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Archive for 2021
February 27, 2021
[Hollywood in Toto]: Was it a challenge to earn the Sandmann family’s trust in order to get them talking for the interviews shown in the film?
Oldfield: I think I connected with Ted Sandmann, Nick’s father, right away because I told him I wanted a photograph of Nick not wearing a MAGA hat so that viewers could see him in a different light. When he sent me a photo that included Nick’s younger brothers, I offered to blur their faces, and I think Ted knew I was concerned about their privacy.
Anderson: On top of that, just like most of the others we interviewed, they could tell we are genuinely trying to tell this story truthfully and with only one real agenda, to promote civil discourse and logical thought.
Read the whole thing.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Here’s a short jingle to remind you to take your kids out of public school yesterday.
WHY THE NATIONAL SPACE COUNCIL MATTERS. Though I can’t see Kamala Harris providing positive leadership on space.
MEDIA MYTH ALERT: The ‘Cronkite Moment’ of 1968: Remembering why it’s a media myth.
THIS IS CNN: Jim Acosta Gets Acosta’ed at CPAC. “The dude walked into the lion’s den. That’s clearly what he was doing here. And when you walk into the lion’s den sometimes you gotta face the lion.”
Related: Sen. Cotton at CPAC. “They said things like, ‘your words put my life at risk,’ as if typing on their phone, sitting on their futons, was as dangerous as being a cop trying to stop rioters in the streets. Or, ‘your words are violence.’ No, I’m sorry kiddo: words are words; violence is what your friends are doing out on the streets of America.”
I BELIEVE YOU MEAN THE WORST SO FAR: Good riddance to Richard Carranza — the worst schools chancellor in NYC history.
JIM TREACHER: Next Superman Movie to Be Written by… Super-Woke Ta-Nehisi Coates?
Now that Coates is going to write about America’s #1 superhero, it’s worth noting that he was in New York during the 9/11 attack, when a lot of real heroes sacrificed their lives. Since Toby Emmerich mentioned Between the World and Me, here’s a quote from that book where Coates recalled those first responders:
“They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”
A simple “Thank You” would’ve sufficed, but okay.
This is the guy who’s going to put words in Superman’s mouth. If that’s how Coates feels about actual real-life heroes, who knows what he’ll do with the world’s greatest superhero? If paramedics and firefighters can “shatter” Coates’ body, what does he think about the guy who could pulverize him into hamburger in the blink of an eye? If the NYPD and FDNY are “the fire” and “the comet,” how much does Coates hate the dude who can literally fly through the air and shoot heat beams out of his eyes?
Exit quote: “I get the feeling Kal-El is about to check his Kryptonian privilege.”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Middle Easterners Begin Painting Transgender Flag Colors On Doorposts To Avoid Biden Drone Strikes.
But will that be effective against America’s increasingly woke armed forces?
AS YE SOW, SO SHALL YOU REAP: Professor called for peers to be fired for their speech. Now she’s being fired for her speech.
THE DESIRE NAMED STREETCAR: The Low Spark of High-Speed Rail.
Confidence in the original timeline was once high, but setbacks have mounted. One high-speed rail blogger wondered in 2009 if the state itself should make a bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics, since California was “on track” for “fast, high-capacity public transportation” that would allow events and venues easily to be “spread out over a much wider area.” Twelve years later, as the Los Angeles Times has noted, the project “may run out of money” before the “171-mile starter system between Bakersfield and Merced” can be completed. And this month, rising costs forced the High Speed Rail Authority to reduce the planned pair of tracks between Bakersfield and Merced to a single track, saving $1.1 billion but likely coming at the expense of train speeds.
The project, which has gone through at least a half-dozen business plans, is the definition of a money pit. When voters approved it via 2008’s Proposition 1A, they were told it would cost $33 billion. The Los Angeles Times editorialized that the cost was “not too much to wager on a visionary leap that would cement California’s place as the nation’s most forward-thinking state.” Several other newspapers favored the train, but a few came out against it, with the Orange County Register warning that Prop 1A was “a fast track to bankruptcy” and a “boondoggle.”
The original projection has proved far too optimistic. Cost estimates have bounced around since 2008, landing at various times at $64 billion, $77 billion, $98 billion, and $117 billion before settling, for now, at $100 billion for a scaled-back version that links Los Angeles and San Francisco. That’s $20 billion more than the price tag of a year ago when Governor Gavin Newsom, in one of the political understatements of the year, said that “the current project, as planned, would cost too much and take too long.”
As with all government-sponsored rail projects, graft is the ultimate goal, in sharp contrast to America’s privately-owned freight railroads: How America Fostered The World’s Best Freight Rail System.
BUT OF COURSE: Harvard Business School Club of NY cancels speaker from…cancel culture talk: report. “The event was cancelled after someone complained about the topic.”
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: COVID Aid Bill Would Pay Federal Employees $1400 a Week if Kids Are Out of School.
PULLING DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF DEFEAT: Iran has already beaten Biden.
While the US’s leverage over Israel is diminishing, Iran’s leverage over the US grows. The US cannot achieve a peaceful and staged withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan without Iran’s permission. The Biden administration is determined to return to the Iran Deal, if only to restore the reputations of the Obama-era diplomats who negotiated it. The Iranians, in or out of a deal, know they can make a break for a nuclear weapon any time they like, that the US won’t use force, and that it would do its best to restrain Israel too.
The US is beaten in the Middle East and nothing can undo that. Iran is testing Biden, and Biden is failing the test because he cannot alter the calculus. This was a small test and Biden’s tit-for-tat response was a small failure: it changes nothing but invites Iran to further antagonize the US. If, however, Biden and his team really put their minds to it, they might turn it into a big failure.
Given enough tit from Biden and enough tat from Iran, the US can spark an all-out regional war. This will draw American forces back into the Middle East. If that happens, force in pursuit of flawed strategy will have summoned what it most fears. Yet another American president is about to pull defeat from the jaws of defeat. The quagmire deepens.
Speaking of which, everything old is new again:
QED:
FASTER, PLEASE: We have to prepare to accept victory over COVID-19 and move on.
Even Fauci seems to be slowly accepting the inevitable: Finally: Okay, yes, vaccinated people can get together and socialize, says Fauci.
There’s a Website that’s organizing mask burning parties in Idaho; a concept which I expect will eventually go worldwide.
OUT: TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. IN: Tucker Carlson Derangement Syndrome.
Do you see how the rage at Tucker Carlson — from Megan Garber, from Brian Stelter, from every other liberal journalist inside whose head Carlson has been living rent-free for months — is driven by fear? If these liberals were really confident in the effectiveness of their influence, if they really believed they were capable of persuasion and that the facts were on their side, why would they care what Tucker Carlson says?
I don’t lose any sleep over the fact that millions of people watch Rachel Maddow. It doesn’t bother me that people I disagree with have TV shows with enormous audiences. As much as I despise the New York Times, I haven’t organized a campaign to get them kicked off Twitter.
What bothers Megan Garber is the haunting fear that most people aren’t really buying what she’s selling.
Hence the efforts to bully and marginalize anyone who dares point it out.
Related: Why are Democrats so scared of Donald Trump when they just defeated him?
Plus: It’s Time for the Deplorables to Become the Unconquerables.
BAD NEWS FOR LAW STUDENTS: The Pandemic Threatens Summer Associate Programs—Again.
RUSH LIMBAUGH: THE ORIGINAL CANCEL CULTURE TARGET.
Rush Limbaugh is frequently credited with reviving talk radio in America, and that is true. But Limbaugh was also “patient zero” of today’s cancel culture, with dozens of efforts to kill his program for one ginned-up controversy after another. They all failed, and the inside story of how he handled the efforts to discredit him is a useful lesson for today.
Rush’s first rule was simple: “No faux apologies for fake transgressions.” The best illustration was the “phony soldiers” controversy in 2007. Rush was speaking with a caller on his program about “phony soldiers” like Jesse Macbeth, who had falsely claimed to have seen war crimes, and who was ultimately convicted for receiving veterans benefits to which he was not entitled. But Harry Reid and 40 other Senate Democrats deliberately misinterpreted his comments and sent his syndicator a letter demanding an apology, which of course wouldn’t have been accepted.
Rush auctioned their letter off in a show of gleeful brio, marching the document on stage handcuffed to his security guard during a Philadelphia speech. He matched the $2.1 million winning bid with his own funds, and donated the money to scholarships for the children of fallen service members and police officers. It was classic Rush: punching a hole in the arrogant, exposing their flaws, turning something fake into something larger than life, all while having “more fun than a human being should be allowed to have,” as he often said.
But it wasn’t all fun and games. Rush’s sponsors included thousands of small and growing businesses; they relied on his audience to pay their employees. When the industry of boycotts and business harassment came knocking at his door, threatening his sponsors with ignominy for the crime of wanting to offer their products to his audience, Rush pushed back—and hard.
As Victor Davis Hanson writes: In Rush Limbaugh, We Have Lost an American Genius.