Archive for 2022
January 14, 2022
FIRST SALVO? Ukraine hit by ‘massive’ cyber-attack on government websites. Suspected Russian hackers leave message warning: ‘Ukrainians … be afraid and expect worse.’
LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Crime city: Philadelphia police just published instructional guide on how to survive carjackings.
You need a whole booklet for this? I mean, just ask the Dalai Lama:
THE SPREAD OF NEUROTIC COVID-PARANOIA: “Every time Emma Dalton sets foot in a shop, supermarket or cafe, she reaches into her handbag and pulls out her portable carbon dioxide monitor. The $350 device allows her to quickly detect how much fresh air is circulating in her surrounds— information that helps protect her against COVID-19.”
While the shame campaign has been a catastrophe as public health strategy, it has been effective as aristocratic misdirection, a way to keep the public’s eyes off the vault. Maybe that’s what it’s for.
Related: The rich and powerful thrived as the rest of us suffered in the year of lockdowns. “So is it fair to call the overclass response to the pandemic a failure? Well, certainly not for the overclass, whose members are richer, more powerful and more secure in their positions than a year ago. For America? Well, that’s another story.”
JAMES LILEKS ON TERRY TEACHOUT: “We corresponded over the years, as many did; he was generous on Twitter, where he kept a running account of music and movies worth your attention. We would get into the weeds in DMs about certain films and actors, but the great pleasure was tossing back and forth a link or a photo to something that spoke to our common bond: Smallville. Our luck to grow up in a decent place in the middle of the country in the waning days of mid-century culture, and how it shaped us — sometimes by what we experienced, and sometimes by what we sensed about the time that immediately preceeded our tenure. For him, Smallville was small: see above. The downtown is much less impressive than Fargo, but of course it was different, once. Local stores, no doubt a bustling 5 and Dime. A lunch counter with the swirling smells of hamburgers and cigarettes. Unlike some who run off to the big city and paint themselves as special orchids who could not bloom in the arid land of flyover America, Terry was proud of where he came from, and regarded it with affection and rue. The mark of a good and generous soul.”
JOHN LUCAS: The Biden Administration Isn’t Even Hiding Its Designation Of Mainstream Americans As ‘Domestic Terrorists.’
As Tulsi Gabbard says, this is poisonous.
THESE IDIOTS ARE NOT ACTUALLY IN ANY SENSE AMERICAN: House Democrats attempt end-around of filibuster to pass election law using NASA bill.
They never thought about what comes if they make the ballot box invalid.
“HE’D KILL YOU IF HE GOT THE CHANCE…:” Editor Walter Murch on Coppola’s The Conversation, the Nodal Concept of Montage and Our Modern Surveillance State.
Filmmaker: In the book you collaborated on with Michael Ondaatje [The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, 2002], you said, “There were many times while making the film that I had a sense of doubling. I’d be working on the film late at night, looking at an image of Harry Caul working on his tape, and there would be four hands, his and mine. Several times I was so tired and disoriented that Harry Caul would press the button to stop the tape, and I would be amazed that the film didn’t also stop.”
Murch: Well, there is some disorientation that comes with being up at 3am after working 18 hours straight.
Filmmaker: Right, but it seems like this experience, aside from being a part of the lonesome craft of editing a film, becoming intimate with its events and characters, tends to mirror the audience’s as the film plays. The viewing body is thrust into a symbiosis with Caul as they are with any closely hewn protagonist, but in the case of The Conversation, we are also brought into a synchonicity with the events themselves.
Murch: Well, to your point, Harry Caul is not a natural leading character for a feature film, and that was one of the things that Francis was interested in. Taking a character that at best, in another kind of movie, would have a two- or three-minute scene. The man who delivers the tape.
Filmmaker: We find ourselves drawn into a character’s fold by watching them work.
Murch: Right. When Francis hired me for the feature, he said “You’re a sound person, you’ll understand him.” But because he’s not a naturally engaging cinematic character by all conventional standards, one of the techniques we have to use, when presented with that kind of problem, is to not allow the audience any escape. It’s also true of Talented Mr. Ripley. This is not someone you want normally to be the lead.
Filmmaker: It’s less seldom the case in the 50 years since, but still holds largely true.
Murch: Right. So in these cases, the audience either willingly has to engage or become Stockholm Syndrome hostages to the film. There’s no wiggle room.
If you have any interest in great films from the 1970s, read the whole thing.
LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY: Sen. Ron Johnson Demands Details From Pentagon on Project Veritas COVID Story Origins Report. “The impetus for Johnson’s request was a report by a Marine major working at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The report was subsequently released by Project Veritas. In it, we learn that EcoHealth Alliance pursued a grant from DARPA in 2018 to study ways to prevent a coronavirus outbreak similar to the Sars CoV-2 coronavirus that caused the current pandemic.”
FILIBUSTERS ARE RACIST RELICS OF JIM CROW, ALSO USED BY DEMOCRATS YESTERDAY:
But then something incredible happened. Literally hours after the Democrats embarked on a major offensive to abolish the filibuster as a tool of racists everywhere, they then…used the filibuster. They didn’t just block any bill either. They did Russia’s Vladimir Putin a solid by blocking Ted Cruz’s bill to sanction the Nordstream 2 pipeline.
You couldn’t have scripted this any better, and I’m pretty sure Ted Cruz knew exactly what he was doing here. He timed things perfectly to once again show what rabid hypocrites the Democrats are. That the bill was stopped also represented a massive win for the Russians was just the cherry-on-top. The White House actually spent the last week lobbying for Putin in this case.
But remember, it’s Republicans who are soft on Russia. Meanwhile, Biden and his party continue to bend the knee, going so far as to green-light Germany making itself energy dependent on the very country that NATO exists to protect it from. Truly, yesterday was a banner day in exposing the Democrats for exactly what they are on essentially all major fronts. Throw in the prior day’s inflation report, and this has easily been the worst week of Biden’s presidency, and that’s saying something considering what happened in Afghanistan.
Related: So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines [in America]
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
You know who didn’t do that? Trump. You know who is doing it now? Biden and the Democrats.
EXTRADITE ERIC HOLDER: Mexico charges 7 including top officials in ‘Fast and Furious’ guns trafficking scandal.
MEAN, LAZY, AND VINDICTIVE IS NO WAY TO GO THROUGH LIFE: To staff, Kamala Harris is a clueless bully who refuses to do her homework.
WHY ARE BLUE JURISDICTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF ANTI-ASIAN HATE? Virginia School Board Members Acknowledged Anti-Asian Bias in Admissions, Texts Show. “It was absolutely motivated by anti-Asian racism.”
Plus: “Anti-Asian discrimination has become a problem in higher education as well. Under former president Donald Trump, the Justice Department sued Yale University over alleged anti-Asian bias in its admissions process. The Biden administration dropped the case last year.”
LEARN A NEW SKILL: Knife Fighting: A Step-by-Step Guide to Practical Knife Fighting for Self-Defense. #CommissionEarned
SEAN TRENDE: What Biden’s Approval Rating Means for the Midterms. “Although the presidential election isn’t for another 2½ years, the midterm elections are fast approaching. In our increasingly polarized and nationalized politics, the single most determinative factor in midterm outcomes is the president’s job approval. . . . Assuming the parties don’t nominate particularly weak candidates and there are no further retirements, a Republican-controlled Senate starts to come into the picture when Biden’s job approval falls to around 51% and becomes the most likely outcome at around 48%.”
Don’t get cocky. If you care, you need to be out there volunteering, working, and donating. And no, commenting on blogs, even this one, doesn’t count.
THE PRIME MINISTER OF VINLAND COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Is the Viking next to go? WWU eyes ditching Viking mascot due to colonialism.
LARRY KUDLOW: America to Biden: It’s Time To Start Singing ‘It’s Over . . .’
As his political agenda falls apart the President has become more vitriolic and insulting in various speeches. Virtually every sensible person in politics is attacking Mr. Biden’s poisonous speech yesterday in Atlanta. The fallout from those poisonous words continues to spread today.
Then on the hill, Mr. Biden threw another temper tantrum about losing on the election takeover bill, but also adding this bizarre screeching about who counts the votes. Listen to this:
“We missed this time. We missed this time. The state legislative bodies continue to change the law not on who can vote, but who gets to count the vote. Count the vote. Count the vote. It’s about election subversion.”
By the way, the answer to who counts the votes is the Democrats who run the election day operations throughout America’s big cities. They’re the vote counters. Not Republicans.
And, let’s not forget Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who spent $450 million illegally placing his left-wing minions into election operations throughout the country and thereby bending every decision against Donald Trump and Republicans.
Meanwhile, even Mr. Biden’s State Department is acknowledging that this week’s talks with Vladimir Putin and his threatened invasion of the Ukraine have gone nowhere. I don’t know why they’re still talking.
The White House should’ve imposed across the board sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and Russian banks, and Russian natural resources, and oligarchs, and we should be publicly visibly selling lethal weapons to our Ukrainian allies, but none of this is happening.
Senator Cruz’s amendment to restore the Nord Stream 2 sanctions, which were a gift to Putin in the first place and should never have happened, looks to have been defeated on the Senate floor today by Democrats.
“A gift to Putin,” enabled yesterday by the same filibuster the Democrats profess to want to eliminate: Biden and the Democrats are colluding with Russia.
MARK HEMINGWAY: Friends don’t cancel friends.
If [Patton Oswalt’s behavior in regards to Dave Chappelle] is an example of what friends are not to do, I was at least reminded of one of the more inspiring public displays of celebrity friendship. In 2014, a Minneapolis Star-Tribune reporter asked actor Danny Glover about his friend and Lethal Weapon co-star Mel Gibson, whose alcohol-fueled antics involving racial and antisemitic slurs have largely destroyed his Hollywood career.
“I have a friendship with Mel Gibson,” Glover responded. “It’s a respectful friendship, and when I talk to Mel I know what’s gone down and heard what is happening. … I’ll say this: As I’ve said when people try to get me to throw … say something bad … I love Mel Gibson. That’s all I have to say about that.”
As you ponder that response, it’s worth noting that in contrast to Gibson’s reputation as a right-leaning traditionalist Catholic, Glover is a far-left political activist. But the reporter pressed Glover further.
“I don’t want to go any further with the question,” Glover told him. “You can say, ‘Danny Glover says he loves Mel Gibson.’”
The reporter pressed Glover again.
“This is not an interview with you,” Glover said. “This is [an] interview with me. What your friend says is relevant to your friends; what’s relevant to me is that I love Mel Gibson. Do you have another question?”
Glover gets it—being there for someone when they’re wrong is the whole point of friendship.
Exit quote (though not from Glover): “Anyone can defend you when you’re right. It takes a friend to defend you when you’re wrong.”
KRUISER: Sinema Wraps Filibuster Dagger In Dem Talking Points Then Sticks It In. “Although she’s on board with almost all of the Democratic agenda, Sinema has refused to budge on the filibuster issue. It’s not a position that has been easy for her to maintain but she’s proven to be tough.”
THE ABA SHOULDN’T BE INVOLVED IN ACCREDITATION, IT’S HOPELESSLY POLITICIZED AND UNTRUSTWORTHY: The ABA’s Problematic Proposed ‘Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion’ Rules For Law Schools. State legislatures should begin stripping it of any role.