OPEN THREAD: It’s here at last.
Archive for 2022
December 18, 2022
THE 21ST CENTURY IS STUPID: Norwegian Actress Faces 3 Years In Prison For Saying Men Can’t Be Lesbians.
ELON MUSK DOES A POLL: Should I step down as head of Twitter?
Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 18, 2022
One suspects, however, that he has a new CEO already lined up.
UPDATE: Heh.
CNN PUNDITS UPSET THEY WEREN’T HANDED TWITTER FILES:
The Twitter files have been a series of reports made by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger, detailing the behind-the-scenes conversations at Twitter over several years concerning the company’s efforts towards censorship and information suppression.
The files have shown that previous Twitter leadership, including CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey as well as Vijaya Gadde, former Twitter lead counsel, lied about shadow-banning conservative voices for years. The files have revealed the deliberate efforts to censor stories around Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” and have detailed how Twitter executives, especially former head of Twitter Trust and Safety Yoel Roth, devised a justification to ban the sitting president.
“I think the problem here though is that Elon Musk is effectively serving as a gatekeeper for this information. He is not giving it to newsrooms. He is giving it to handpicked journalists who are then agreeing to the condition or at least one condition of tweeting out the files instead of posting the news stories,” Darcy said.
“That’s not the spirit of free speech,” Lemon replied.
To be fair, free speech has never really been a topic that CNN has cared much about. But as Musk himself tweeted on Friday, “So inspiring to see the newfound love of freedom of speech by the press.”
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: A Popular Sweetener Has Been Linked to Increased Anxiety in Generations of Mice. “Approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1981, aspartame is widely used in low-calorie foods and drinks. Today, it’s found in nearly 5,000 different products, consumed by adults and children. When a sample of mice were given free access to water dosed with aspartame equivalent to 15 percent of the FDA’s recommended maximum daily amount for humans, they generally displayed more anxious behavior in specially designed mood tests. What’s truly surprising is the effects could be seen in the animals’ offspring, for up to two generations.”
“ANTHROPOLOGY IN RUINS”: If you had wanted to ruin a perfectly good November weekend, it looks to me like attending the 2022 annual meeting of the American Anthropology Association would have been just the ticket. Elizabeth Weiss attended for us and sends us this report.
OUT ON A LIMB: The real cause of California’s homelessness crisis.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, newly inaugurated Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and legislative leaders are pledging decisive action on California’s homelessness crisis, which raises a pithy question: Why did it erupt during a period of strong economic growth?
The reasons often offered include a moderate climate, the availability of generous welfare benefits, mental health and drug abuse. However, a lengthy and meticulously sourced article in the current issue of Atlantic magazine demolishes all of those supposed causes.
Rather, the article argues persuasively, California and other left-leaning states tend to have the nation’s most egregious levels of homelessness because they have made it extraordinarily difficult to build enough housing to meet demands.
Author Jerusalem Demsas contends that the progressive politics of California and other states are “largely to blame for the homelessness crisis: A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic politicians, who run most of the cities where homelessness is most acute, from addressing the issue.
“Liberals have stated preferences that housing should be affordable, particularly for marginalized groups … But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple.”
Demsas singles out Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area as examples of how environmentalists, architectural preservationists, homeowner groups and left-leaning organizations joined hands to enact a thicket of difficult procedural hurdles that became “veto points” to thwart efforts to build the new housing needed in prosperous “superstar cities.”
It’s “the housing price of liberalism,” as Thomas Sowell dubbed it – and it doesn’t come cheap.
WHY HARRISON FORD’S BEST ROLES ARE NEITHER HAN NOR INDY:
Ford leaned into the idea of blockbuster stardom following the success of Star Wars, banging out two sequels to George Lucas’s space opera, the first two Indiana Jones flicks, and Blade Runner (not a blockbuster, but certainly a movie that aspired toward blockbuster-dom) in the years that followed. Sure, he had bit parts in interesting movies (Apocalypse Now) and bigger parts in worse movies (Hanover Street) during this time, but this was the age of Harrison Ford, Superstar. He wasn’t asked for nuance; he wasn’t being hired to delve deep into his craft. It was pure, brute force charisma.
And then, in 1985, Ford starred in Witness. Directed by the great Australian director Peter Weir and written by Earl W. Wallace and William Kelly, Witness is part thriller, part romance, part culture clash story, and part work of anthropology. Ford plays a homicide detective named John Book who is investigating the murder of an undercover cop. The only witness to the crime is Samuel, a young Amish boy (Lukas Haas). Due to the perpetrators of the crime being other cops, Book, after being wounded in a shootout with one of them, is forced to take refuge in the Amish community cut off from modernity.
And Ford is terrific. The character as written is an archetypical kind of movie cop: mildly schlubby (see how he digs into that hot dog), a bit awkward, at his best when being a cop. Most notably, for me, is how Ford handles Book’s occasional bursts of rage. This was not an emotion he’d been called on to express in previous films, and at the end of Witness, when Ford explodes at the police chief covering up the actions of his officers, he seems truly dangerous, expressing a kind of raw-voiced fury you wouldn’t want to find yourself in front of.
Witness, for which he received his only Academy Award nomination, seemed to have unlocked something in Ford: that he could be both a huge movie star and a serious actor. The Mosquito Coast, his second film with Weir and to my mind his single best performance, followed.
Read the whole thing.
MAY HAVE TO TAKE SOME TIME OFF FROM THE BLOG, to go through Boot Camp.
HE’S 79 TODAY, BUT HE DOESN’T LOOK A DAY OVER YODA: 10 Crazy Keith Richards Stories On His Birthday.
READER FAVORITE: EFAYCRR Steampunk Table Lamp. #CommissionEarned
READER FAVORITE: MyPillow Premium Bed Pillow 2 Pack. #CommissionEarned
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Dad Tells Kids Santa Would Prefer Beer And Cigars Over Milk And Cookies This Year.
YEAH, THE POLICE DEFUNDING AND NORMALIZING OF VIOLENCE DIDN’T DO IT. IT WAS CLIMATE CHANGE, THAT’S THE TICKET: Warm days are contributing to gun violence surge across the US, says study of 100 cities.
JEFF DUNETZ IS ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Differences Between Christmas And Hanukkah (With Tongue Firmly In Cheek).
16. Hanukah movies are easier to identify. Christians fight over which movies are Christmas movies. If you ever want to purposely start an argument among Gentiles, walk into a room full of Christians and ask, “Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” Oh boy, it will get ugly.
The truth is Die Hard is a Hanukkah movie. Think about it —” Die Hard” is a story about a desperate insurgency against a vastly superior invading force, requiring the near-miraculous marshaling of limited resources. It’s a modern version of the Chanukah story.
So many movie plots occur during the Christmas season. Therefore, there is an excellent chance of disagreement about whether or not a particular film can be considered a Christmas Movie.
But with Hanukah movies, there is no grey area, perhaps because there are so few Hanukah movies besides “Eight Crazy Nights,” “The Hebrew Hammer,” “The Rugrats Hanukkah,” and, of course, “Die Hard.”
CODA. A few weeks ago, Ye (Kanye) West wanted to write a song about the Maccabees. However, one night when Ye was sleeping, the ghost of Judah Maccabee visited him. He admonished Ye for being an anti-Semite and warned West he would be punished if he did the song without first having a bris. I heard the Jew-hating Ye was willing to have the bris but couldn’t find a Mohel willing to do such a tiny job.
Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™
IF YOU CAN WALK UP THERE, YOU CAN WALK ANYWHERE: Researchers find that chimpanzees learned to walk in trees, not on ground.
DON SURBER: We are letting weirdos run things.
The media hailed Sam Brinton as the first transvestite to serve as the deputy assistant secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy.
The rest of us knew bald, mustachioed men in dresses should not be running the government because if they cannot govern themselves, how can they govern others?
And Brinton cannot. As expected, he crashed and burned. He has been charged with stealing women’s luggage at two airports. The Biden administration canned him. If the charges are true, they show a man who is a slave to his impulses. He needs a checkup from the neck up.
But he’s LGBT and therefore exempt in our society from rules and standards.
For example, if a Christian teacher began talking about the Bible and his weekend at a religious retreat to his kindergarten students at a public school, he would be fired so fast, his Bible would spin.
But half the country now believes LGBT teachers have the right to blab about their weekend orgy. A law to ban this kind of talk in Florida faced opposition from Disney.
As Glenn wrote in the New York Post on Tuesday: Biden’s return to ‘normalcy’ brought us crazy instead — like Sam Brinton.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Cluster headaches may be a sign of other medical conditions.
On Friday, Musk responded to a tweet from Ariadna Jacob, who wrote: “I’m not famous and I wasn’t a public figure either when Taylor Lorenz asked for my address, said it wasn’t for publication and then proceeded to dox me in the NYT with the address she had assured me she wasn’t going to publish. The article was shared many x on Twitter.”
Musk responded to the tweet: “Such shameful behavior will not be tolerated going forward.”
While many conservatives typically oppose online censorship, it seemed as though there was a near-unanimous consensus from the right side of the political spectrum that this was not a typical censorship case.
Podcast host Tim Pool tweeted: “Taylor Lorenz finally got suspended for all the awful things she’s done.”
“Banning Taylor Lorenz is the best thing Elon Musk has done for this website,” said digital strategist Caleb Hull.
Elsewhere in lefty freakouts over losing their monopoly on Twitter: Soros-Funded Wikipedia Casts Musk Journo Suspensions as ‘Thursday Night Massacre.’
UPDATE: On the other hand:
THE WHOLE WORLD IS LISTENING TO YOU: What would you say if you knew every human being on Earth was listening? Fifty-four years ago, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders had exactly that opportunity.