Archive for 2023
July 16, 2023
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Woke Barbie Bait and Switch in the Works?
It’s not hard to read between the lines. Director/co-screenwriter Greta Gerwig often uses her work to explore gender issues, from “Lady Bird” to “Little Women.” The early previews suggest she did it again.
None of this shares if the movie is good, bad or indifferent. We’ll have to wait until July 21 to find out.
Yet the message discipline for “Barbie’s” marketing team has been nothing short of outstanding. Most potential movie goers won’t read the quotes from Ferrell, Gerwig or Nef. They’ll be too busy sharing the cute clips and frothy trailers on social media.
If “Barbie” is the first woke blockbuster, it’ll be partly thanks to a bait-and-switch press push.
A boffo opening weekend does not a blockbuster make. That takes a lot of positive word of mouth and repeat ticket buyers, and neither of those will show up if the film is a woke disaster. Barbie is also benefiting from the novelty of theater attendees who want to see it the same day as Christopher Nolen’s tough and grim Oppenheimer: What is Barbenheimer? Inside the Double Feature Mania.
ICYMI: Veteran feds cry foul on White House cocaine probe: ‘This is a cover-up.’
“This is a cover-up. How can they say they have no leads?” one ex-agent said. “It is a restricted area and they have a log book, you don’t have to be Columbo to figure out who was there.
“Suppose it was anthrax,” the same person raged. “Would they have the same answer?”
“We have a tale of two countries,” another former fed said. “They identified hundreds of people who were in the Capitol building on Jan. 6 after an extensive investigation, but they don’t know who left something in an 8 x 10 room in the White House?”
Can’t or won’t? This is a banana republic “investigation” in a banana republic White House.
Related: Secret Service covering up White House cocaine for Hunter Biden, Nikki Haley says.
I SUSPECT IT MOSTLY IS. POWER DOESN’T SO MUCH CORRUPT AS IT ATTRACTS CORRUPTION.
This mirrors the larger trend in politics of which both sides accuse each other of treason, sexual predation and low down, belly crawling behavior. The elite are painting each other in the blackest colors. The scary thing is it could all be true.
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) July 14, 2023
DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: Texas bill requiring all schools to have armed security goes into effect this fall.
Nowadays anti-fascism is called “fascism,” just as explicit racism is called “anti-racism.”
July 15, 2023
OPEN THREAD: Just do it.
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: A Dead Whale at The Bottom of The Ocean Is Now a Thriving Home of Life.
Apropos, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the last remaining political throwback to that era, recently went viral for a video of a shirtless outdoor lifting session. This occasioned a lot of commentary, most centered around Kennedy being completely jacked (though some haters criticized the amount of weight he was putting up, not taking into account that it was a drop set and that Kennedy is almost 70). But perhaps the most jarring thing was the spectacle of an avowed progressive being in shape, as this is atypical, given the leftist proclivity for fetishizing weakness and victimhood. But while RFK Jr. is a progressive, he is also a Kennedy, and that fact is significant, because it points to an overlooked part of the Kennedy legacy- the role that his uncle, John F. Kennedy, playing in creating the last great wave of enthusiasm for physical education, and what that means for the future. . . .
Stan LaProtti was a WWII vet like many of his generation. And like many of his peers, he felt that the youth were getting soft, and also like many of them, he sought to make a difference as a physical education teacher. The modern reader, accustomed to a feminized and safety-centric version of PE (assuming it exists) taught by the bottom of the educational barrel, should know that in the semi-recent past public education was an attractive career prospect for bright and talented men who brought to their work an unapologetic masculinity, especially in PE. LaProtti was such a man, not only a teacher, but a real theorist and philosopher, and he got his chance to put his ideas into practice as head of the physical education department at La Sierra High School in Carmichael, California.
Plus: “For the confused modern reader, please know that at one time, California was not the American capital of fail, fentanyl, and feces. For a shining moment after the Second World War, the Golden State was the epicenter of all the promise of the nation, a paradise of opportunity and excellence, glamor, wealth, fame, and beauty.”
And: “We cannot be a group of part-time philosophers, earning a living while complaining about what the system is doing to kids these days; we must be the system, or the kids will. And if that doesn’t motivate you, remember: A commie taught a kid today- DID YOU?”
WHAT TUCKER DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT ANDREW TATE: Odds are you have heard of Tucker Carlson’s controversial interview with social media influencer Andrew Tate.
Odds are also good that there are also things you don’t know about Tate. But Conn Carroll of the Washington Examiner does know about Tate and he lays it out in about as straight-forward a manner as possible here.
I should also disclose that I know both Tucker and Conn, having worked for the former at the Daily Caller News Foundation and hired Conn for his first stint at the Examiner. I respect and admire both of them. Perhaps Tucker will have Conn on for a profoundly different Tate conversation.
HIGHER EDUCATION AS MONEY LAUNDRY:
People ask why Harvard admissions can still be bribed or influenced by the rich or well-connected. This is the wrong question: the right question is why they ever give spots based on merit at all. The answer is: otherwise the scheme wouldn’t work. The point of a money-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty money, then mix them together so thoroughly that nobody can tell which is which. Likewise, the point of a privilege-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty privilege, then stamp both with a Harvard degree. “Fairly-earned privilege” means all the brilliant talented ambitious youngsters admitted on the basis of their SAT scores and grades and impressive accomplishments; “dirty privilege” means the kids of various old-money aristocrats, foreign potentates, and ordinary super-rich people. Colleges mix them together, with advantages for both groups.
Is this good or bad? It’s good insofar as it provides a justification for making some elite positions dependent on merit and accessible to anyone, but bad insofar as it helps defend and obfuscate the ones that aren’t. It’s good if you think it’s good for all the elites (meritocratic and otherwise) to know each other and be on the same page; it’s bad if you don’t want them to be (maybe because it helps them oppress people more efficiently).
I expect that without such a system the elites would do their own thing without any concession to merit whatsoever – so maybe it beats the alternative.
On the other hand, this lets them coopt potential opposition.
HMM: Ketamine effective for treatment-resistant depression: clinical trial. It’s cheap and off patent.
OVER AT MY SUBSTACK: Thoughts on the Population Implosion.
MARK SMITH INTERVIEWS SIXTH CIRCUIT JUDGE AMUL THAPAR on the Second Amendment and Justice Clarence Thomas.
JOSH BARRO: The Kennedys Were Always Bad.
If you’re going to have dynastic politics, you should have dynasties built around good families who share positive traits, like sobriety, thrift, and public-spiritedness. You know, families like the Romneys. The Kennedys are the opposite of this — they are a cadre of reckless, womanizing, substance-abusing mediocrities of middling IQ, who have produced a staggering array of displays of bad judgment and poor character over the decades, often leading to the deaths of themselves or others. I would not get in a car driven by a member of this family, let alone let them run the government.
You are surely aware of how RFK Jr.’s uncle Ted killed a woman. After a party on Chappaquiddick Island near Martha’s Vineyard in 1969, Ted drove his car off a bridge, leaving his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne in the car to die and waiting hours to report the accident to authorities. It’s less likely you know that RFK Jr.’s brother, Joe Kennedy II, also caused a serious car accident near the beach, in his case on Nantucket in 1973. He was driving a Jeep-like vehicle with four seats but seven passengers — “people were hanging all over, some were standing up,” one witness would later tell a court — which he overturned, injuring several of them, including his brother David. Unlike Ted, he didn’t kill anyone, but one of his passengers, Pam Kelley, was paralyzed from the chest down. Joe II was convicted of negligent driving and fined $100. Later, he would be elected to six terms in Congress.
Another one of RFK Jr.’s brothers, Michael — who had served as campaign manager to both Ted and Joe II — died in a ski crash at Aspen Mountain in 1997. Why did he crash into a tree? Because he and two of his other siblings were playing a game of ski football. As the New York Times reported, this was a tradition in Robert Sr.’s branch of the Kennedy family — a dumbass, dangerous thing they’d been doing for decades[.]
And the hits just keep on coming: RFK Jr. says COVID may have been ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Yes, the Kennedy family is bad. But RFK Jr. says the New York Post story is wrong:
The @nypost story is mistaken. I have never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews. I accurately pointed out — during an off-the-record conversation — that the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons and that a 2021…
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 15, 2023
W. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Watergate’s ‘Gift of the Gods:’ The Surprise Disclosure of Nixon’s Tapes, 50 Years On.
The conventional storyline of the Watergate scandal is that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, through their dogged reporting for the Washington Post, uncovered evidence that forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in 1974.
A more accurate, less mythical interpretation is that the president’s fall was triggered not by newspaper reporters but by a mostly anonymous former White House aide who, 50 years ago, reluctantly told investigators that Nixon had secretly recorded most of his conversations at the White House. The disclosure by Alexander Butterfield in mid-July 1973 altered the complexion and dynamics of Watergate, shifting the scandal to a monthslong drama to pry the tapes from Nixon’s possession.
Butterfield’s surprise revelation about the White House tapes was, according to the late Stanley I. Kutler, Watergate’s preeminent historian, “the gift of the gods.”
Read the whole thing.
READER FAVORITE: Flat Plug Power Strip, Ultra Thin Flat Extension Cord. #CommissionEarned
QUELLE HORREUR! Cycling’s Governing Body Bars Trans Athletes from Women’s Races.
Or as America’s Newspaper of Record reported in 2019: Motorcyclist Who Identifies As Bicyclist Sets Cycling World Record.
REMEMBER WHEN IT WAS CALLED “SHACKING UP”? Back then, living together before saying “I do” was generally frowned upon, something that “just isn’t done.” Today, living together or “cohabitation” is not only accepted but often encouraged as the best way to find out if you two are “compatible.”
Is that true? As is made clear by the latest edition of the Colson Center’s “What Would You Say?” videos on HillFaith, there is more than enough credible academic research from a wide variety of sources to come to an informed answer to that question.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Don’t take chances: Why doxycycline is a great bet against STIs.