Archive for 2022
February 22, 2022
MUNICH: THE EDGE OF NONSENSE. Andrew Roberts, the author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny, reviews Netflix’s new film, Munich—The Edge of War, starring Jeremy Irons as Neville Chamberlain — strategic genius(!):
This movie which attempts to rehabilitate Chamberlain is historically illiterate, a farrago of nonsense. Yet in a sense, it performs a useful task because if—even with the bending of the facts and putting the best possible gloss on him—Chamberlain still emerges as a fool and a failure, which he does, it shows that the generally held view of him is the correct one. Although Chamberlain states in the movie, “If I’m to be made to look a fool, that’s the price I must pay,” he never said anything of the kind at the time, as he believed himself to be the greatest peacemaker since Disraeli.
Neville Chamberlain was such a poor wordsmith that this movie is reduced to quoting (without attribution) the words of Winston Churchill about people “falling below the level of events,” a phenomenon of which Chamberlain was the primary exemplar. Churchill is not even mentioned in this movie despite its several scenes of the House of Commons, which was where he made the greatest critique of the Munich Agreement.
“Do not suppose that this is the end,” Churchill prophetically said of Chamberlain’s sacrifice of Czechoslovakia. “This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.” Churchill was proved totally right within a matter of months, whereas for all this movie’s attempted advocacy, Chamberlain is still wrong eighty-four years later.
And speaking of Churchill, if you’re looking for an alternative, or if you suffered through Munich—The Edge of War as I did last week, Netflix also currently has a much more enjoyable alternative: Darkest Hour, starring Gary Oldman and his incredible — and deservedly Oscar-winning — makeup as Winston Churchill. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote when it played theaters (remember those?) in 2017: “Churchill assumed that if Britain and its overseas Empire could hold out, then a frustrated Hitler might turn elsewhere — and thereby gain new enemies (and new British allies). That is exactly what happened in 1941. A blundering and frustrated Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Later, he would declare war on the United States. By December 1941, Germany was at war against the world’s largest economy (American), largest navy (British), and largest army (Soviet) all at once. Germany and its allies could never win such a global war. Darkest Hour takes place almost exclusively indoors during Parliament sessions, private meetings, and scenes between Churchill and his equally brilliant wife, Clementine. But the dialogue is riveting, the acting superb.”
I MENTIONED EARLIER THE PIECE THAT PENNY WHITE AND I HAD IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL TODAY, on policing for profit. (Link and extensive excerpt available here.)
The actual law review article that the WSJ piece is based on will appear shortly. You can read it for free here. Download it early and often! I really appreciate it when you do.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Canadian MP On Truck Caravan: Honk Honk=Heil Hitler (Video).
One member of Trudeau’s Liberal Party went absolutely frothing from the mouth crazy during the parliament’s discussion about extending the prime minister’s emergency powers.Her name is Ya’ara Saks. Per the Toronto Sun, In the middle of the parliamentary debate about extending Trudeau’s emergency powers, this crazy lady claimed the “horn honking during the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa was a call for Adolf Hitler.”
Why would a Jewish woman make an inappropriate comparison to the Holocaust, thus cheapening the memory of the actual horrors suffered by millions of people at the hands of Hitler? There’s only one explanation, the wiring in her cranial cavity shorted out.
Related: When boring people turn dangerous:
[Chrystia] Freeland arouses strong feelings among old Russia hands. Before the Yeltsin era collapsed, she had consistent, remarkable access to gangster-oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky, who appeared in her Financial Times articles described as aw-shucks humans just doing their best to make sure “big capital” maintained its “necessary role” in Russia’s political life. “Berezovsky was one of several financiers who came together in a last-ditch attempt to keep the Communists out of the Kremlin” was typical Freeland fare in, say, 1998.[”]
* * * * * * * *
Years later, she is somehow Canada’s Finance Minister, and what another friend from our Russia days laughingly describes as “the Nurse Ratched of the New World Order.” At the end of last week, Minister Freeland explained that in expanding its Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) program, her government was “directing Canadian financial institutions to review their relationships with anyone involved in the illegal blockades.”
The Emergencies Act contains language beyond the inventive powers of the best sci-fi writers. It defines a “designated person” — a person eligible for cutoff of financial services — as someone “directly or indirectly” participating in a “public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace.” Directly or indirectly?
She went on to describe the invocation of Canada’s Emergencies Act in the dripping-fake tones of someone trying to put a smile on an insurance claim rejection, with even phrases packed with bad news steered upward in the form of cheery hypotheticals. As in, The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets? Have been shared? By the RCMP with financial institutions? And accounts have been frozen? As she confirmed this monstrous news about freezing bank accounts, Freeland burst into nervous laughter, looking like Tony Perkins sharing a cheery memory with “mother”.
With Freeland having locked up the Freedom Convoy’s bank accounts, Ottawa’s mayor also wants to sell off their confiscated trucks:
In the interview, Watson also said that the Freedom Convoy hurt small businesses in the nation’s capital and “disrupted the city.”
“That’s one of the reasons why, under the Emergencies Act, that I’ve asked our solicitor and our city manager, how can we keep the tow trucks, and the campers, and the vans and everything else we’ve confiscated, and sell those pieces of equipment to help recoup some of the costs that our taxpayers are absorbing? That’s one of the provisions of the Emergency Act and we have been a beneficiary of the Emergency Act,” Watson stated in the interview.
“I asked the Members of Parliament to consider, it’s [the Emergency Act] helped us a lot, things like confiscating vehicles,” he added. Watson continued, saying that lawmakers need a better plan going forward to “protect our residents” better than they have this past month.
Fortunately though, Oceania has never been in favor of totalitarianism: “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded to Russia’s actions during a late afternoon news conference in which he accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of having ordered an invasion of eastern Ukraine – and attacking democracy. ‘Russia’s flagrant disregard for the independence of a sovereign nation is a serious threat to security and stability in the region and around the world,’ he said. ‘Canada and our allies will defend democracy. We are taking these actions today in a stand against authoritarianism.’”
UPDATE: Democrat Congressman Suggests the Redistribution of Trucks.
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported. Second Sight left users of its retinal implants in the dark.
Barbara Campbell was walking through a New York City subway station during rush hour when her world abruptly went dark. For four years, Campbell had been using a high-tech implant in her left eye that gave her a crude kind of bionic vision, partially compensating for the genetic disease that had rendered her completely blind in her 30s. “I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’ sound.”
It wasn’t her phone battery running out. It was her Argus II retinal implant system powering down. The patches of light and dark that she’d been able to see with the implant’s help vanished.
Terry Byland is the only person to have received this kind of implant in both eyes. He got the first-generation Argus I implant, made by the company Second Sight Medical Products, in his right eye in 2004 and the subsequent Argus II implant in his left 11 years later. He helped the company test the technology, spoke to the press movingly about his experiences, and even met Stevie Wonder at a conference. “[I] went from being just a person that was doing the testing to being a spokesman,” he remembers.
Yet in 2020, Byland had to find out secondhand that the company had abandoned the technology and was on the verge of going bankrupt. While his two-implant system is still working, he doesn’t know how long that will be the case. “As long as nothing goes wrong, I’m fine,” he says. “But if something does go wrong with it, well, I’m screwed. Because there’s no way of getting it fixed.”
Ross Doerr, another Second Sight patient, doesn’t mince words: “It is fantastic technology and a lousy company,” he says. He received an implant in one eye in 2019 and remembers seeing the shining lights of Christmas trees that holiday season. He was thrilled to learn in early 2020 that he was eligible for software upgrades that could further improve his vision. Yet in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, he heard troubling rumors about the company and called his Second Sight vision-rehab therapist. “She said, ‘Well, funny you should call. We all just got laid off,’ ” he remembers. “She said, ‘By the way, you’re not getting your upgrades.’”
These three patients, and more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight’s implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget. One technical hiccup, one broken wire, and they lose their artificial vision, possibly forever. To add injury to insult: A defunct Argus system in the eye could cause medical complications or interfere with procedures such as MRI scans, and it could be painful or expensive to remove.
Read the whole thing.
I’M NOT SAYING THAT IT’S ALIENS, BUT IT’S ALIENS: Mystery Deepens as China Denies Owning Space Junk Set to Crash Into Moon. Or I suppose the Chinese could be lying, but how likely is that?
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: “In a hypothetical 2024 match up, former President Donald Trump is at 48% and President Biden is at 44%.”
Plus: “Hispanic voters are most critical of Biden’s job performance: only 35% approve while 56% disapprove. White voters are more favorable of Biden’s job performance: 41% approve and 51% disapprove. Black voters are the most favorable of Biden’s job performance: 66% approve while 28% disapprove.”
A LOUSY RULING CLASS HAS CONSEQUENCES:
As Robert Heinlein foresaw in Starship Troopers, a successor society will probably pay much more attention to maintaining standards for its ruling class. Though given the current state of Western militaries, it may not choose the precise solution he described.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): ‘Livid:’ Small town shook up after woman charged with 18 counts of child rape in McMinn Co.
TOP SELLER: Victorinox Fibrox Pro Chef’s Knife. #CommissionEarned
WHEN MORE PENETRATION ISN’T ALWAYS BETTER: Testing Home Defense Ammo for Carbines.
HEALTH SAFETY THEATER: NYC Mayor: Vax mandates don’t work but we’re sticking with them anyway.
HE CERTAINLY WAITED FOR AN AUSPICIOUS MOMENT: Going For Broke, Putin Is Counting on the West’s Weakness to Win.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Hormone found to regulate mothers’ behavior. “University of Otago researchers have discovered a new function for the hormone prolactin—it limits a new mom’s investment in aggressive behavior and instead focuses them on interacting with their babies.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: White House: Okay, yes, we’re now officially calling this an “invasion” of Ukraine by Russia.
THE DANGEROUS PART IS, NEITHER IS PUTIN: ‘Is This Really It?’: CNN’s Jim Sciutto Is Not Impressed With Biden’s Response To Putin.
INSIDE EVERY LIBERAL IS A TOTALITARIAN SCREAMING TO GET OUT: Democrats overwhelmingly approve of Trudeau’s crackdown on freedom protestors, freezing of bank accounts: Poll. Looking at Democrat likely voters alone, 65 percent said they favored Trudeau’s crackdown on the protestors, and 17 percent said they disapproved.
Related: Canadian truckers protest organizer denied bail, judge cites ‘safety of the public.’
(Classical reference in headline.)
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Kyle Rittenhouse Is Going on Offense. Will He Sue Joe Biden?
I BELIEVE YOU MEAN “PEOPLE WHO IDENTIFY AS GIRLS AND BOYS.” BECAUSE SCIENCE. Autism appears differently in brains of girls, boys.
ANOTHER MILESTONE: James Webb Space Telescope’s Mirrors Align 1st Starlight In A Hexagon, Reveals NASA. “Engineers handling the James Webb Space Telescope have achieved another milestone as they recently completed the ‘Segment Image Identification’ phase of mirror alignment. With the completion of the first phase, the telescope has brought the 18 unfocused images of a star into a hexagonal formation by moving each of its 18 primary mirror segments. As of now, Webb is in its commissioning phase and has two of its four major instruments turned on.”
PUTIN CHUCKLES: Psaki says binge-watching The West Wing got her back into politics.
OLD AND BUSTED: Going “Green.”
The New Hotness? Spending Green! Climate activists spend millions for friendly Associated Press ‘news.’
When climate activists called for more coverage, the Associated Press went green.
No, it didn’t dive into environmental activism. The news agency had already done that. It dove into a pile of cash — more than $8 million.
AP just announced it sold its gold-standard journalism for 20 bright, shiny new reporters under the benign headline “Climate grant illustrates growth in philanthropy-funded news.” The announcement was adorned with a photo of a polar bear (of course) because journalists do love their cute, man-eating predators.
That $8 million over three years works out to about $133,000 per staffer — in case you’re interested in buying (or renting) a journalist or two.
Hey, a key member of the Obama administration casually mentioned that as well in 2009, and the AP didn’t bat an eye!
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: Putin Gets Piece (Of Ukraine) In Our Time.
Plus:
- Good news: We’re winning the meme war
- Maybe Biden could try de-sanctioning American energy producers
- Deep Thoughts by… Kamala Harris?
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.