Archive for 2022
October 5, 2022
NOBODY RESPECTS, LIKES, OR FEARS HIM: Biden Begs OPEC for More Oil Again, Gets Massive Cut Instead.
THEN WHY ARE THE SPANISH NOT FAT? Eating later in evening may increase hunger, risk of obesity, study says.
DISNEY HEIRESS SLAMS GREAT-UNCLE WALT: ‘He bordered on rabid fascism.’
“He bordered on rabid fascism,” the 62-year-old heiress [Abigail Disney] said of Walt Disney on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast last week.
The wealthy film producer and activist spoke with Maron about her new documentary that takes aim at her family’s company, called “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales,” as well as her family’s battle with addiction.
Disney told Maron that while her great-uncle Walt was a “chaotic genius,” he and his brother played up prejudices of the time.
“They weren’t shy about delving into the stereotypes if it served them,” she said.
The Post reached out to the Disney company for comment.
The heiress noted that Disney positioned the wolf from “The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf” as a “Jewish peddler” and named one of the wisecracking black crows from “Dumbo” Jim Crow.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called out Disney when he made “Song of the South,” a 1946 film set in the Reconstruction-era American South that reinforced racist stereotypes.
“When they made ‘Song of the South,’ people from the NAACP came to the studio and they said, ‘Please don’t do it this way. Please talk to us,’” she said, noting that her family pushed ahead anyway.
“In some enclosed way, Disney is an American fascist fantasy,” Maron said.
But the person who condemns her grandfather for making a racist film is also quick to judge someone not by the quality of her character, but by the color of her skin: A White Woman’s Documentary About Muslim Extremists Is Being Canceled. Guess Why.
The Times notes that the South by Southwest and San Francisco film festivals canceled plans to screen the documentary.
But no one did more damage to Jihad Rehab than Abigail Disney, a filmmaker and member of the Disney family who served as an executive producer for the film. She initially described it in excited terms as “freaking brilliant.” But then she changed course, penning an open letter of apology.
“I may not be in total agreement with every criticism of the film but that does not obviate my responsibility to earnestly own the damage I had a hand in,” she wrote. “I call upon my colleagues now, whether you are gatekeepers, funders, curators, heads of institutions, agents, buyers, critics, or other filmmakers to rethink how we all behave when we are called out for our failures and shortcomings.”
The letter—which (ironically) reads like the transcript of a hostage video—expressed Disney’s commitment “to not creating any more pain, if only by accident or in ignorance.” She apologizes for causing “trauma,” and says that her “mistakes are myriad so I will not be able to claim them all in a single list, but I will try.”
Disney’s apology letter addresses the other, major criticism aimed at Jihad Rehab, which is that [Meg] Smaker’s interview practices are unethical, given that the men are unwilling participants in the center’s rehabilitation program: They are compelled to be there, and thus cannot give consent to be interviewed.
“I should have pushed back on the idea that the protagonists consented to appear in the film,” wrote Disney. “A person cannot freely consent to anything in a carceral system, particularly one in a notoriously violent dictatorship.”
This is deeply unpersuasive. For one thing, Smaker attempted to speak with 150 different detainees, and only four agreed to talk. If the other 146 said no, it would be reasonable to think that the four who said yes did so with a modicum of self-determination. It’s also standard practice for journalists to interview inmates who are incarcerated in prisons; there’s no generally accepted journalistic convention that such reporting is unethical.
Nor is it wrong for a person of a certain gender or ethnicity to attempt to understand, depict, explain, and create art about a foreign group. There’s a major difference between empowering voices from marginalized communities to tell their stories and shutting down seemingly good-faith efforts like Smaker’s film. Los Angeles Times media columnist Lorraine Ali expertly highlights this distinction, writing that “a film losing its shot at an audience over such a controversy doesn’t encourage critical thinking about images of Muslims. It throttles it.”
As Kevin Williamson wrote in 2018, “Watch What You Say. Someone Else Is.”
The generation that reached what passes for maturity in the age of social media is the most status-obsessed—and hence etiquette-obsessed—since the ancien régime. They are all miniaturists: There hasn’t been an important and original book of political ideas written by an American Millennial, and very few of them have read one, either. But they are very interested in individual pronouns and 280-character tweets. It is extraordinarily difficult for any one of them to raise his own status through doing interesting and imaginative intellectual work, because there is practically no audience for such work among his peers. Worse, the generation ahead of him stopped paying attention to Millennials years ago, and the generation behind him never started.
What that leaves is the takfiri tendency, scalp-hunting or engineering a court scandal at Versailles. Concurrent with that belief is the superstition that people such as Harvey Weinstein or Bret Stephens take up cultural space that might otherwise be filled by some more worthy person if only the infidel were removed, as though society were an inverted game of Tetris, with each little disintegration helping to enable everybody else to move up one slot at a time. Status obsession does funny things to one’s map of social reality. It leads to all manner of bizarre thinking.
And as a result, we live in the dumbest timeline imaginable: Whatever his flaws, Walt Disney invented the concept of the long-form animated movie, the idea that movie studios could own theme parks, and laid the groundwork for his cartoon mouse becoming the symbol of a multi-billion dollar empire. His granddaughter, given the chance to produce a documentary pushing back against Islamofascism, would rather attack a dead white man, and cancel the career of a living white woman instead.
NEWS PEOPLE REPORTING ACTUAL NEWS: Liberal Media Concedes GOP Momentum Before Midterms.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Inside the White House’s failed effort to dissuade OPEC from cutting oil production to avoid a ‘total disaster.’ “The Biden administration launched a full-scale pressure campaign in a last-ditch effort to dissuade Middle Eastern allies from dramatically cutting oil production, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. But that effort appears to have failed, following Wednesday’s crucial meeting of OPEC+, the international cartel of oil producers that, as expected, announced a significant cut to output in an effort to raise oil prices. That in turn will likely cause US gasoline prices to rise at a precarious time for the Biden administration, just five weeks before the midterm elections.”
Plus:
“It’s important everyone is aware of just how high the stakes are,” said a US official of what was framed as a broad administration effort that is expected to continue in the lead up to the Wednesday OPEC+ meeting.
The White House is “having a spasm and panicking,” another US official said, describing this latest administration effort as “taking the gloves off.” According to a White House official, the talking points were being drafted and exchanged by staffers and not approved by White House leadership or used with foreign partners.
The situation’s so desperate, he may have to allow domestic drilling and pipelines.
Nah, that’s crazy talk. . . .
Seriously, allowing domestic drilling puts money in the hands of an industry and a worker demographic that Democrats regard as enemies. Better we should send that money to Russia, Venezuela, or Saudi Arabia.
MARK JUDGE: How the Hollywood Stasi Hypes Conservative ‘Violence’ and Downplays the Left’s ‘Days of Rage.’
There will be several films about January 6, but none about James Hodgkinson, a former campaign volunteer for socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), who showed up at Republicans’ practice for the annual Congressional Baseball Game and shot congressman Steve Scalise (R-LA), a congressional staffer, a lobbyist, and two Capitol Police officers. (Hodgkinson had tried to wipe out the entire GOP leadership.)
Expect no movie about Floyd Lee Corkins, who in August 2012 entered the offices of the Family Research Council in downtown Washington and shot a security guard. Corkins pled guilty in February 2013 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to charges of committing an act of terrorism while armed, assault with intent to kill while armed, and interstate transportation of a firearm and ammunition. Corkins was angry that the Family Research Council is against same-sex marriage. “They endorse Chick-fil-A and also Chick-fil-A came out against gay marriage, so I was going to use that as a statement,” prosecutors quoted Corkins as telling investigators.
There won’t a film depicting the acts of Nicholas Roske, who came to Washington in June to attempt to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. If Hollywood even did do such a project, Roske would be portrayed as an innocent kid who got lost one night in Washington, D.C. He’d be played by Chris Evans, who also played Captain America. His parents would be played by Alec Baldwin and Mia Farrow.
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Although it dates all the way back to 2006, conservatives still honor the great German film The Lives of Others. It depicts the terror, violations rights, hypocrisy and intrusive abuse of the Stasi, the German secret police under communism. We are right to celebrate this great film, yet it is unfortunate that in the years since its release nothing on the right has emerged to match it.
But plenty on the left view the East Germans as the good guys in that movie.
INCENTIVES MATTER: Seniors Are Moving From High-Tax States To Low-Tax States.
COLORADO: Broomfield poised to pass numerous gun rights restrictions despite near certainty of lawsuits. “Broomfield’s involvement in the ‘regional approach’ to gun control comes as no surprise, as the mayor, one other council member and the wife of another council member have close ties to gun control activist organizations Mom’s Demand Action, Gifford’s Law Center, and Every Town for Gun Safety. Two of the groups have written most of the language being used in the ordinances.”
DEAL OF THE DAY: Marino’s Men Genuine Leather Dress Belt. #CommissionEarned
HMM: How polio came back to New York for the first time in decades, silently spread and left a patient paralyzed. “How polio reemerged in New York this year remains the subject of investigation, but public health officials believe the virus originated overseas in a country that still uses the oral polio vaccine. American health officials stopped using the oral vaccine more than 20 years ago because it contains live virus that can — in rare circumstances — mutate to become virulent, but it is still common in other countries.”
FEAR OF LEARNING SOMETHING: Harvard Law students walk out on pro-life scholar before she started speaking.
But give them credit — Yale Law students probably would have chased her off the stage, with the encouragement of school diversity officials.
HOW LONG TILL IT’S ILLEGAL TO BE A CHRISTIAN IN THE U.S.: If that strikes you as a nonsense question, you haven’t been paying attention. Check out my latest PJM column and, if you are an outspoken believer, make note for future reference of the civil liberties defenders mentioned.
AUSSIE ‘FOOTIE,’ BIG SCREEN ‘BROS’ AND THE ‘YUCK FACTOR:’ Al Mohler Jr. is president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) in Louisville. In his “Briefing” podcast today, he explains in detail the linkages among an Australian football executive’s firing, the total cinema flop of “Bros,” the first “gay rom-com’ from a major film producer, and the reality of the “Yuck Factor” in how many Americans view LGBQT issues.
It’s a bit lengthy at 27 minutes, but Mohler is an extraordinarily articulate, well-informed and careful thinker who is extremely attuned to the tone and temper of American public discourse. His comments on the Yuck Factor are especially relevant.
FIGHT THE POWER: Change these ‘unconstitutional’ policies, legal organization tells 12 universities.
On Monday night, Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) sent letters to 12 universities across the country demanding that they change “unconstitutional” policies that impede students’ freedom of speech.
The Roswell, Georgia-based nonprofit primarily identified potential free speech violations, with eight letters challenging bias reporting systems, which professors and students use to report on the so-called offensive speech from their peers.
Two letters challenged university policies that regulate on-campus flyers and another two highlighted restrictions on students’ ability to manage recruitment tables on public property.
SLF sent the 12 letters to: Southern Utah University; Clemson University; University of South Carolina, Columbia; University of Maine, Orono; Santa Rosa Junior College; Iowa State University; Bowling Green State University, Illinois State University; Rutgers University; Miami University of Ohio; University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; and Louisiana State University.
Unacceptable.
YOU CAN GIVE STUDENTS ‘EQUITY’ — WHATEVER THAT MEANS IN THE MOMENT — OR YOU CAN TREAT THEM EQUALLY BUT YOU CAN’T DO BOTH: Public schools are losing white, middle-class students. “New York City’s education officials hope ‘to create more equitable schools, while trying to prevent middle-class families from abandoning the system,’ writes Closson.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump Has His Lawyers Firing on all Cylinders, Hope He Keeps It Up. “What the people running Biden’s brain, Congressional Democrats, and the corruptomedia don’t grasp is that their relentless attacks are merely making Trump grow stronger. Each time they give him a chance to counterattack his legend among the faithful grows.”
STAND UP TO THE LEFTIST CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: Providence (RI) Whistleblower Teacher Ramona Bessinger Threatened At School By Student Protest Leader.
Students act this way because the administration communicates that there will be no consequences.
GEORGE LEEF IS NOT HAPPY WITH UT: Woke Capture at UT-Knoxville: Despite efforts by state legislators, the institution remains committed to DEI nonsense. Some of that is turning around — I can attest that the atmosphere is different than it was a couple of years ago — but the long march through the institutions goes both ways.
PRETTY PLEASE HELP US OUT OF THIS HOLE WE DUG: White House launches last ditch effort to dissuade OPEC from cutting oil production to avoid a ‘total disaster.’
You know, maybe Biden would have better luck if he hadn’t called the Saudis a pariah state.