HAVING THEM BE REVEALED TRUTH WITH UNNERVING FREQUENCY ALSO ISN’T HELPING: How To Create Conspiracy Theories.
Archive for 2023
July 25, 2023
WITH THIS GANG, THE SHOCKING THING WOULD BE IF ANY OF IT GOT TO UKRAINE: Criminals Are Stealing Weapons And Supplies Sent To Ukraine.
AND TOLD NO ONE: Fargo Police Stop Mass Terrorist Attack.
DESPITE? IT’S AN INTENDED RESULT! Despite low math test scores, California advances framework ‘equity’ & ‘social justice’ curriculum.
NAHHHH…. WHAT ARE THE CHANCES? Secret Service vet on WH cocaine: ‘Somebody’s stopping this from being thoroughly investigated’.
Oh, yeah 100%.
I DOUBT THAT’S THE ONLY – OR EVEN THE MAIN – REASON: Hollywood royalty avoiding Harry and Meghan to stay in William and Kate’s good graces: report.
WITH LOW-FLOW WASHERS AND NO HOT WATER? OF COURSE IT DOES: The message from Uxbridge: Net Zero stinks.
MAINSTREAM AMERICA CONDEMNS COMMIE-TOTALITARIAN RESEARCHERS: Researchers condemn rise of ‘fascist ideologues’ after students send mocking responses to LGBTQ survey.
IS IT TRUE NY POLICIANS GET A PROFESSIONAL DISCOUNT? Hochul facing criticism over new health care program for sex workers: ‘Magnet for more prostitutes’.
EVERY DEM INTERVIEWED – VERY SINGLE ONE – OUGHT BE ASKED “STIPULATING THE ALLEGATIONS CAN BE PROVED, SHOULD BIDEN LEAVE OFFICE?” ‘We may have a criminal family sitting in the White House’: Gingrich on Biden bribery doc.
I’M SO OLD I REMEMBER WHEN WE RELIED ON MARKETS TO MAKE SUCH DETERMINATIONS: GOP lawmakers slam Biden administration’s proposed clamp down on home water heaters.
LONG OVERDUE – ESG OUGHT BE INDICTED AS BREACH OF FIDUCIARY DUTY: Political Backlash Is Upsetting Corporate Enthusiasm for ESG, DEI, Survey Suggests.
A FEW MORE YEARS OF THIS ADMINISTRATION AND I FEAR WE’LL GET ALL TOO CLOSE A LOOK: North Korean Defector on Famine, Life Under Communist Regime: ‘People Don’t Know What’s Happening’.
July 24, 2023
FALL OF THE INSTITUTIONS:
The dancing TikTok nurses are back except this time it’s for “climate change”
Do these people not realize they’re singlehandedly ruining the reputation of the medical industry?
Humiliating
— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) July 24, 2023
OPEN THREAD: This is your moment.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Our society’s ‘top brains’ have gone mad — and dysfunctional politics is the result.
SAUL ALINSKY SMILES: LOL! Just Stop Oil gets a taste of their own medicine.
Just Stop Oil gets a taste of their own medicine.
Counter activists tie rape alarms to balloons and let them go in a Just Stop Oil meeting. pic.twitter.com/GbyI8CPj09— Paul Golding (@GoldingBF) July 24, 2023
BOMB CANADA—THE CASE FOR WAR: Toronto principal killed himself after being singled out during DEI training.
(Classical reference in headline.)
OPPENHEIMER, PRO AND CON:
Pro: John Podhoretz:
When middlebrow movies of this kind—Gandhi, Cry Freedom, The Killing Fields, and many others—vanish from the scene, that doesn’t make new space for highbrow stuff, because high culture will always be an elite minority taste. Instead, everything just goes lower. And that’s exactly what happened with Hollywood. Over the past two decades, movies that try to tell a real story about real people (and I don’t just mean actual real-life people like Oppenheimer, but just everyday folk) have gotten smaller and more insignificant. They are unambitious and unassuming. When they work, they work because they are touching slices of life and seek only to make us shed a tiny tear. They’re not weighty. They’re gossamer.
Oppenheimer is weighty, and it’s kind of magnificent. Writer-director Christopher Nolan has decided the story he is telling is the most important story in human history, and he wants to do it justice. This movie’s level of ambition is something I’m not sure we’ve seen in a major studio release in decades, and Nolan is so skilled a storyteller and so authoritative a director that his reach blessedly does not exceed his grasp. This is not a subtle movie, and there’s barely a joke or a laugh in it; as in all his pictures, Nolan presents us with an earnest, formal, and heavy world. But what he doesn’t do is preach, and that is what makes this movie such a triumph. Oppenheimer is a wildly ambiguous portrait of its titular subject, the work he did, the life he led, and even the humiliation to which he was subjected by political and ideological enemies. The titanic performance of Cillian Murphy, who does nothing to ingratiate himself with the audience, takes this incredibly complex and deeply troubled man and follows him through four decades of scientific growth, political activism, engineering achievement, and raw power politics. And it does a beautiful job posing the key question of his life without answering it: In doing something transcendently great, did he do something evil?
Con: Armond White: Oppenheimer’s Revenge of the Geeks. Christopher Nolan remakes Dr. Strangelove for today’s moral idiots:
On the way to turning pop cinema into a weapon of mass destruction, Christopher Nolan specialized in narratives about amoral excitation — Memento, and his Batman Begins / The Dark Knight / The Dark Knight Rises trilogy. These bad productions changed movie culture by appealing to the terrors of naïve film nerds the same way Stanley Kubrick corrupted adolescent pop-culture devotees — through technological preening that made geeks feel smart.
There’s always a moral vacancy in Nolan’s films. Now, Nolan has made his ultimate geeks’ movie: the overhyped biopic Oppenheimer, which mystifies physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by the eccentric, intense Irish actor Cillian Murphy), credited for creating the atomic bomb that the U.S. dropped on Japan in 1945 to end World War II. This is Nolan’s subversive remake of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, from 1964. The real-life basis of Nolan’s film is all the more enticing for kids who know nothing about military or scientific history. He introduces them to Oppenheimer in the same way that Marvel distorted Oppenheimer’s wizardry in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And surely Nolan is aware of how Zack Snyder’s Watchmen used Oppenheimer’s oft-repeated quote — “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” It came from the Bhagavad Gita, a Sanskrit epic that polymath Oppenheimer knew, but the proclamation now teases pop-culture nihilists — and that’s the purpose behind Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
Not since David Fincher’s serial-killer epic Zodiac has there been a crime procedural as plodding as Oppenheimer, even though Nolan constantly switches to black-and-white flashbacks of the scientist’s early academic years, his wartime bomb research on the Manhattan Project, and his post-war persecution by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Murphy is outfitted in a wide fedora, and his imperious manner makes him seem half-hero, half-nemesis. Nolan lacks the momentum to dramatize Oppenheimer’s travails (Murphy’s blue eyes do all the work), but the precarious portrait of a genius recalls Fincher’s worship of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. Both Nolan and Fincher exploit the zeitgeist’s disinterest in what’s moral or immoral. This film dithers for three hours, as if viewers were also morally uncertain and aesthetically gullible.
Like Nolan’s Dunkirk, his latest film feels detached and Kubrickian. I watched The Imitation Game on Saturday night on Netflix as a sort of warmup for Sunday’s big movie. (In this case, England’s tortured WWII genius, Alan Turing). While the plastic CGI SFX from 2014 were nowhere near as good as Nolan’s practical effects, and I felt much more sympathetic to Turing as played by Benedict Cumberbatch than Cillian Murphy’s cool and detached Oppenheimer. And while the plot was also non-linear, it was much more obvious in each scene which period of Turing’s life was being recreated. But Oppenheimer is big, bravura, and smart filmmaking, something that as Podhoretz writes above is quite rare in post-’80s Hollywood.
FISH OIL FOR THE WIN: Increased Omega-3 Intake May Protect Against Age-Related Hearing Loss.