BEHOLD, MY SHOCKED FACE: BBC: COP26 Document Leak Reveals National Interest Manipulation,
Archive for 2021
October 22, 2021
KNOW YOUR LAWS: HIPAA VS. ADA .
THE BUTCHER’S BILL IS COMING DUE, AND IT WILL BE HORRIFIC: Biden Administration Plans For The Forever Pandemic.
WELL, THEY MIGHT BE RIGHT AT THAT: Lancet: Climate Change Worse Than Covid.
It’s a much longer, more damaging and more expensive con.
I’M NOT. HIS LIPS MOVED: Fauci Lied, No One Should Be Surprised.
For him, it’s a tell.
LOOK, THE MAN IS A SELF AVOWED COMMUNIST… Garland Tap Dances Amid Questions About DOJ School Memo.
ONE OF THE STUPIDEST IDEAS EVER: FDA hearing and comment period for giving COVID vaccines to children 5 to 11.
The kids don’t need it, and are not at risk of the disease. Injecting them with a half-tested medicine on the pretext of a not particularly lethal bug is stupid, insane and criminal.
BUT IT WAS DONE IN A BUSINESS-LIKE AND PROFESSIONAL MANNER: Taliban beheaded female volleyball player, posted photos online, coach says.
That Brandon guy has blood on his hands.
Let’s go Brandon. #Teamheadsonpikes.
BUSINESSES, OTOH, NEED TO KEEP REGULAR HOURS: Workers fed up with nights, weekends seek flexible schedule.
YOU MEAN, LIKE THE FLU AND COMMON COLD? Can new variants of the coronavirus keep emerging?
October 21, 2021
Alec Baldwin fatally shot a cinematographer and injured a director when a prop gun misfired at the New Mexico movie set of the film “Rust,” authorities said.
The filming location at Bonanza Creek Ranch in Sante Fe was initially sent into lockdown and production was halted following 1:50 p.m. double shooting.
“There was an accident today on the New Mexico set of Rust involving the misfire of a prop gun with blanks,” the production spokesperson told Deadline.
The film’s 42-year-old director of photography, Halyna Hutchins, and 48-year-old director Joel Souza, were struck during the incident, according to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office.
Hutchins was airlifted to University of New Mexico Hospital and later died from her injuries. Souza was being treated at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, authorities said.
“Detectives are investigating how and what type of projectile was discharged,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.
Flashback: The Mysterious Death of Brandon Lee on the Set of The Crow.
OPEN THREAD: I’m still rolling.
LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Iconic Target Store on Mission St to Close Amid Shoplifting Tidal Wave: SFPD tells Globe Mayor Breed falsely claims it’s not about theft, begs company to stay.
“This store loses $25,000 a day to shoplifting,” an SFPD officer told the Globe in lengthy, taped interviews conducted this week. “That’s $25,000 that walks out the door on average between 9 and 6 every day.”
(The Globe is redacting the officers’ names because of critical remarks made about Mayor London Breed and District Attorney Chesa Boudin that could potentially endanger their jobs.)
“This store does between $80,000 to $120,000 in sales every day. And they lose 25 of it [meaning $25,000]. Even if they’re making 25% profit, the stealing takes that down to zero.”
Asked if the presence of armed, uniformed police officers had any deterrent effect on thieves, one officer was blunt in his assessment.
“They don’t care. There’s no consequences. Literally zero consequences. I’ve kicked out… I’ve been here since 9 AM today. I probably have already kicked out eight or nine people and I’ve recovered a thousand dollars worth of stuff alone off of that. Whether we kick them out, tell them they can’t come back, whether I put them in handcuffs and take them down to the county jail—there is no difference. Because they will not be prosecuted by the district attorney. Therefore, there is nothing documented that they can’t come back here. You know, they get no time in jail to think about what they did, right? There is zero consequence. And that’s why in this store the same exact people come in every other day and in the city the same couple percent of people are the same people committing all the car break-ins, all the robberies and all the shootings, any aggravated assaults right in town where there’s more street people, people fighting. It’s all the same exact people, and there are zero consequences. Therefore you take them to jail they get out of jail. They do it again. It’s a big circle.”
Elect commies, ruin your city. It’s obvious, and yet . . .
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: ‘Promise?’ Illustrated warning of what Washington, DC might look like if climate change isn’t addressed backfires:
Much faster, please. (That’s quite a ratio, by the way.)
(Classical reference in headline.)
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Climate Change: Tax the Blue Zones!
FRUITS OF THE DEMOCRATS’ TREE: The Ghost of Kitty Genovese: An assault in Philadelphia evokes memories of a notorious crime. “Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney’s Twitter feed had nothing to say about the rape, perhaps not surprisingly given that he also has had little to say about Philadelphia’s historically high murder numbers. Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner didn’t mention the rape either, instead focusing on re-arresting a police officer on charges that had previously been dismissed. Kenney and Krasner, both progressives, seem relieved that the actual rape occurred just outside of the city limits—making it somebody else’s problem—even though the victim and defendant spent most of their train ride in Philadelphia.”
However, the Genovese analogy is misplaced, because the sensational New York Times report wasn’t true. More here.
COVINGTON KIDS PART DEUX: The caption on this AP photo from the Netflix walkout is completely false (and now retracted).
OUT ON A LIMB: Biden’s State Department is a laughingstock. China launches a hypersonic missile but Antony Blinken is very worried about gender pronouns.
Last week, the State Department learned that twice this summer China had tested a new hypersonic missile weapon with nuclear capabilities. According to the Financial Times, the rocket employed a “fractional orbital bombardment” that also had the guidance ability to “glide” around the earth in orbit.
The test reportedly stunned the Biden administration, and comes on the heels of a string of embarrassing global events for the US, including the fall of Afghanistan and Russia opting not to raise natural gas supplies to Europe after the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Secretary of State Tony Blinken reacted with a series of “deeply concerned” letters. The State Department had once again been caught flat-footed.
But fear not: Blinken has his priorities straight. This week, his State Department responded forcefully and with great clarity to its adversaries and hostile foreign regimes around the world: by recognizing International Pronouns Day. The agency stands in solidarity with people who list pronouns “on their email and social media profiles” through ShareAmerica, the department’s platform for communicating American foreign policy worldwide.
I hope this movie ends much better than the last one:
Related: Rocket failure mars U.S. hypersonic weapon test as others succeed.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Dems’ vaccine mandates for police are bound to backfire.
In the media narrative, those resisting the vaccine mandates are all Trump-supporting snake handlers from Appalachia, or something like that. But real life, as happens so often, doesn’t track the media narrative.
In fact, much of the resistance comes from people like airline pilots, health professionals and air-traffic controllers, none of whom can fit the stereotype of uneducated rubes.
But perhaps the most interesting and determined resistance to vaccine mandates comes from those who are usually tasked with enforcing government mandates: police. Across the country, officers are refusing the shot and daring their bosses to make them take it. There are several lessons in this, about class, about democracy and about the authorities’ competence.
Read the whole thing. But you knew that.
DESTROYING COMEDY: David Zucker, the co-writer and director of a little-known and rarely watched comedy film called Airplane! on the state of comedy today, and those who are attempting to eliminate it:
Humor happens when you go against what’s expected and surprise people with something they’re not anticipating, like the New York Jets winning a game. But to find this surprise funny, people have to be willing to suppress the literal interpretations of jokes. In Airplane!, Lloyd Bridges’s character tries to quit smoking, drinking, amphetamines, and sniffing glue. If his “addictions” were to be taken literally, there would be no laughs. Many of today’s studio executives seem to believe that audiences can no longer look past the literal interpretations of jokes. Fear of backlash rather than the desire to entertain seems to be driving their choices.
I admit that their fear of audience retaliation is not entirely unwarranted. There is a very vocal, though I believe small, percentage of the population that can’t differentiate between Glue Sniffing Joke and Glue Sniffing Drug Problem. It is these people whom studio executives fear when they think twice about rereleasing Airplane! on its 40th anniversary, when they put disclaimers in front of Blazing Saddles, or when they pressure writers to remove jokes that are otherwise perfectly offensive. As a result of these fear-based decisions, some of the best contemporary comedy minds are abandoning laughter in favor of admittedly brilliant but serious projects such as Joker, directed by Todd Phillips, and Chernobyl, written by Craig Mazin. These men collaborated on two of the Hangover pictures, which struck gold at the box office. Phillips summed up the general plight of the comedy writer when he said, “It’s hard to argue with 30 million people on Twitter. You just can’t do it. So, you just go, ‘I’m out.’”
Or you can go the Dave Chappelle route: “When Sticks and Stones came out…a lot of people in the trans community were furious with me and apparently they dragged me on Twitter. I don’t give a f***, ’cause Twitter is not a real place.” But then, Chappelle’s The Closer special, as brilliant as it is, was likely a much cheaper proposition to produce than most Hollywood films: Fillmore Hall in Detroit was sold out; a three-man camera crew isn’t all that expensive for Netflix; much of the initial editing was likely done by the video director as the tape hard drive rolled. The highest expense was likely Chappelle’s salary. Compare that to the multiple star salaries, and massive committees that produce even medium-budget films in Hollywood.
Plus:
The truth is, I still don’t fully understand why there’s a problem with making a joke that gets a laugh from an audience, even if it is mildly offensive. Why cater to the minority who are outraged when most people still seem to have a desire to laugh? Is there a way to determine what exact number of America’s population is killing joy for everyone? Is it 1 percent or 10; 3.3 million Americans or 33 million? Since I can’t seem to find one, let’s go with Phillips’s estimation of “30 million people on Twitter,” which computes to roughly 9 percent of America’s population.
What I often wonder is, why do studio executives feel as if they have to cater to these 9-Percenters? In all fairness, 9-Percenters are not a new segment of society. Historically, they’ve always lived among us. The difference between now and then, however, is that social media amplifies the voices of even the smallest subgroups while the anonymity of the Internet removes all consequences. This means that today’s 9-Percenters can hide behind screens and social-media handles as they attack any person on the Internet whose jokes offend them. The 9-Percenters of 40 years ago had to think twice about what they were sharing publicly, because at the end of the day, they had to sign their names to their reactions. Without this type of accountability, it’s all too easy for today’s 9-Percenters to attack and shame comedy writers into giving up on the genre.
And that “nine-percenters” number assumes that everyone on Twitter disagrees with something when the outrage mob finds its target. As the recent meltdown over Chappelle proves, it’s nowhere near that size, but the media loves to amp up the hype: ‘Netflix may become a stigma brand:’ PBS NewsHour says the backlash against Dave Chappelle’s special ‘is at a tipping point.’
Not a chance — the outrage will find its next target, and completely forget about this story.
PORTRAIT OF A DOMESTIC TERRORIST, 2021.
**UPDATE** About 30 mins after I posted the above on Bookface…this:
TUNE IN, TURN ON, DROP OUT: The Great Resignation is Accelerating.
As I wrote in the spring, quitting is a concept typically associated with losers and loafers. But this level of quitting is really an expression of optimism that says, We can do better. You may have heard the story that in the golden age of American labor, 20th-century workers stayed in one job for 40 years and retired with a gold watch. But that’s a total myth. The truth is people in the 1960s and ’70s quit their jobs more often than they have in the past 20 years, and the economy was better off for it. Since the 1980s, Americans have quit less, and many have clung to crappy jobs for fear that the safety net wouldn’t support them while they looked for a new one. But Americans seem to be done with sticking it out. And they’re being rewarded for their lack of patience: Wages for low-income workers are rising at their fastest rate since the Great Recession. The Great Resignation is, literally, great.
For workers, that is. For the far smaller number of employers and bosses—who in pre-pandemic times were much more comfortable—this economy must feel like leaping from the frying pan of economic chaos, only to land in the fires of Manager Hell. Job openings are sky-high. Many positions are going unfilled for months. Meanwhile, supply chains are breaking down because of a hydra of bottlenecks. Running a company requires people and parts. With people quitting and parts missing, it must kinda suck to be a boss right now. (Oh, well!) . . .
One way to capture the meaning of any set of events is to consider what it would mean if they all happened in reverse. Imagine if quits fell to nearly zero. Business formation declined. In lieu of an urban exodus, everybody moved to a dense downtown. It would be, in other words, a movement of extraordinary consolidation and centralization: everybody working in urban areas for old companies that they never leave.
Look at what we have instead: a great pushing-outward. Migration to the suburbs accelerated. More people are quitting their job to start something new. Before the pandemic, the office served for many as the last physical community left, especially as church attendance and association membership declined. But now even our office relationships are being dispersed. The Great Resignation is speeding up, and it’s created a centrifugal moment in American economic history.
Politically, the pandemic has led to centralization of authority, though the incompetence of authority may make that a short-term phenomenon. Economically, the direction has been rather the reverse.
THIS SOUNDS LIKE A WIN FOR BLUE ORIGIN LOBBYISTS: NASA looks beyond SpaceX, Boeing contracts for space station commutes.