. A proper understanding of science demands no less.
The history of medicine offers ample reasons to avoid smug certitude which, unfortunately, is abundant on social and traditional media. Science is always about likelihood and never about certainty, though word apparently hasn’t reached Twitter and TV news.
Then there is the flagrantly political demeanor of so many COVID experts. I’m not at all prepared to say whether red states or blue states were wiser in their public policies. Too many confounding variables. I’ll make one exception, which is to say that the press and others besoiled themselves by relentlessly lionizing ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Today, few Democrats or Republicans quote his tweet from May 5, 2020: “Look at the data. Follow the science. Listen to the experts. … Be smart.”
Here’s why they shouldn’t. Science, like a chainsaw, is an exceedingly powerful and useful tool. But “follow the science” makes no more sense than “follow the chainsaw.” The chainsaw doesn’t know the safest way to cut a tree, and science—let alone some anthropomorphic vision of it—can’t weigh the tradeoffs between slowing COVID and shutting down schools and cancer surgeries.
Science informs individual and collective choices, which depend not only on those scientific findings but also on subjective preferences and one’s degree of confidence in those scientific findings. As for “listen to the experts,” Cuomo wrote the book on COVID expertise, and that book’s fall has been as spectacular as its author’s plummet.
Medical history is littered with experts who were spectacularly wrong. When Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that doctors employ antiseptic medical procedures (e.g., washing hands in maternity wards), medical experts were offended and conspired to destroy Semmelweis. When Stanley Prusiner suggested that misfolded proteins could cause mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, he was pilloried as a heretic—a pejorative that didn’t entirely vanish when he received a Nobel Prize for his work. As physicist Max Planck said, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
In October, novelist and essayist Ann Bauer wrote a poignant column, “I Have Been Through This Before,” on her discomfort with the parade of cocksure COVID experts issuing ever-changing diktats and pronouncements. When vaccines didn’t end the pandemic, she wrote, “doctors and officials blamed their audience of 3 billion for the disease. The more the cures failed, the greater the fault of the public.”
Related: The Suicide of Expertise.
AT THE APEX OF THE PIVOT:
As Greenwald writes in his follow-up tweet, “That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they’d politicize their expertise when convenient. Corporate media celebrated a douchebag-lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests.”
Flashbacks:
● After telling GOP to downsize convention due to COVID-19, N.C. governor marches in crowded protest.
● De Blasio: Large Group Protests Are Acceptable, Religious Observances Are Not.
THE WAR OF THE MACHINES HAS BEGUN: Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to touch live plug with penny.
HMM: Anti-abortion forces scored major victories in 2021, pushing Roe vs. Wade to brink of extinction. To the (limited) extent that this is true, it’s evidence that unrelenting pressure, coupled with a disdain for what makes media folks happy, is the key to success. See also the gun-rights movement.
THE MAKING OF THE BEATLES’ LET IT BE AND PETER JACKSON’S GET BACK:
The project began in Fall 1968, when The Beatles announced to fans that they would play three concerts at London’s Roundhouse, a 1700 capacity venue, in October or November, even before the November 22 release of The Beatles. In late October, Paul McCartney reached out to American-born director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, to ask his help in turning that event into a television special of some kind. Lindsay-Hogg had spent several years directing Associated-Rediffusion TV’s Ready Steady Go! weekly pop music program. The Beatles had hired him in 1966 to film promotional films for their single, “Paperback Writer”/”Rain,” and again, in early September ’68, promo videos for their first Apple single, “Hey Jude”/”Revolution,” at Twickenham Film Studios, in front of an invited audience of 150-200.
Not long after filming the latter, the director moved into The Rolling Stones’ offices on Maddox Street. “I’d already been talking to Mick Jagger about a television special The Stones wanted to do,” he says. Meanwhile, Paul invited him to meet with the four Fabs at Apple, at 3 Saville Row – a four minute walk from The Stones’ office. “When we were doing the promo for ‘Hey Jude,’ between each take, there was about a 10 to 12 minute gap, and, without knowing what else to do, they just started to play some of the go-to songs of the time, old Tamla Motown, etc. And Paul noted at the meeting, ‘You know, we had a good time playing to the audience that day. So we’ve been thinking we could do a television special. Do you want to direct it for us?’ I wasn’t gonna say no to that one.” At further meetings, McCartney suggested shooting documentary footage of them rehearsing for the concert, for, perhaps a half hour teaser TV special to air a week before the show. “No one had ever seen The Beatles rehearsing.”
This is the most detailed article yet I’ve come across on how the intertwined Let It and Get Back projects were produced. There’s a look back at the 16mm film and eight-track recording techniques of 1969. And then how Peter Jackson’s team employed the digital video restoration the had previously used on They Shall Not Grow Old. Plus the cutting edge Machine Audio Learning (abbreviated to MAL, a name inspired by the Beatles’ faithful roadie) was developed to restore and remix the audio, much of which was originally in mono.
FAUCI’S BIG, FAT PENSION WILL MAKE HISTORY: Leave it to Adam Andrzejewski and OpenTheBooks.com to expose the fact that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s annual pension would reach nearly $350,000 if he retires at the end of 2021 after 56 years of bureaucratic service. And that doesn’t include an annuity he would also get worth more than $8,000 annually.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: I want to have a gay orgy for my 30th birthday… should I tell my girlfriend?
And some people thought I was kidding when I said I want to catch omicron.
Or maybe I have but just failed to notice.
LETTER FROM “PUBLIC HEALTH” EXPERTS URGING PFIZER TO HOLD THE VACCINE UNTIL AFTER THE ELECTION: “I didn’t even remember this but wow. I doubt the same letter would have been sent had 2020 not been an election year or had a Democrat been in office.” That’s Nate Silver I just quoted.
MICHAEL WALSH: How the New York Times Abuses the ‘Public’s Right to Know.’
But why was the FBI acting like the Bidens’ private Praetorian Guard in the first place? No one alleges that Ashley Biden’s diary was stolen, and even if it was, so what? A lost diary, even one belonging to yet another troubled Biden offspring, is not a federal case. And in any event, Project Veritas never published the contents of the diary. The FBI investigation was concerned with “how a diary stolen from President Biden’s daughter, Ashley, came to be publicly disclosed a week and a half before the 2020 presidential election.”
As it turns out, the diary was simply left behind in Florida by a “rehabbing” Ashley, where it was found by a third party and offered around to various outlets.
So, on the one hand, the Times is trying to use its (transient?) victory in the Pentagon Papers case to justify publishing legally protected correspondence concerning, among other things, O’Keefe’s lawsuit against the Times as well as the legal boundaries of his “undercover” methods of collecting information. At the same time, it was acting as an agent of the Democrat-controlled U.S. government in collecting and publishing dirt on a rival and political opponent to smear and destroy him.
A final irony is that Times holds freedom of the press to an absolute, Mosaic standard while at the same time attacking freedom of assembly and freedom of religion, not to mention the entire Second Amendment, and supporting imaginary “hate speech” laws that clearly abrogate freedom of the press itself.
In other words, the “public’s right to know”—which by the way is nowhere to be found in the constitution—for me, but not for thee. The old Times motto was “all the news that’s fit to print.” Now it’s, “l’etat c’est moi.”
Read the whole thing.
HANDY GADGET: Stud Finder Sensor Wall Scanner – 4 in 1. #CommissionEarned
GOOD: Polls Show More Hispanics Turning Their Backs on Gun Control, Civilian Disarmament Advocates. “An Axios/Ipsos poll showed Hispanic swing voters are concerned about crime, criminal violence and personal safety. That finding wasn’t a surprise to NSSF. Hispanic-Americans, along with nearly every other demographic group, are embracing their right to lawfully purchase and own a firearm. Firearm industry retail survey data revealed this growing trend a year ago. That’s when law-abiding Latinos purchased firearms in big numbers and the demographics of America’s gun owners continued to show growth. Hispanic-Americans aren’t an outlier community and examples are plenty. Suburban swing voters and other minority groups demonstrated similar patterns as they saw policy failures affecting their safety, fully embraced lawful gun ownership and exercised their Second Amendment right.”
YES, BUT…: Holiday shopping surged 8.5% despite Omicron, supply-chain snags. “While a strong job market and rising wages fueled the jump, some experts said surging inflation — which has jacked up prices on jewelry, apparel and electronics in addition to gas and groceries — also helped goose the figures.”
Ya think?