Archive for 2024

December 1, 2024

WHEN THE STORY TELLER PUTS OUT THE BOWL, SHE HAS TO TELL THE STORY:  The Chinchilla Of Hope.

Posted at 12:33 am by Sarah Hoyt on Dec 1st, 2024

November 30, 2024

OPEN THREAD: My Christmas lights are up.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 30th, 2024

THE INTEL COMMUNITY AND THEIR MEDIA TOOLS WILL BE GOING AFTER HIM LIKE NOTHING BEFORE:

The stakes are high:

Posted at 7:16 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 30th, 2024

JOEL KOTKIN: DEI is dead. The establishment media just doesn’t want you to know it: The US election will accelerate the decline of a diversity ideology that was making race relations worse.

Even before November, the once trendy concepts of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) were already sinking. Now the election of Donald Trump all but guarantees their accelerated decline.

The DEI push gained momentum during the 2020 George Floyd riots, after being nurtured for years on most college campuses. Many companies, including Walmart, adopted its associated practices. But new research from The Conference Board indicates that over half of executives anticipate continuing the pushback of DEI initiatives. Among the firms stepping back from DEI include Boeing, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, and Black & Decker, and the biggest of all, Walmart itself.

Like DEI, corporate types saw in ESG a means of expiating the sins of the past. Both draw support from cultural arbiters as well as corporate human resources departments and Left-wing non-profits like the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Open Society Foundations, and from “progressive” billionaires.

Economics was sinking ESG even before the election, as its one-time promoter, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, has acknowledged. A recent analysis of major funds found that BlackRock and others who had binged on ESG have underperformed those funds not so encumbered. US sustainability funds faced their worst year on record in 2023, according to a Morningstar.

The GOP takeover is sure to make things worse. Republican state legislatures – Florida, Kansas and Idaho among them – have passed laws that ban or limit the consideration of ESG, providing direct opposition to these green investment pledges.

DEI is, if anything, even less favoured. The recipe of racial quotas and the systemic destruction of merit was already unpopular before Trump’s victory. Over the last two years, corporate DEI departments were slashed. One third of DEI professionals lost their jobs in 2022.

The idea of racial quotas in hiring and college admissions is rejected by the vast majority of Americans and minorities. Trump is aware of this and, under the influence of activists like the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, could ban aid to schools that adopt DEI and quota policies. Given the extreme dependence on Washington, bloated universities will either have to cut staff or change direction.

Make the rubble bounce.

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 30th, 2024

THE CASE FOR — AND AGAINST — GLADIATOR II: 

When TikTok and Instagram turn men thinking about the Roman Empire into a meme, the historian’s job isn’t to list off the names of consuls and emperors or the years in which battles took place; it’s to use that as a chance to see Rome as a mirror for the present. People who lived long ago operated according to principles that were not our own, but the choices they made and the worlds they built show us something essential about what humanity can be. If we don’t engage thoughtfully with them, we’re doing them and us a disservice.

Whatever its flaws as a film or as a description of the past, Gladiator II accomplishes that task. If you’re paying attention, despite the copious gore, Denzel Washington having the time of his life as a scenery-chewing villain, and of course the sharks, you’ll leave the movie with a far deeper grasp of Rome as it actually was. People really did live and die on the sands of the Colosseum. Some benefited from that. Others suffered. While some will surely hate it for this, Gladiator II is surprisingly ambivalent about the Roman Empire. So are most of the people who spend their lives researching and writing about Rome. That’s not because they, or the movie, lack a perspective, but because knowing Rome—really knowing it—requires us to grapple with both spilt blood and gorgeous marble.

I’m willing to concede that Gladiator II has a richer and more detailed subtext than the first Gladiator movie, in which the hero’s quest to restore the Roman republic serves as the equivalent of the “MacGuffin” that drove so many Hitchcock movies. But having first seen Gladiator II on the big screen in Fort Worth yesterday afternoon, and then watching the original Gladiator purely because it was on TV back in the hotel room last night, it was obvious that the first Gladiator works so much better as a movie.

It has Russell Crowe, whom the film would make into a superstar, and he’s surrounded by a cast of colorful and dissipated old Brits – Oliver Reed, David Hemmings, and Richard Harris (okay, technically an Irishman). Again, as with Hitchcock’s frequent casting of Jimmy Stewart and Carry Grant, these actors bring all of the baggage they’ve accumulated through all the old movies we’ve seen them in, which acts as a sort cinematic shorthand. In Gladiator II,  with the exception of Connie Nielsen, whom we remember from the first Gladiator, and Denzel Washington, who brings his own superstar presence to the Gladiator II cast, none of the actors in the new film have anywhere near the sort of gravitas that grounded the original.

In the first movie, Ridley Scott only uses obvious CGI to create sweeping wide shots of Rome, or the large establishing shots of the Colosseum. In the sequel, Scott’s use of CGI feels incredibly self-indulgent, with phony looking sea battles, and unrealistic and occasionally sheer fantasy animals for the gladiators to fight. Then there’s what the denizens of the TV Tropes Website call an “anachronism stew,” where Scott depicts a Rome with outdoor coffee bars, paper newspapers, in the first battle scene, trebuchets.

If Gladiator II existed as an individual film, it would be a pretty good 21st century updating of the venerable “swords and sandals” genre which Hollywood and Italy have been churning out for decades and decades. Unfortunately, it has to serve as sequel to one of Scott’s best films – and on that level, I’m forced to give it a reluctant thumbs down.

UPDATE: Gladiator II: This time, it’s hokey. “Gladiator was a worthy heir to classics such as Ben-Hur; the sequel belongs in a category that includes 2 Fast 2 Furious. Mostly it’s a vehicle for Pascal to glower defiantly at the emperors and for Mescal to take his shirt off. Not that I’m complaining. No movie can be all that bad when it features Denzel Washington, in this case as the villainous slave trader Macrinus. Washington is not simply chewing the scenery here. He is rubbing the scenery tenderly in a blend of aromatic spices, slathering it in its own juices, and wolfing it down with a honey glaze. Whatever this screenplay had to offer, Washington gave.”

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 30th, 2024

THE WORLD IS HEALING: LA Times Appoints Scott Jennings to Editorial Board.

I have been a fan of Scott Jennings on CNN since I first saw that Scott Jennings was on CNN.

I’ve made no secret of that since I wrote pieces about him and used his video clips all the time. Every day, he is the sole voice of reason on panels dominated by lefties whose idea of argumentation amounts to scoffing at others. It’s a treat to watch because Scott is unflappable, brings the goods, and is the one person who relies on reason and facts.

Most of us in his situation would get frustrated; I know I would because I would make the mistake of thinking that my audience was the people in the room and not the people watching the debate. No matter how reasonable or even obvious Scott’s arguments are, the people sitting at the table will never acknowledge that Scott has a point.

It’s always five against one. But Scott, as the one, always gets the better of it because the five are usually peddling talking points, not persuasive arguments.

This gets us to this: the owner of The Los Angeles Times–an extraordinarily liberal paper that has been roiled by controversy over the owner’s diktat that the paper not endorse in the presidential race–has decided to bring Scott on as an editorial board member.

Read on, as David Strom of Hot Air quotes Oliver Darcy, formerly of CNN, having a swarmy meltdown over L.A. Times owner Pat Soon-Shiong hiring Jennings. But Soon-Shiong may have far better known subscribers’ heads exploding as well. In 2005, when the LA. Times’ previous owner hired a pre-TDS Jonah Goldberg and dropped lefty Robert Scheer, Barbra Streisand had a near-aneurysm in response:

I am delighted to be in the Los Angeles Times and I’m deeply flattered by the opportunity. I would be saddened if Streisand were right in her claim that my presence will hurt the paper or if her insinuation that she somehow speaks for the larger community were true.

But Streisand is adamant. She writes, “The greater Southern California community is one that not only proudly embraces its diversity, but demands it. Your decision to fire Robert Scheer is a great disservice to the spirit of our community.”

She continues: “It seems that your new leadership, especially Publisher Jeff Johnson, is entirely out of touch with your readers and their desire to be exposed to views that stretch them beyond their own paradigms. So although the number of contributors to your Op-Ed pages may have increased, in firing Scheer and hiring columnists such as Jonah Goldberg, the gamut of voices has undeniably been diluted.”

Babs and “the Desirable”

So, taking Streisand seriously, we must ask: Is she on crack?

Robert Scheer may be the greatest writer since homo sapiens first scribbled on cave walls, but no serious person can believe that his views test the elasticity of Streisand’s “paradigms.” He reinforces them, he ladles concrete on them. Scheer confirms all of her biases and reaffirms all of her ill-considered views. Put aside the fact that both Scheer and Streisand are committed leftists who share almost identical views on most major issues. Scheer served as an informal adviser to Ms. Streisand on at least one occasion–when she delivered a speech to Harvard. Streisand, who recently called for President Bush’s impeachment, threw a book party for Scheer when his last anti-Bush book came out, and she regularly links to his articles on her always amusing website.

And even if you suspect I don’t have the intellectual firepower to burn toast, it’s hard to see how my views wouldn’t put just a bit of spring in her paradigm. Indeed, it’s doubtful that Scheer would even take the time to tell her that “gamuts” cannot be “diluted” or that if you are going to pronounce upon “principals of journalistic integrity” with Olympian pomposity, you might take an extra moment or two to spell “principles” correctly. Otherwise, when she writes that the Times is stepping away “from the principals of journalistic integrity, which would dictate that journalists be journalists, editors be editors and accountants be accountants” it sounds like she’s saying we should back away slowly from the dean of the Columbia Journalism School and other journalistic “dictators.” “Have that accountant beaten! He’s acting like an editor!”

Here’s hoping Jennings will have a similar metaphorical effect on the L.A. Times’ remaining leftist subscribers:

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 30th, 2024
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