I BLAME CLIMATE CHANGE: Deaths linked to ATV use in U.S. climb by a third in one year.
June 1, 2024
BLUE POLICIES BEAR PREDICTABLE FRUIT: Brutal Machete Attack in Times Square ‘Gun-Free’ Disarmament Zone.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China spacecraft to try to land on Moon’s far side.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Best Cars That Still Offer a Manual Transmission in 2024, Ranked.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: DEWALT 20V MAX Cordless Drill and Impact Driver. #CommissionEarned
I DON’T THINK THIS IS THE FCC’S BUSINESS: FCC chair calls for stricter ‘space junk’ rules.
Flashback: “The FCC’s claim to jurisdiction rests on a thin reed.”
WELL, THERE’S A SURPRISE: Starliner Launch Attempt Scrubbed. “There are backup launch opportunities June 2, 5 and 6.”
ONLY SOME OF THEM ARE IN THE WHITE HOUSE: Traumatic brain injury affects 1 in 8 older Americans.
KNOWN-WOLF: “Covenant School shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale reportedly told her therapist that she was fantasizing about killing her family and committing a school shooting, according to a report by 99.7 WTN radio host Brian Wilson. The therapist reportedly did not report these findings to authorities.”
Flashback: Nashville Mayor Furious Over Leak of Transgender Shooter’s Manifesto, Demands Investigation. “If there was any question about whether the photos released by [Steven] Crowder were real, this answers them. You don’t start an investigation into the leak of something that doesn’t exist.”
JULIO ROSAS: Reflecting On The Minneapolis Riots Four Years Later.
The evening before my flight to Minneapolis, I covered a BLM protest in downtown Los Angeles. Tensions were high. An American flag was burned. LAPD donned on riot gear and pushed angry protesters away from city hall.
But that paled in comparison to what I had witnessed on May 28. The radical elements within the city and beyond seemed to be converging on Lake Street and Minnehaha Avenue. Beyond a Minneapolis police convoy that quickly retreated just as quickly as they appeared, because of the mob attacking them, there was no authority to keep people safe. If you needed help, you were on your own.
It all culminated when the Third Precinct was attacked after the sun went down. Despite holding onto the building for days against the odds, officers were about to be overrun. Multiple times I heard rioters wanting to set the building on fire with the officers still inside. Mayor Jacob Frey ordered the officers to evacuate.
To highlight how much the rioters wanted to keep the officers trapped in the building’s perimeter, someone chained the back gate, forcing police to ram it to allow the evacuation to continue. After the officers were gone, the rioters’ dream became reality after the infamous fire was set. The crowd became ecstatic at the flames. They took selfies with the fire in the background. Fireworks were set off in the air.
While the riots had been going on in the Twin Cities for days, this was a turning point that sent a dangerous precedent: If BLM rioters were violent enough and had the numbers, they could get weak-kneed politicians to back down. It set a high bar for the rest of the rioters across the nation to reach, but Minneapolis showed them it was very possible to reach.
It was also a tactical error on the city’s part. Now that the rioters’ main target was gone, they did not go home. Instead, they spread out to create more victims in the name of social justice.
Thinking about that crazy night, I laughed how I naively believed that first wave of riots were going to be the only ones for that summer. By the end of that summer, I went from thinking, “Oh, this will end soon,” to “Will these ever stop?”
And they did (well, at least for a while), as the left finally gave up on their pipe dream fantasies of defunding the police, reducing the length of prison sentences and shrinking the size of jails:
Related: Four years ago, today:
ROBIN HANSON: Beware Moral Fashion. Like regular fashion, it’s easier to follow it, then when fashions change to laugh at the old ones and say “times were different.”
LIGHTNING DEAL: neabot Neakasa P1 Pro Pet Grooming Kit & Vacuum Suction 99% Pet Hair, Professional Clippers.#CommissionEarned
DON’T GET COCKY:
Poll by HarrisX/@Forbes conducted online in aftermath of Trump guilty verdicts says he leads Biden, 51%-49%https://t.co/7rtrmi9uUl
— W. Joseph Campbell (@wjosephcampbell) June 1, 2024
NOW OUT: Climate Cult: Exposing and Defeating Their War on Life, Liberty, and Property. #CommissionEarned
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Hollywood’s Shocking Response to Trump Verdict, Explained.
Well, non-response:
What changed?
Hollywood is scared silly, and rightly so. The industry is contracting. Jobs are increasingly scarce in the post-strike world. The desperation is so profound all we see are more sequels, prequels, re-imaginings and reboots.
Chris Hemsworth is headlining a “Transformers”/”G.I. Joe” crossover film, fusing two tired franchises. The flop sweat beads are in plain sight.
Streamers are bleeding red ink. Legitimate fears of how A.I. will impact the industry are widespread.
The summer box office is off to an ignominious start. And that’s after blockbuster after blockbuster went bust last year. The Biden economy is making all of the above worse. Much, much worse.
Suddenly, alienating your remaining customers with a virtue signal endorsement isn’t smart[.]
And some sectors of the industry have actually figured that out: The Untouchable: Broadcasters Association Strips Robert De Niro of Award After Unhinged Trump Rant.
ARNOLD KLING: Are Chatbots Dangerous for Teachers?
Personally, I think they can be a source of useful and amusing ideas, like this one from Google’s Gemini AI:
I mean, honestly, this is much better than the reality. Make it so!
GREAT MOMENTS IN PAGANISM: Man who transformed into a dog says he wants to become another animal. The man known only as Toco spent around $14,000 on his hyperrealistic dog costume, which was completed last spring.
A Japanese man who went viral for transforming into a dog says he now wants to become another animal.
Speaking to Japanese news outlet WanQol, Toco said it is a dream of his to transform into something else that works for his size, even if it’s another type of dog.
“I would like to become another animal as well,” he told WanQol, according to a Yahoo translation. “I might realistically be able to become another dog, a panda or a bear. A fox or a cat would also be nice, but they are too small for humans to try. I’d like to fulfill my dream of becoming another animal someday.”
Last yeat at Commentary, Liel Leibovitz wrote “The Return of Paganism:”
To the pagans, change is the only real constant. Just consider the heathens of old: Believing, as they did, in the radical duality of body and spirit, they enjoyed watching their gods breathe the latter into a wide array of incarnations. To please himself or trick his followers, a god could become a swan or a stone, manifest himself as a river or adopt whatever shape suited his schemes. Ovid, the greatest of Pagan poets, captured this logic perfectly when he began his Metamorphoses with a simple declaration of his intentions: In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas corpora, or, “I am about to speak of forms changing into new entities.” This was not understood as fickle behavior by the gods’ cheerful followers. To the contrary. With no dogma to uphold, the sole job of deities was simply to be themselves. And the more solipsistic a deity chose to be, the better. Nothing, after all, radiates inimitable individuality more than marching to the beat of your own drum and no other.
If that’s your understanding of the gods, or whatever you’d like to call the hidden forces that arrange the known universe, how should you behave? Again, lacking a prescribed credo passed down from generation to generation, pagans began answering this question by casting off the tyranny of fixity. The gods are precarious and ever-changing? Let us follow their example! We should sanctify each sharp transformation in our behaviors and beliefs not as collective madness but as a sign of the wisdom of growth.
Exit question: Why doesn’t Toco just transform himself into Jimmy Page, like normal Japanese men?
READER BOOK PLUG: Reader William Stroock has a story in Hooves, Tracks and Sabers!: Tales of Alternate History. His story is Standoff at San Miguel, “in which a troop of US Cavalry Scouts tracks down Pancho Villa.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Fat Sex Therapist’ compares fitness trainers to Nazis, children’s dieting to sexual assault.
LAWPROF STEVEN CALABRESI: President Donald Trump’s Manhattan Convictions are Unconstitutional.
SCHEDULED FOR 12:25 PM EDT: Boeing will launch its 1st Starliner astronaut mission today after delays. Here’s how to watch it live online.
JOHN HINDERAKER: Another Officer Down. “One post-Floyd recruit was Jamal Mitchell. Mitchell joined the MPD a year and a half ago. Just days into his tenure as a police officer, he made headlines by saving an elderly couple from a burning building. Last night, he was murdered.”
MARK JUDGE: Box office blues: Movies today are underwritten and have no emotional payoff.
Until recently, there was a level of literacy in comedies and action movies. Woody Allen’s films in the 1970s were funny, but also had long stretches of characters having philosophical conversations. Jaws, the 1970s smash that ushered in the blockbuster era, is based on a novel and has long, wonderful scenes that are nothing but dialogue. George Lucas famously mashed up literature, mythology, and psychology to create Star Wars. Whit Stillman’s great films from the 1990s, such as Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco, feature young people trying to navigate their social worlds. The characters have read books. They are verbal and able to explore their interior lives with compelling perspicacity.
I still remember the comment my brother, an award-winning actor, made after seeing 1982’s action masterpiece Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior: “That was Homeric.” Yes, The Road Warrior is about postapocalyptic car chases in the Australian desert. Yet there is a poetic voice-over throughout the entire film that holds it together and gives it depth. The film is well-written.
And more than 40 years later, Furiosa, a sequel to The Road Warrior, has been released. Like most movies these days, it is underwritten. Unsurprisingly, it has flamed out at the box office.
These days a film as literate and verbally rich as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is unthinkable. Yet I think audiences crave it. We want some intelligent payoff for our money.
As early as 1998, the late Todd Gitlin was telling the Washington Post:
“Insofar as American-based studios are making stuff for the global market, the stuff is dumbed down,” said Todd Gitlin, sociology professor at New York University and a cultural critic. “It’s not conscious, it’s just that the James Camerons [“Titanic’s” writer-director] who write the garbage dialogue are the successes. The relative crudity of the language is far from an impediment to exports. It’s a benefit.”
Said [then-Disney chairman Joe] Roth: “There’s no reason to think that the economics of movie business won’t turn out to be the same as Coca-Cola. It’s a product that’s uniformly imported. People will go see the ninth version of ‘The Bad News Bears.’ And I make them because people are going to see them.”
Until they don’t: Nelson Peltz Throws in the Towel On Basket-Case Groomer Corporation Disney, Sells Trian’s $Billion+ Stake In Disney.
Peltz’s proxy fight/hostile takeover bid had the perverse result of boosting Disney’s stock price even as Peltz was arguing the company should go back to producing family-friendly, uncontroversial, nonsexual material for children, instead of being a full-services groomer corporation. Because there was a fight for control of Disney, the stock was trading at an artificially high price — the stock had a control-of-the-company premium baked into the price.
Well, Peltz has now taken his own support away. He sold all of his (and his investment group Trian’s) stock for $120 per share, well above Disney’s current $100 per share value.
Like I said, there’s a control premium in the price of a big chunk of stock.
The rest of Disney shareholders won’t be enjoying that premium. They’ll see the stock lose value as Disney’s losing streak continues and no more White Knights will try to save it.
I hope all that Weimar-esque political activism was worth it for them.
Related: Fear not! A more intellectually rigorous script will finally soon be on its way: Chris Hemsworth in Talks to Star in ‘Transformers’ and ‘G.I. Joe’ Crossover Movie.
