IT’S A VODKAPUNDIT TWOFER! RBG, Steve Jobs, Cancer, and the Public’s Right to Know. “I looked up the half-forgotten timeline of Jobs’s public-yet-private years-long decline after being shown a series of tweets from an anonymous user with the Twitter handle ‘au ng.’ Some of what he says is pure speculation, but given Ginsburg’s serious disinterest in being forthright with the American people, and the media’s seeming acquiescence to her wishes, speculation is all we have right now. For what it’s worth, I found au ng’s tweets to be interesting throughout, and sometimes compelling.”
Much, much more at the link. That’s from my daily column outside the VIP paywall.
And for PJMedia’s VIP members: Are Apple TV+ and Disney+ Worth Your Streaming Time and Money?
I have a quick overview of both streaming services best and worst offerings, but this bit deserves getting broken out for non-members:
For All Mankind is the show I thought I’d love. It’s set in an alternate history where the Soviets beat Apollo 11 to the Moon by a few weeks. Then, just as NASA is really getting its act back together, the Soviets double down and land a woman on the Moon as part of a huge propaganda effort. The show is well-acted, lovingly produced, and totally had its hooks in me for the first two or three episodes. Things went downhill quickly as the show descended into the preachy strain of feminism. Worse, Ted Kennedy is presented as a feminist hero, a plot development I feared might come after catching a small tell in the first episode. When the Soviets reach the moon, it’s mentioned on the news that Kennedy cut short his weekend in Chappaquiddick. So of course Mary Kopechne lives, and of course Ted gets elected in ’72 as the most woman-loving president evah. Which I guess kinda works if you forget all the waitress sandwiches and pantsless pickup lines and stuff. Oh, and because of the extra-heated space race, Nixon got us out of Vietnam years earlier, too… yet still couldn’t manage to get reelected.
In other words, the premise of For All Mankind seems to be that the world would be a much better place if only the Communists had been more competent. Talk about your alternative histories, right?
If you’re interested in becoming a VIP member, the promo code VODKAPUNDIT is good for a nice little discount.