Plus, from the comments: “Well, the purpose of the speech was to attack his political opponents and to label them an enemy. Hard to get more political than that. Along the way he borrowed from Hillary Clinton’s playbook and branded the MAGA crowd as a threat to our, meaning his, way of life. In essence they are his ‘deplorables’. Every Democrat running for office this November should be asked if the endorse that view and, if not, what have they done to rebut the President on this?”
I THOUGHT THE PROBLEM WAS PLASTIC STRAWS IN KANSAS: Much of The Great Pacific Garbage Patch’s Plastic Comes From These 5 Countries. “When the authors used computer models to simulate how their samples ended up in the patch, they found that a plastic fragment was 10 times more likely to originate from fishing activities than land-based ones. . . . Less than 2 percent of simulated debris from rivers ended up offshore, carried by ocean currents. In comparison, 21 percent of trawling gear waste and 15 percent of fixed fishing gear waste drifted into the deep, and more than 85 percent of those particles never encountered land in simulations. Of all 232 plastic objects analyzed by researchers clues about their origins, roughly two-thirds were made in either Japan or China.”
Question: With whom is the United States currently at war?
Joe Biden bugged out of Afghanistan almost exactly a year ago while leaving 14,000 Americans and many more of our allies behind Taliban lines. At that time, Biden himself celebrated that he had given us peace for the first time in twenty years, apparently forgetting that we’re still conducting hostilities in the Syria-Iraq desert.
So if this is a “wartime address,” as Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson described it to Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, who’s the enemy?
In an administration chock full of Obama retreads, they’ve return to The One’s favorite past-time. As I wrote in 2009, “President Obama has demonstrated that he’s always eager to view American politics as the continuation of warfare by other means, to flip von Clausewitz’s axiom on its head. Certainly class and culture warfare at least. It’s the Chicago way, after all.” Biden’s handlers have dusted off Obama’s old playbook, and with the midterms rapidly approaching, our sclerotic one-time “President Unity” has no qualms with putting it to work.
Amazon Studios had a problem. It wasn’t money, of course. Amazon Studios’ parent company (and for that matter its actual parent, Jeff Bezos) has, to use a technical term, money out the yin yang. What Amazon needed was intellectual property with major nerd appeal. HBO has Game of Thrones, which is already being multiplexed into a Game of Thrones Cinematic Universe—a GOTCU, if you will—and Netflix has a reliable competitor in its Stranger Things series. They set their sights on The Lord of the Rings.
There’s a huge amount of published work by J.R.R. Tolkien—novels, maps, songs—and an even larger amount of unpublished material controlled by the Tolkien estate. Then there are the Peter Jackson–helmed movies, which together add up to about 47 hours of motion-picture content. (Could be less, but they sure seemed long to me…) All of that material is under the control of the Tolkien estate, which is run by the author’s heirs, who have tenaciously guarded the creative and subsidiary rights to their forbear’s body of work.
They’re not nuts, though. When Amazon offered $250 million for the rights to certain parts of the Lord of the Rings Extended Universe, they struck a deal. But the deal is as complicated and Byzantine as the endpaper maps on my (mostly unread) edition of The Lord of the Rings. Amazon Studios has the rights to produce a film version of the events in the appendices of the novels but is mostly restricted to those and whatever pieces of the unpublished material the estate wishes to share. The series, which premieres in September 2022 and will cost more than $1 billion to complete, has to stick to that material and the events of something called The Second Age, which takes the idea of “nerd appeal” to a new level of intensity.
Which is to say: The studio committed $1 billion to buy the rights to the bits and pieces of the story around the bigger, more well-known story. They spent $1 billion dollars for four very expensive words. Not exactly a leftover pickle and mustard sandwich.
If you aren’t aware, the Tolkien fandom isn’t happy with Amazon’s new work of “art,” the $1-billion-a-season “Rings of Power.”
There are a lot of reasons why the show is being criticized so heavily – most of them having to do with post-modern, feminist, Marxist ideology that the showrunners are trying to impose on a franchise that is utterly opposed to such things – but I’ll let you sift through those in-depth reviews for yourself.
As for right now, let’s just glory in the fact that somehow, despite the beloved franchise having oodles of source material to work with, the creators of this hot garbage managed to get a worse initial rating than the current approval ratings of the most unliked President of the United States.
If you’d like an in-depth look at (some of) what went wrong, YouTuber “The Critical Drinker” (aka Scottish novelist William Jordan) has you covered:
It has been an unusually quiet summer in Wine Country.
Many Napa and Sonoma County business owners have described a slowdown, attributing it to a number of factors, including the surge in international travel and inflation. The costs of gas, airfare and lodging are all on the rise. Wine tasting fees have also gotten more expensive in Napa and Sonoma counties.
Maybe we’re already in a recession, and maybe a lot of the target market has left California.
LOUT, LIAR AND LUNATIC: Issues & Insights captures the Trilemma that is the Joe Biden seen by the nation in last night’s eerie presidential rant:
“Biden is also a lunatic. To have listened to him since he took office, it’s hard to conclude that he’s not trying to provoke a cold if not hot civil war, or at least a major political conflagration.
“He did tone things down a bit Thursday from his previous fever speech, but that was likely in part to make room for all the meaningless bromides he spouted as if they were the most unique and profound words ever stitched together.
“Naturally Biden resorted to our ‘democracy’ over and again as if it were a convention that should be worshipped. He said it well beyond the point of where it became sickening. And it’s another lie. The U.S. is not a democracy. Never has been. Why do the Democrats and their media cheerleaders continue to identify our style of government in the same terms a grade-schooler would?
“The U.S. is a representative republic, or democratic republic. (And Biden and his party are its biggest internal threat.) Democracy is mob rule, which is exactly what the Democrats want – as long as it’s their mob ruling. Think of the George Floyd riots, Antifa violence, destruction, looting – they support anything that wrecks order and helps set them up to take on more political power.”
Why is this Alzheimer’s patient yelling? It’s like America is a lawn and he wants you off it.
If the Republicans don’t use footage of this crazy old man screaming in front of a blood-red hellscape, they deserve to lose.
I mean, just look at this:
* * * * * * * *
I’m not a big MAGA fan, but this stuff is just nuts. Biden’s polls are tanking, his administration is panicking, and now he looks and sounds like a tyrant in a bad movie. He says he wants to unify the country by destroying anybody who disagrees with him. He wants to stifle dissent to quash “fascism.” It’s at least as crazy as anything Trump has ever said.
It’s time to start seriously talking about impeachment.
Today, Biden is walking back his rhetoric from last night:
Biden today: "I don't consider any Trump supporter a threat to the country."
Biden last night: "Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic." pic.twitter.com/lO8rVceUQd
Assuming he hasn’t simply forgotten what he said last night, that’s a curious retraction. The president had a career defining visual last night, on par with Gerald Ford stumbling, Clinton posing next to Monica Lewinsky, Obama in Muslim togs, or an out of touch Richard Nixon walking on the beach in bluchers. Why is he backpedaling now? Why did he give the speech in the first place?
This is both amazing and rather disturbing. While all other networks showed the harsh-hued backdrop in all of its oppressive glory, CNN – quite literally – opts to cast Joe in a kinder light. It appears that newly arrived CEO Chris Licht has a long way to go with his effort to move his news network closer to the political center.
● CNN Brings on Hard-Hitting White House Correspondent to Join Jim Acosta. “Harwood is a well-sourced veteran of Washington who can appeal to the leading experts for their insights. For instance, on Sept. 21, 2015, Harwood emailed Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta for advice on what to ask Jeb Bush during his interview the following day. Incredible access!”
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