Good News, Bad News and Seriously?

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

The good news is that this isn’t apparently an auto-immune attack but stomach flu of some kind.

The bad news is that spending the night in the bathroom is not conducive to getting up early and ready to work.  I’m more or less okay now, but haven’t yet showered, and am only demi-caffeinated.

The good news is that the idiots are self idenfying.  From the NFL taking a knee in response to…. G-d knows what.  Apparently “I’m black, and even though I’m a millionaire, you’re mean to me.” or perhaps “I liked how much attention the idiot who took a knee got and I want that attention.”  to Star Trek STD cast members taking a knee in solidarity with the NFL because “well, we have no clue why, but it has something to do with being anti-Trump and stuff. Besides, a lot of players are black, so they’re obviously right, and we denounce ourselves.” “Besides our show sucks, and if we’re uber left we can convince the rest of Hollywood it was great but no one watched it because we spoke truth to power.”  (Aka Rolling left and dying.)

And then there’s this.  No seriously, a guy with a high school education, probably with “athlete’s breaks” is calling half the nation uneducated.  This is the old, old bullshit of “if only you were educated, you’d be progressive” leading to all the idiot-flakes saying “educate yourself” when you disagree with them.

Some gems from that one:
“At the end of the day, I don’t think a lot of people was educated,” he said.
“I’ve done things for my daughter and realized I shouldn’t have gave my daughter that many damn Skittles.”

“And am I saying that the people of Ohio wasn’t educated?”

“”Am I saying that some of the other states that voted for him was uneducated?”

Actually what LeBron James is proving is that you can get a High School diploma in America while being a complete moron.

So, the good news is that they hear their own echo chamber ad nauseum, they’ve lost track of any opposing opinion, the media has lost all integrity and the left thinks they’re winning without realizing they’re just disgusting the normal people out there.

As Ace of Spades put it, they used to try to appear “just like you” and that led us to think they couldn’t be bad people even though they advocated appalling things.  Now they’ve lost track of what “normal” is.

I can’t find the link, but I’m sure one of you will.  (I linked it at instapundit, I think.)  The thing is they’ve lost track of what the average person thinks, and so they think pushing brightly hair colored gender-indeterminate super heroes (for instance) will cause us to accept weird-hair-gender-indeterminate-feminists, instead of turning away from comics.  Or they think that having barely literate sport stars and unhinged singers/actors lecture us on how bad Trump is will make us side with them instead of going “Oh, good Lord, I don’t like him that much, but if you hate him…”

The bad news?  The bad news is how far the long march through the institutions has got before they thought they were safe to come out of the commie-closet.

I don’t know how one deals with a communist like Rapone.  I’ve been told being a communist is not an objection to being an officer in the United States Army.  Well, if it’s not, it ought to be.  Anyone who believes in the communist manifesto and also that communism will win (briefly, before everyone dies screaming?) cannot in good faith take the oath of allegiance to protect and defend the Constitution.  This is the same reason convinced communists shouldn’t be able to become US citizens.

The good news?  The good news is that the more they think they already won, the more they crawl out of the closet, the easier it is to isolate them and counter their years and years of undercover work to undermine the republic.

They are only effective while they’re buried and hidden.

Seriously, they’re doing our work for us.

Be not afraid.

349 thoughts on “Good News, Bad News and Seriously?”

  2. Good Heavens. I know I’m a slow (and not always exactly sober, but that was some good whiskey..) but how does one do so well for oneself and be THAT slow and he is allegedly sober? Marxism/Defeatism/etc. must be one HELL of a drug.

    Perhaps the Magratheans had the right idea.

    2. Like most marxists, he’s a high-functioning sociopath. That means he has the ability to suck up exceptionally well, to the point that the suckee doesn’t even realize his ass is being kissed. Unfortunately for him (but fortunately for the Republic) it means that he won’t be able to resist abusing the power he has over his subordinates. Subordinates who are past masters at making incompetent officers look terrible to the chain of command. The military maintains numerous mushroom farms precisely for people like this. Quiet places where the incompetent can be themselves without having to worry about breaking anything important.

  3. A communist could, I suppose support and defend the US Constitution and the other things within the oath [thinking of Catholics in particular who served then later joined monastic orders, men and women]. However, flashing the Che shirt and insulting the SecDef in public are probably considered mighty close to politicking while in uniform, respect for the institution vs. for the person, or something similar. IANAJAGL.*

    *I am not a Judge Advocate General’s lawyer.

        1. Well, I meant the possible charges. They will include politicking in uniform, discredit upon the service, insulting civilian superiors, etc.
          They won’t include membership in an organization advocating overthrow of the US, etc. Because those are a LOT harder to prove, and the SCOTUS has (iirc) already dealt with “member of communist party” as not a deal-breaker.

          Maybe not so much naïve as realistic in what they can uphold before the court of appeals.

          1. court of appeals? If he’s been commissioned, isn’t it UCMJ not civilian court?

            In which case, you start with conduct unbecoming, and go from there… not to mention uniform violations…

        2. They’re gonna let the troops take care of the issue. Officers that stupid don’t often get out of larval stage. He is likely to get an “unintentional” mineral supplement

          1. I’m sure if sent to a combat zone he’d be treated with all the respect due an officer.

            *salutes*

            Sniper Check!

          2. Which will only demonstrate their moral cowardice, similar to what we’ve seen in Berkeley and Charlottesville. They will look the other way from anarchy rather than apply the law to everyone.

        3. No, just our civilian leaders in charge of it are. And the political officers they’ve hand picked to replace the real warriors.

          1. Even Stalin realized political officers above a certain percentage are a liability and limited those he kept to shooting deserters.

            1. And some of the evidence that I’ve seen suggests that there wasn’t even as much shooting by political officers as is often believed. Much better to put you in a penal unit instead where you can help scout the enemy lines.

              Plus, even the Soviets were starting to hurt for manpower by the end of the war. They lost a *lot* of people.

              1. David Weber made the same comment about State Security in his Honorverse. Dead folks aren’t much good for anything anymore. Disappeared and locked away, you can haul them back out if you find you have a need for them later.

                1. As a rule of thumb, killing people who don’t follow orders is not really practical. Having people think you are willing to kill those who don’t squat when the commander says “Crap!” is a whole different thing.

        4. The army? Why, I know of a former US Marine who not only was a commie, he held a security clearance, and was honorably discharged.

          You might know of him. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald.

      1. “A lie in the service of communism is no vice, the truth in opposition to it is no virtue.” ~ Lenin

        Remind you of anyone else?

        Nope. These guys? They have to go back.

        1. Lenin was a monster.

          On the other hand, I think Barry Goldwater was right.

          “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

          Makes you wonder where America would be now if he had been elected. Possibly a radioactive wasteland. I’m still not sure how we dodged nuclear Armageddon; other than we were very, VERY, lucky. – so far.

    3. I agree with Mrs Hoyt, I know communists as well and they are most certainly not to be trusted to do anything other than clean toilets on a base in Wyoming.

      Americans, and its allies, are constantly fighting communist, or communist like, countries and a lot of soldiers in his platoon are not going to trust him.

      1. I’m curious to hear from his squadmates when he was enlisted. I’ve seen info he was a Ranger prior to his time at Hudson High errr, West Point.

        (That’s not disparagement of USMA, it’s inter-Academy rivalry at work.)

      2. What did Wyoming ever do to you…toilets on a base in New Jersey, Massachusetts, or the PRC (not that one, but the one on our left coast).

        1. The plus side of those communities is they would render him right of center for those localities.

          Alternatively, he could be assigned as embassy guard in Chavezuela. Whether or not we still have an embassy there is not relevant.

      3. The only base I know of in Wyoming is Warren AFB, which controls 150 Minuteman missiles, and ought not hire any Communist Party members or sympathizers.

        1. Not to mention that everything I”ve ever heard about Wyoming-folk indicated they don’t deserve to have commies dumped on them. Why would you inflict pinkos on Flicka? :-p

    4. There’s always Article 133, “conduct unbecoming an officer”, which used to be pretty much “it would be best if you found another career, because this one just plateau’d.”

      The problem I have is, this sort of thing rarely appears suddenly. He’s probably worked up to this in stages, which means his fellow officers have let things slide.

      Well, at least it didn’t wind up as “workplace violence” like the Army major who decided to go al-jihadi back in ’09.

      2. This.
        There’s no way that his classmates and immediate superiors were unaware.
        Which implies that making a stink about it would have been detrimental to their careers.

        1. I haven’t seen any claim that Snowflake was being fast-tracked, but if so, his performance reports would have been carefully crafted and audited works of fiction.

          This is also the turning point for the Army – if he keeps his commission, we’ll know the Army has been fully converged by the SJWs. And that could become very ugly…

          1. Officers like him in charge. Rescind Posse Comitatus. And you’ll know the next American Revolution just started. Remember the Boy Scout Motto: Be Prepared.

            1. Did Eisenhower rescind Posse Comitatus before he sent the 101st to Little Rock? Answer: NO.

              Precedent established, and for the same reason they’ll claim.

              Rule of Law started eroding earlier than most people will admit.

              1. Didn’t need to .

                “The Enforcement Acts were three bills passed by the United States Congress between 1870 and 1871. They were criminal codes which protected African-Americans’ right to vote, to hold office, to serve on juries, and receive equal protection of laws. Passed under the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, the laws also allowed the federal government to intervene when states did not act to protect these rights.”

                Arkansas had demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to enforce the equal protection of laws regarding desegregated education of blacks as ruled by the Supreme Court. Which was how Eisenhower was able to legally send the military in.

                Just means you need to be aware of what’s going on nationally. If the legal justification comes before the troop, then you’ll know. If the troops come before the legal justification, well, I hope you’re well armed. 😉

              2. Rule of law (as in, rule of the Constitution) started eroding around the time the ink on that document dried. For evidence, read St. George Tucker’s book about the Constitution, published in 1803, and the horror stories about infringement on same that are in it. The “Alien and Sedition” acts are a well known early example of what I’m talking about, but Tucker points out a rogue’s gallery of other examples I was not aware of.
                Wholesale destruction of the Constitution started around 1860, and was pretty well completed in the early 1900s.

    5. Wearing the Che shirt under the uniform is probably also a violation of regulations (I’m not up on AR 670-1). It’s not much, but start with an Article 15, 2 weeks restriction and 2 weeks pay.

    6. It goes well beyond the Che shirt and the antifa flag. Daily Caller is reporting that he posted openly on Reddit.
      http://dailycaller.com/2017/09/27/chelsea-manning-inspired-communist-west-point-graduate-to-infiltrate-the-military/
      His inspiration? That confused traitor, Bradley Manning!

      And yes, he’s a truly committed useless idiot – he uses the “long march” language in a post. He also advocates creating a new guerilla warfare manual (because Che’s and Mao’s are out of date for here and now).

  4. Actually what LeBron James is proving is that you can get a High School diploma very rich in America while being a complete moron and proving it every damn day by opening your mouth in public.
    Minor fix.

    1. True. It has been a known fact for a long time that it is possible to get a high school diploma and even an undergraduate degree while being a complete moron.

      For the higher degrees, it depends on your definition of “moron.”

      2. Another Orville-ism for you.
        He’s the hottest pilot in the Union. he’s also a complete idiot.
        That about sums up LeBron. Except he’s not the hottest player out there either.

        1. Yeah, LJames sure isn’t a Dr. J or Shaquille O’neal, who finished college while playing pro.
          iirc, Shaq has degrees in business, and even when acting like a dumb jock, comes across as someone ACTING like a dumb jock.
          and he ain’t a great actor

          1. Your comment caused me to remember David Robinson — or rather, the NBA star who attended Annapolis. I had to [search-engine] him and what I found is interesting …

            Per Wiki:
            Robinson married Valerie Hoggatt in 1991. They have three sons, David Jr., Corey, and Justin. He identifies his religious affiliation as Christian.
            [SNIP]
            In 2001, Robinson founded and funded the $9 million Carver Academy in San Antonio, a non-profit private school named for George Washington Carver to provide more opportunities for inner-city children. In 2012, the school became a public charter school and its name changed to IDEA Carver. Robinson continues to be a very active participant in the school’s day-to-day activities.

            In 2011, Robinson earned a Master of Arts in Administration (with concentration in organizational development) from the University of the Incarnate Word to better “understand how businesses work and how to build them.”.

            Beyond his founding of Carver Academy, Robinson is well known as a philanthropist. Robinson and business partner Daniel Bassichis donate 10 percent of their profits to charitable causes. The winner of the NBA Community Assist Award is presented with the David Robinson Plaque.

            Other ventures
            In 2008 Robinson partnered with Daniel Bassichis, formerly of Goldman Sachs and a board member of The Carver Academy, to form Admiral Capital Group.[29] Admiral Capital Group is a private equity firm whose mission is to invest in opportunities that can provide both financial and social returns. Robinson’s primary motivation in starting Admiral Capital was to create a source of additional financial support for The Carver Academy. Its portfolio is worth more than $100 million and includes nine upscale hotels and office buildings across the U.S. as well as Centerplate, one of the largest hospitality companies in the world, and Academy Sports + Outdoors, a sports, outdoors and lifestyle retailer with over 160 stores. Admiral Capital Group also partnered with Living Cities to form the Admiral Center, a non-profit created to support other athletes and entertainers with their philanthropic initiatives. Robinson is also co-owner of a Jaguar Land Rover Dealership in San Juan, Texas.

            N.B. – notice that is George Washington Carver, not W.E.B. DuBois, so he is probably an Uncle Tom.

              1. Being labeled an Uncle Tom is the negro version of being called deplorable. They only go there because they’ve lost all other arguments.

                I agree about Carver, although I might list him in a top ten rather than top three — there have been some pretty great Americans. I read his autobiography in grade school (thank-you, Scholastic Book Club! Thank-you parental book indulgence!) and consider it a great indictment of American popular culture that it has been so largely ignored. Although would love to see it adapted for the screen, I shudder to think of the depredations Hollywood would inflict on it in the name of making it more acceptable to the modern audience.

                1. I will freely admit my criteria for top 3 might be a bit Odd…it even includes a *shudder* academic who taught everything but math and a nudist 🙂

                  1. I am simply disinclined to “rank” such unique individuals, especially as “Greatness” is a nebulously defined term.

                  2. Nothing wrong with being a nudist; beyond horrible sunburn, and eaten alive by mosquitoes, deer flies, horse flies, midges, no-see-ums, and bot flies.

                    1. Especially being a nudist i the 18th century.

                      No, it wasn’t our recently departed Playboy 0. While an interesting and influential character I doubt he will be long remembered now that he is gone.

                2. Company plug:
                  Scholastic Book Club/publishing bends over backwards to work with homeschoolers– they act like we are identical to a normal small school, for prices and ordering.

                  They’re partly to blame for my kids’ main disobedience being reading when they’re supposed to be doing something else. (Yay, homeschool problems!)

            2. Not being a big b-ball type fan, I forgot about the “Admiral”. Brings to mind Karl Malone as well, Remember seeing 18 wheelers from Malone Trucking in my travels. Also the fellow who comments on NASCAR who owned a race team for a while (and might still)
              I know the leftoids get mad at Jordan for not going full sjw turnip. “Conservative people buy shoes”

    2. Oh, hell, THAT was proved a long time ago. The celebrity ‘hippies’ of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s demonstrated it beyond doubt. The nasty Stalinist assholes on the Hollywood blacklist made careers out of proving it. If you think about it the political careers of William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and John McCain are proof. OR, for that matter, the life and utterances of the likes of George IV.

      It’s all part of the human condition, and why I believe that God will allow us to continue to live because we amuse Him.

      Nast sense of humor, that.

  5. I give only entertainment dollars to those that haven’t insulted me. Thank god for indy press and Amazon. Cut the cable decades ago, and stopped watching sports even longer ago. I see some of these idiots get out there and open their mouths to show once again why I don’t support them or watch them. Lot more people are going the same way it seems.

    1. James is at least one standard deviation below “idiot” on the bell curve.
      (Though, the news lately certainly makes it seem like somewhat other than a bell curve…….)

      2. Embrace the healing power of circularity, and every measuring instrument will produce a bell curve after the raw data has been aDjUsTeD.

        N.N. Taleb did very well out of noticing this tiny fact, and I’m indebted to him for spilling the beans.

    2. If Mr. James wants to tell us about those who are uneducated, his very manner of speech informs us that he is certainly qualified to speak for and of himself.

  7. And apparently, for STD they threw out everything about the Klingons except the language. Stuff that was made a story point of decades ago, was ditched. The new makeup doesn’t looks similar to either the TOS TNG or Enterprise stuff. It was quite obvious that the actors playing the fish-people-being-called-Klingons were having huge amounts of trouble talking through the dental work and the appliances that came right up to the edge of their lips. Their armor looks completely different and not at all like any of the previous series. The ship interiors look like some kind of weird open aquatic cathedral thing,,, not consistent at all with that we’ve been shown before. Its like… someone at CBS decided they didn’t need any of the fans in the IKF to watch the series.

      1. I hadn’t read this before now, but it would appear they don’t want you — or anybody else — to watch:

        Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt
        September 26, 2017
        [SNIP]
        CBS is attempting to launch a new streaming service with the show Star Trek: Discovery. The pilot aired Sunday, the first time a Star Trek program appeared on a major television network since 1969. (Sorry, Voyager, I said a major television network and the short-lived UPN doesn’t count.) The rest of the episodes only available with a subscription to the new streaming service. Creating a good television series pilot is hard enough; this one faced a supreme degree of difficulty: offer a first hour so thrilling and intriguing that people would pay extra to see the second hour that resolves the cliffhanger.

        I didn’t subscribe; that first hour was awful.

        The protagonist felt like a grab-bag of tropes and clichés: traumatic memories of murdered parents, raised by Vulcans, trying to live up to the high expectations of a stern mentor/father figure, impulsive, but fighting the impulse for revenge against the Klingons. The Science Officer might as well have been named “Kvetching Worrywart” and was insufferable. The captain and first officer kept stepping off the bridge to have confrontations or heart-to-hearts. (This could have been played for laughs if the rest of the crew heard them yelling through the wall. Fox’s Star Trek parody show, The Orville, would have done something like that.) One of the revelations of the first hour is that the Vulcans figured out how to reach peace with the Klingons by relentlessly preemptively attacking them until the Klingons were willing to negotiate, which is . . . either really bold storytelling, or just ignoring everything else Star Trek has shown about Vulcans since the beginning.

        Emphasis added. Good Grief!

    2. Is it the standard to drop the ‘:’ after “ST” in Star Trek abbreviations now? Because “STD” used to mean something very different from “Star Trek: Discovery”.

      5. Yes, it’s the TLA for Sacrae Theologiae Doctor, “the final theological degree in the pontifical university system of the Catholic Church.”

        If one spends many years learning Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, studying canon law, reading and commenting on Aquinas and Origen and the other Fathers of the Church, and composing a thesis, one gets to add the letters STD after one’s name: Reverend Father Francis X. Murphy, STD.

        1. Better than Star Trek Disco!
          Can you Imagine flying around in a glittery mirror ball for a space ship?

          2. It would likely be an effective defense against directed energy weapons, such as lasers and phasers.

            Besides, think of the theme song:

            Disco, Disco Trek,
            Ah wanna see the Disco Trek …

            1. “What the HELL just happened? We nearly overloaded our own shields!”
              “Their hull… is covered in wide-spectrum corner reflectors.”
              “Damn, why didn’t we think of that?”
              “We did. Budget constraints. And… ”
              “And WHAT?!”
              “… Disco.”

              1. Rick “Disco Duck” Dees, actually. I never liked Disco* and tended to change the dial hastily if it turned up on my radio or telly, but some things are just so ubiquitous …

                *IIRC, during that era I was listening to Celtic folk and such Ska bands as The English Beat and Madness (ere they became popular) and Classical music. And, I confess, Cheap Trick and 10CC.

            1. Well, considering Warf thought prune juice was the acme of Earth drinks, I wouldn’t be surprised that Klingons would like disco. On the other hand, Klingons would give an entirely new meaning to break dancing; not to mention they’d probably love it.

                1. ….and now I have an image of Garak taking Putin’s place in Russia. Improvement or nightmare?

    3. Well, I gave up when they pointed out the Federation/Klingon struggle would be a metaphor for “Good guys vs. Trump supporters” with Klingons being the Trump side.

      Told me all I needed to know before they even took a knee.

      1. Even though Rodenberry had a very utopian vision, they at least had some decent writers back in the days of the original series.

      2. well, if it was done using established Klingons instead of this new race being called Klingons, I wouldn’t mind.

      3. On the plus side, I won family dinner last night (we’re an absurdly competitive household) with “D’you know what the Klingon word for “deplorable” is? ‘KLINGON!'”

    4. I decided not to watch when I read the show would be an allegory for 2016 with the Klingons as Trump supporters against the righteous Federation of Hillary fans.

      1. Wait, WordPress ate that comment and now it is here after I post a variant…and it still doesn’t recognize me as logged in…Wordpress delendia est.

      3. Hmm… Klingon is the new Strawman…

        I’m not sure how well that would pan out though. If the Klingons are Trumpian-analogs, and the Federation are the Hillary-analogs. Doesn’t that automatically mean that the Klingons will win?

        Never mind that you’ll never convince me that Hillary is anything more (or less) than a Ferengi.

        1. Hilary is too stupid to be a Ferengi! Somebody has to keep the economy going so that there’s a lot of tax money to support the Federation.They deep sixed Prelude to Axanar for this dreck? I wish Axanar was available instead of STD.

          2. For Axanar I’d go see it in the movie theatre at full price. It looks like it would be one hell of a movie.

          1. Ferengi are only idealistic about buying and selling when the value is headed their way– if the goods are there, and not sufficiently guarded to keep them from being taken, they’re obviously up for the taking.

      4. And unintended hilarity ensues because Klingons “Today is a good day to DIE!” are hella kewl.

        Sooooooo.. Soc-jus TV decides to wrap the alt-Right in the mantle of… the Klingons.

        Snicker.

    5. Among the various comments that I’ve heard about Discovery, the only thing that people seemed to like was the Captain.

      Also based on what I’ve heard, this becomes a problem by the end of the second episode.

      1. My mom, who gets all her news from WSJ on dead tree and the occasional Fox & local TV news shows, is watching STD. She has NO idea what the SJW staff has planned for it.

        And she’s griping about the characters not being very interesting, the stupid mistakes in ST tech canon, and “the got the Klingons wrong.”

        Bigotry makes you stupid.

  8. The intellectual contortions of the MSM bien pensant would be hilarious if they didn’t inspire subtly moving between the and the knife drawer. Their attacks on Trump’s “divisiveness” call to mind the favorite accusation of domestic abusers worldwide, “See what you made me do.”

      1. There was this story about a brain eating message from old Assyria. I somehow can’t remember it. It contained the fragment “shug” and that’s about all I’ve got. Ftagn and have a nice day.

    2. The mainstream media hasn’t made a lick of sense sine Reagan’s election. Not one jot. The difference is that they used to be ubiquitous, and that made them intellectually lazier (hardly seems possible) so that by the time they were encountering widespread counter-argument they had lost any obituary to really WRITE that they ever had.

      1. This sort of showed when they added a token conservative character to Murphy Brown and kinda floundered, wondering what to do. Seems the character’s arguments didn’t have any counters… just then.

  9. Stomach flu is transitory, provided you follow reasonable care procedures. As for the lack of shower, fortunately, on the internet nobody can smell you stink.

    Get well soon.

  10. Pro tip: when you’re a famous athlete calling out other people for being uneducated, for goodness sake, get your team’s press secretary to proofread your Tweets.

    1. Noticed that too? Silly question to ask in a group who make their living off their use of the English language. James just screams, “Failure of American Education System” every time he opens his mouth.

      1. Except James is not a product of the American Education System — he is a product of the American Athletic Development System, a wholly owned subsidiary of the AES (or is that the other way ’round?) Heck, he didn’t even attend college (although, by most evidence that would render him better educated than those who did.)

  11. Good news: in the same email check that told me about this post B&N told me how they are celebrating misandry, I mean “girl power” (I know it shouldn’t mean the same as misandry but anymore I assume it is until proven otherwise) so I know I won’t have to shed a single tear when roll left and die wipes them out sometime next Spring (I would point out Toys’r’Us, which doesn’t insult its customers, is going bankrupt right on the lead to their busiest season…B&N might not make Christmas).

    Bad news: Some magazines will be harder to get and my easiest alternative is Google Newsstand as I am trying to de-Google my world.

    Good news: Retinologist says my right eye has improved and left has no change.

    Bad news: Dilation makes the day star even brighter.

    Good news: Seems like our hostess and most of the Huns and Hoydens are happy and whole.

    Bad news: Nothing about that can be bad news 🙂

    1. IN RE Google Newstand: In my quest to de-Google, one piece at a time, I discovered Feedly. Maybe worth a look?
      Related: Has anyone found a Gmail alternative that doesn’t make itself look crazy? So far all I’ve found is Disroot, and their branding makes them look like Antifa poster children.

                1. When I lived alone, it’d take weeks to get through a bottle of wine. So I got boxed wine for the fridge, because it doesn’t oxidize and therefore stay fresh much longer. Still meant I was using most of it for cooking, but worked well.

                  Now If I know I need wine for a recipe, I just have friends over for dinner. We’ll drink over half the bottle, and the rest goes in the fridge until I make the recipe that needs it.

      2. Re: Google Newstand: The specific magazines in question are either Google Newstand (on Android) or the iOS equivalent (I have no Apple devices) or paper subscription. I used to have that but they are UK mags and even that was ~$130 (individual newsstand is $15) so I’d gone to by the issue guy. Google is $36/year for a subscription but I don’t trust Google.

        Email: I have my own domain so I just use my own email. My hosting provides atmail web client but I’m slowly building the Perl/Tk email system of doom.

        1. LOL yeah, that’s fair. I’m cheap, so atm my only subscriptions are a couple of writing magazines – and I’m not entirely sure how valuable one of those is. “WordPress delenda est” is bad enough on the site – not sure I’d trust them with my email. I am intrigued by your PERL email of doom, however. 😄

          1. It is somewhat specialized, ie I can’t find something that does what I want which is: take multiple addresses, filter for spam, transmit to central address, sort into folders there, and be smart about the “from” header on replies back out.

        2. More and more public libraries have smart phone app enabled news readers with subscriptions to major WORLD magazine’s and newspapers (library-speak = journals)

          Your local librarian can help you set it up (call in and ask) and since your tax $ are paying for it anyway….

      3. I have e-mail through my domain so not sure? But a google groups alternative is groups.io. (Not sure if you’re looking for an alternative to groups but eh…)

        1. Last I check you could register one through a microsoft service. And not an Outlook thing either.

    3. MomRed had to have retinal surgery last year. The down side was cataracts. The good side was post-cataracts she can see much, much better. The down side is… she can see dirt, dust, pet-hair, the jacket that has not yet been returned to the closet, tracked-in mud and leaves, the stack of magazines that I am going to get rid of really I am… much better.

      Glad things are on the up-side for you. 🙂

    4. I’m always surprised at how blue things are with dilated eyes. I keep a set of Old Man sunglasses in each vehicle, now. Hey, I’m 65.

      Retina surgery happens in a week–right now, it’s less “terrified” than “slightly nervous”. Not too many retina specialists in our area, so I have to drive over the Cascades to get the procedure in the People’s Republic of Ashland.

      No worries about cataracts as a side effect; already have the Tee-shirts. I asked the doctor to remove the membrane behind the lens; it’s a bit cloudy.

      If they have to do the gas-bubble thing to hold the retina in place, the drive home will be slow. Looks like I should stop every 1000′ (in elevation) to decompress. 5/8s of the 4000′ elevation gain happens in 10 miles, so the climb could be fun.

    5. Yeah, for the last year or so I have been slowly building a “next retailer to go belly-up” stash in anticipation of going-out-of-business sales. I cleaned up when the local Kmart died, was in a snit for a week when the local Penney’s didn’t, and am circling Barnes&Noble in a manner not entirely unlike a well-read vulture.

      1. The problem is B&N is going out of business because they have very little readers want very unlike Borders. Back when Borders died I asked, “Why couldn’t it be B&N?” as Borders was my first choice then B&N then Amazon back then.

        Was a time a trip to B&N was going to cost at least $50 and that was only if I skipped CDs. Now it rarely breaks $25.

        1. I agree, but I will happily buy half-price tchotchkes and stash them for gift-giving emergencies, since people are unaccountably resistant to fruitcake. (There is a company near us that makes divine fruitcakes, and I have made a convert or two with them, but I’d rather save ’em to eat myself.)

            1. That does look tasty, and I approve of *anything* topped with pecans. I get mine from Southern Supreme (heavy on nuts, butter and honey, lightish on fruit) and I MEAN to give them as gifts but somehow it doesn’t happen often.

                1. Take your pecans. Toss them in egg white, then in a mixture of brown & White sugar, salt and a teeny amount of Spice House Aleppo or chipotle pepper. Bake at 225 degrees for several hours turning ever 30 min or so until crunchy.

                  That’s how to do pecans

          2. After having tried it once, I make my own fruitcake (not very often, but once in a while – I think i need to make some soon), because it is so good, and costs less per pound.

        2. B&N has con many colleges and universities into manage their campus stores, they may using that money to stay afloat.

          1. A) B&N split the college book store division into its own company with its own stock.

            B) The college bookstores aren’t doing any better than the regular retail side with shrinking sales year on year. I’ve been seeing stories about them not stocking more than a handful of copies of books the Professors put in orders for so that 2 weeks into the semester most of the students don’t have a copy and the prof suggests ordering online (aka Amazon) so they can do their homework. Also “Another situation students find themselves in is pre-ordering textbooks from the bookstore, receiving a confirmation email, but then receiving another email stating that they do not have the book anymore.”

  12. “This is the old, old bullshit of ‘if only you were educated, you’d be progressive’‘

    That statement is valid, for certain values of “educated” — generally those synonymous with “indoctrinated.” No doubt when they take power we here will find ourselves in the re-edumacation camps.

    2. Not worried about re-education camps. I shoot too well. Edged weapons are my friend. Blunt weapons I’m pretty good with too. And being a martial artist, I can do a heck of a lot of damage with nothing but what God gave me on my birth day.

  13. What was really surprising was Seth McFarland’s, The Orville, 2nd episode, as actually better than the premiere episode (both parts) of Star Trek: Discovery. Campy, yes. Raising the question of gender reassignment. But it didn’t get preachy, and left the audience to figure out of it was right or wrong. And that kids no matter what need to have loving parents (even if they haven’t a clue about how to raise them.)

    1. Second episode? That was the zoo episode (and Bortas hatches an egg) — I think you mean the third episode, which I haven’t watched (DVR not lie NFL; NFL take up too much time and nobody tell DVR record later … only recorded the first ten minutes of The Orville that night and its only just reached On Demand.)

      Household hasn’t decided on The Orville yet. Don’t find it more than mildly amusing and the jokery cuts time required for proper dramatic build, but there are hints writers will find footing and show become something to look forward to.

      1. But the jokery is where the subtle stuff happens. In the pilot, the jokery took direct aim at some common complaints about Star Trek: A) our intrepid navigator is accosted by Ms First Officer on his way to the restroom and B) someone pulls something out of a pocket.

        1. The subtle jokery is fine, good even, but the explicit jokes don’t really work for me. Then again, I’ve never been much for Seth MacFarlane’s humor. Frankly, The Orville lands squarely in the uncanny valley for me. But there are signs that it’s working its way to higher ground.

      2. 3rd? Could have sworn I clicked on the one that said episode 2.

        Yes, Seth McFarland does have an appallingly high ratio of very lame jokes in his productions. I attribute that to his deliberately trying to include some form of humor that would appeal to at least someone in the entire audience, rather than solely targeting just the majority. Which means many of us are going to be subjected to painfully bad humor that we don’t even get, that others will be rolling on the floor laughing their butts off over.

    2. I have mostly skipped “The Orville” because I have reached saturation in the “let’s make a piss-take on everything”. It isn’t that Star Trek is sacred or something (the second or third best Trek movie imnsho is “Galaxy Quest”) or that I don’t think funny sci-fi should be done (I liked “Quark” ffs) but can’t we just play something straight and mildly heroic.

      It seems everything has to be either anti-hero driven or a send up. I don’t mind dark or even ambiguous (we just started “Mr. Robot” this week and are working through “Person of Interest”) but there is a reason that NCIS, which starts something around season 17 tonight, has been the most popular drama in the US for years.

      A basic show about decent people trying to do something good as well as they can is rare the examples pop to the top. It doesn’t even have to be beyond average in quality.

      1. The “Fargo” tv series has a good bit of “decent people trying to do something good”. Year two being a particularly good example.

      2. A basic show about decent people trying to do something good as well as they can is rare the examples pop to the top. It doesn’t even have to be beyond average in quality.

        Honestly, that’s how The Orville reads to me. MacFarlane’s character so far is a fundamentally decent guy and good officer whose career hit the skids when his marriage fell apart. The closest thing to an anti-hero (so far) is the helmsman with a juvenile sense of humor. It’s like Star Trek if Roddenberry had been more interested in developing characters rather than archetypes.

        1. Interesting…my read from the previews is it was closer to Galaxy Quest in universe than a different twist on the basic Star Trek formula. In my defense with MacFarlane that is a fair expectation.

          Maybe I’ll give it a gander for a few episodes.

  14. It is the rise of left wing social scientists, they are creating an administrative state with themselves in charge. My experience with left wing ideologues is that they are angry and neurotic, they are people who should not be in charge of anything larger than lemonade stand.

    I went to Canadian university twenty five years ago now but even than I noticed that social science disciplines were infested with ignorant left wing profs and students.

    When I first started uni, my plan was to major in history and minor in sociology until I was removed from two different sociology courses for arguing with angry left wing profs in front of whole class. Reading PJ O’Rourke Parliament of Whores at same time as I was kicked out of two classes for arguing with my pillock lecturers, this is when I became an ardent whig or libertarian.

    Social sciences are ideological and they just keep replicating in government like tribbles because they believe in scientific socialism and no one significant in politics is opposing them.

    1. Me too, in the 1970’s. Even then it was getting noticeable, especially in the Social Sciences. Orthodoxies were being established, and those who challenged them were told not to, in no uncertain terms.

      I took my 3 year BA and became a house painter. I got the best of the deal, in my estimation. Learned a hell of a lot more as a painter than I did in Anthropology, that’s for sure.

      All that shite has solidified into the concrete of Socialist rhetoric that we see played out in universities now. Looooong time coming.

      1. The wonderful thing about the Social Sciences is that they rarely risk having to collide with Reality. Nobody can ever prove your equations unbalanced.

      2. Learned a hell of a lot more as a painter than I did in Anthropology, that’s for sure.

        You probably earned more as a painter than in any job where an Anthropology degree would be relevant. 😛

    2. The thing to remember in dealing with social scientists is that ‘social’, when placed before a noun, becomes a modifier word meaning ‘not’. See also: social utopia, social security, and social justice.

    3. “I noticed that social science disciplines were infested with ignorant left wing profs and students.”

      I first read that as “ignorant left wing goofs and students”

      Kinda liked it like that.

      The Professoriat has long been a haven for the ideologically addled. Not now, in this country; going back to the medieval Universities. They insulate people from the need to actually make some sort of sense. OTOH they also insulate people in ways that make serious scholarship possible. It’s just something we will have to learn to live with.

      Sociology may blow up entirely, or it may be swept clean by somebody who has an idea so revolutionary and dynamic that the stale old arguments of socialism can’t compete. That, weirdly enough, is how academic works.

  15. If you vaporize the coffee and pass it through a distillation column, that should do a better job of fractionation. “Demi”. Hmph. Technical assistance can be found ‘most anywheres between Ft Knox and Nashville.

  16. In “taking the knee”, the cast of Star Trek Discovery is being exclusionary toward hortas and other amorphous members of the Federation which lack knees.

    3. The rumors are Star Trek: Discovery had a lot of writers and set peoples from the old series and movies and wanted this to succeed. CBS president Les Moonves doesn’t like or understand science fiction, but he wanted Star Trek to be more like Star Wars:The Force Awakens which he saw, so he micro-mange Star Trek project to a point that many of the Star Trek people left and he alienate Paramount merchandise, many of the same people have join McFarland’s Olivier.

  17. Just discovered your blog and love it. As long as ordinary people can still think and learn to tune out the leftist noise, we stand a chance of winning this war.

    1. The Huns and Hoydens are a merry band, welcome* (from one N00b to another)

      If you’re not already reading Mrs. Hoyt’s PJ Media column you can find it here: https://pjmedia.com/columnist/sarah-hoyt/

      Her Mad Genius columns are very good value as well though they focus on Tha Writing Life (Like Thug Life except with better grammar and you do the violence your hapless characters). Here: https://madgeniusclub.com. Lots of the writers who post there on addition to Mrs Hoyt might take your fancy.

  18. Star Trek STD? BWAHahahahahhahaaaa! The gift that keeps on giving, right?

    I am proud to say, I have not even seen a promo trailer for this turkey. Ever since I heard that the Klingons were supposed to be modeled after Trump supporters, I’ve made a concious decision not to give them any clicks. They can “take a knee” right into first-season cancellation, baby.

    But speaking of STDs and idiots, this one fairly jumped off the page at me the other day:
    https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/scott-whitlock/2017/09/23/director-hollywood-bomb-blames-americans-rejecting-science-flop

    Mother! Director Darren Aronofsky blames the rejection of science by normal Americans for the fact that his $30 million dollar movie made $10 million at the box office last week. I kid you not.

    “It’s scary when you talk to the people who are studying this and thinking about this and then you have other people who basically believe in the power of a iPhone that they can communicate to 35 million people in a blink of an eye, yet they don’t believe in science in other ways. You know, which is as proven as gravity at this point, really. It has as many people believe in it as believe in gravity.”

    I swear I didn’t take that out of context. I think he’s referring to Glowball Warmening, but the guy talks like a Valley Girl so its a little hard to tell. What’s scary is that anybody invested money in that movie, with this incoherent moron directing it.

    Cram it, Lefties. We really can stop watching all your dreck on TV, and we really will.

    1. Thermodynamics, the inability to change energy inputs without changing outputs, is perhaps more solid than gravity. Is he one of the alternative energy degenerates, or is he one of the sort that admits that their policy goals necessarily involve deliberately making people poor.

    2. “which is as proven as gravity at this point, really”

      He apparently is unaware of the appalling lack of knowledge we have about gravity. We know it exists and have formulated a variety of “Laws” predicting its effects but have yet to develop the science to explain it, why it occurs, why it is cumulative (unlike the other three fundamental forces) and how it affects Space (although we are, thank Einstein, finally convinced it does warp Space.)

      Truly, when it comes to the gravitic force we are barely into “follow the recipe on the box” stage and have not yet truly learned to cook.

      1. Exactly. I love it when the scientific ignoramuses try to use “gravity” as their example of “settled science.”

      2. I’m sure a gravity tax and sending money to third world despots while killing senior citizens and economies would be able to make it follow our wishes and give us flying cars.

      3. And to think that, compared to quantum mechanics, gravity is the part of physics that we understand.

        1. Last I heard, gravity was still giving the quantum mechanics guys fits, because it doesn’t play nicely with them. (mind you things may have changed since I last dug into it. Things tend to.)

          1. I’m still waiting for the guys in Germany to finish working out whether Extended Heim Theory is right or not.

    3. Science? That sounds more like a bad film, badly written, badly filmed, that badly insults anyone who watches it. And the poster is a bad rip-off of a Freida Kahlo self-portrait. I’m not certain what disagreeing with the latest hand-wringing over anthropogenic-whatever has to do with that.

      It is 58 degrees here with heavy overcast and chilly northeast wind. Global warming my hind leg.

      1. Apparently “climate change” figures into the plot at some point, and Jennifer Lawrence’s character is supposed to be Mother Nature, so I guess if we all loved science we’d run out and see this film…

        I don’t know. The description of the plot makes it sound like grey goo and torture porn got together and had a really ugly baby. I suppose I might watch it if you paid me, but you’d have to pay me a lot.

        1. Apparently “climate change” figures into the plot at some point, and Jennifer Lawrence’s character is supposed to be Mother Nature, so I guess if we all loved science we’d run out and see this film…

          So Jennifer Lawrence plays a psychopath whose killed most of her “children” over millions upon millions of years?

      1. No no, Sarah. See, its totally -us- that are too dumb to understand his great brilliance. All us science deniers with our poorly-understood cell phones, that we use only to watch cat videos. We just don’t get it.

        Getting tired of hearing that, myself.

        1. If he is so knowledgeable about settled science based on mathematical models I expect him to be able to do my job given huge parts of it are…mathematical models.

          Funny that none of my co-workers are global warming disaster theorists (some will discuss the more grounded CO2 emission might equal 0.4C in a century by direct calculations based on lots of data but not the CO2 forcing of H2O vapor needed for the insane stuff).

          1. I’ve noticed Scott Adams has made essentially the same argument about economic (that is to say, mathematical) models: anybody with any experience with those knows they are highly unreliable.

            Wasn’t it mathematical models upon which Hillary’s campaign relied? How’d that work out?

            1. It didn’t. The key thing modeler’s have to remember is “All models are wrong; some models are useful”.

              One way to do that is not to make predictions per se but to run a bunch of scenarios of the “if x does this then y does this” so the people operating on them the next day watch what x does and act accordingly.

              Also, a key point for us is our models are used everyday in a fairly narrow way (long term hedging of interest rate sensitive portfolio). That gives us a narrow focus, a tight feedback loop, and the need to show a profit (actually, control volatility as true hedging can actually cost a small amount although often we turn a small profit). A big reason I distrust some models *cough*climate*cough* is they lack those three incentives.

            2. Shorter reply: mathematical models are tools and just like any tool have proper uses which they work well for and improper uses that lead to bad results.

              And since they are computerized I would say the original statement of a common saying applies:

              On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out”…I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

        2. Reminds me of work. Right now we have engineers freaking out because they don’t understand the data we’re giving them. Meanwhile, we’re looking at one another and saying “the accuracy of the instrument we’re using is +- 10%. Data point #2 is ~12% lower than data point #1 and data point #3 is ~8% higher than data point #1. What’s the problem?”

          1. They’re obviously worried because two of the data points are right on the edge of the accuracy range.

      2. ehh, i think they just haven’t had trepination recently enough. OR maybe they need to be bled a little, don’t know. Let me ask my phrenologist.

        1. Don’t insult trepanation like that. Sometimes it actually works.
          But yes, once you get the prescription from the phrenologist, I’ll get my alchemist buddies on it, although there could be delays–the entrails might indicate that today would be an inauspicious time to begin.

      3. If it did we’d have anti-gravity and FTL tech by now.

        Clap your hands if you believe. Save Tinkerbell!

    6. Yeah, “it’s a theory like gravity” is the new talking point.

      They tend to vanish when you go into the various detailed theories of gravity.

      2. Gravity allowed us to predict the position of Voyager 2 within ~60 miles after a trip of nearly 4.5 billion miles. Let me know when climate predictions reach even half that level of accuracy.

        1. You know, it’s even kinda backwards…. we know what gravity will do for standard figuring; we don’t know what climate will do.
          We don’t know why gravity does stuff… their theory insists we know why climate does…..

      3. All this. Only worse.
        Phlogiston and the luminiferous aether (gotta love that name) were at least *theories*, in the specific sense they made predictions you could test and confirm or deny. Burn metal to “earth” (oxide we’d say), releasing phlogiston, and it… *gains weight*?? Oops. And until you add the “Fitzgerald contraction” (later a.k.a. special relativity), the Michelson-Morley experiment showed no aether drift, so (presumably) no aether. Oh, well.

        Spacetime foam has (AFAIK) never been a theory, it’s just the idea that if you look at spacetime itself on small enough scales, it must become uncertain (as in Uncertainty Principle), look like foam or a sponge or Swiss cheese or something. That’s pretty much it. As in, no math, no pesky little equations (like Einstein’s G_ab = 8 ((pi)) T_ab) you can use to make hazardous predictions that could actually be wrong.
        As research directions go, it’s always been the guy left until last by both team captains because nobody can figure out how to get any use out of him/it.

        But at least it’s been useful to at least two SF writers, Stephanie Osborn and David Drake (“sponge space”) I can name right off. Just like I’m still waiting for the retro-SF/steampunk spaceships soaring to the planets on tanks full of Compressed Vitiated Phlogiston (maybe even, for your ease and further comfort, Liquefied Vitiated Phlogiston) because after all, negative weight.

        Gravity can make predictions of the planets’ motions out to a few millions, tens of millions or years or something like that. Then things start to go “chaotic” and you need impossibly good information on where the planets (and moons and *everything*) are and how they’re moving.
        For the weather, it’s more like a week ’til you reach that point, the “butterfly effect” and all that. Hmm.

        Einstein’s predictions have been scary good (though for spacecraft trajectories, Newton can and does do most of the heavy lifting for you) — as noted. Meanwhile, the “nuclear winter” guys talked about “self-lofting” of smoke particles and all that… until Saddam Hussein set half the oil wells in Kuwait ablaze and did the experiment for them. Localized (much less regional or global) “nuclear” winter? Uh, no. Heck of a mess, darkness at noon for miles, but no.
        Back to the drawing boards, guys. Try real hard not to come up with Phlogiston III this time.

        1. David Weber used the concept in his Bazell Banakson books; so did S. M. Stirling for his Island books and all the “Change” novels.

        2. You sir… have given me an idea. Fortunately it is an idea that might make a current side project work more easily. The Sidhe in that steampunk world thank you.

  19. > high school education

    I never got one. I just repeated the third grade until I was old enough to leave without having to dodge the truant officers.

    My brief stint at college showed it was more of the same, except they thought they could make people grovel for their grades. I wound up with a police escort off campus after causing the dean of students to melt down to the point of screaming and showering spit all over his desk.

    “No, I’m not some kid fresh out of high school here on grant money, and I don’t have to kowtow to the likes of you…”

    1. Sounds like me in PT school in NY in the 1990s: “No, I will not sign the attendance sheet. I pay you, you do not pay me. You want me to punch a clock, you pay me.”

      I ended up signing as A. Hitler, J. Stalin, L. Beria, H. Himmler… It was easier than listening to screechy females telling me I wasn’t being a Team Player.

    2. More and more I’m thinking that it would be wise to carry a pocket recorder around with me, turned on and recording at all times, any time I’m in a place where leftists are in charge. (Assuming that the local laws permit “one-party consent” recording, that is. If you’re in a “two-party consent” state, well, the recording won’t do you a bit of good if you’ll just get prosecuted for having made it. Which is why most of the Democrat-run states are, not coincidentally, “two-party consent” states.)

      If nothing else, it would have provided plenty of amusement value for others if you’d been able to record that meeting and make the audio public.

      And in the case of a false accusation, or an administrator flat-out lying about the contents of your meeting with them, a legal recording of your own can be amazing leverage…

      1. I’ve been watching the bodycam market for a couple of years now. There are sub-$100 cams now, but so far they’re all far larger than I can put up with. The more convenient ones have substantially larger price tags.

        I keep expecting someone would come up with a dime-sized camera that talked to a smartphone with Bluetooth. (anyone else remember an early-1970s TV series called SEARCH? Something like that) Maybe my web-fu is weak.

        My little MP3 player has an audio record function, but it won’t do that and play too, and it takes far too many menu steps to activate to be practical.

        1. LOVED that show. Once suggested we should do an RPG based on it. You would draft the kibitzers as monito techs, and the Agent character would be free to heckle them back…

      2. Wear a pin on your shirt that says, “Hearing Impaired. All conversations are being recorded for legal and quality purposes. The right to record under this condition is protected by the ADA, 42 U.S.C. § 12101”

        Drives them nuts.

        1. I got my kids’ doctor to send ALL the paperwork for a visit home based on that.

          It’s… a lot smaller than the pile you get in office….

          1. Since we’ve begun insisting on copies of our medical reports for every visit, we’ve found *substantial* differences between my notes as taken during the visit and what their office records say. As in “is this some other patient’s record?” to “given this can be a legal record, what’s the difference between incompetence and perjury?”

        2. I looked that up and didn’t see anything that supported a right to record. Can you direct me to the approximate section?

      2. Some scurrilous wag could probably fund a college off of the popcorn sales alone for people like you going back and kicking the stuffing out of out of touch professors.

  20. There was this story about a brain eating message from old Assyria. I somehow can’t remember it. It contained the fragment “shug” and that’s about all I’ve got. Ftagn and have a nice day.

  21. The kind of movie Mother! is doesn’t appeal to me. I’d rather watch, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” if I want strange.

    1. I confess I had some slight interest, even with Kyle Smith at NRO deeming it the vilest movie out of Hollywood evah. But that was based on Mike Potemra’s thoughtful argument and I now see that the director hasn’t had an original thought since he realized, “If I scream loud enough Mummsy will pay me attention!” — and that thought was not original to him.

      1. I would say that he’s more the guy who’s fallen into M. Night Shamalamadin syndrome.
        He did a few good, original movies way back when (“Pi”, “Requiem For A Dream”, “The Wrestler”), but has since lost his touch.

        1. It’s Lucas Syndrome. Nobody has a problem telling the talented-but-unknown director when he’s made a bad decision. As a result his debut products are really good. But once he’s become a legend in the industry, nobody’s willing to tell him he’s made a bad call. Therefore his later works have far more bad ideas than good.

      2. Eventually, the library will get a copy, and I will watch it the way God meant movies like this to be watched. With a glass of scotch and folks who know how to properly MST3k a thing.

    2. “Mother!” is more confirmation of my hypothesis that Big Media is now filled with people actively trying to harm their audiences. This Aronofsky schmuck actually says it explicitly: “It’s a punch. It’s a total punch. And I realize that we were excited by that. We wanted to make a punk movie and come at you.”

      He’s done everything he can think of to hurt you, the viewer. Surprisingly, very few people have been lining up to give this incompetent jackass a free shot at their face.

  22. Makes me glad I don’t follow main stream media.
    I had to quit listening to NPR when they became “Anti-Trump; All the Time!”
    I mean, I don’t really like the guy, but that sort of focus on one guy is more than a little pathetic.

    1. That they’re maintaining their “Trump hate 24/7” stance in the face of North Korea threatening to nuke Japan and Alaska goes a bit beyond pathetic and starts to look like them playing for the other team.

      The irony that the “other team” is a megalomaniac dictator threatening nuclear holocaust is not lost on me. They’re pretending the elected President of the USA is what the President For Life of North Korea -actually- is.

        1. Obama very nearly willfully and knowingly pissed away any chance of resolving things short of war. If things are resolved without nukes flying it will be to Trump’s credit.

          2. Just remember, if North Korea fails to launch everything they have in an attack all at once, whatever they do launch will be the last thing they ever launch. Come to think of it, even if they do launch everything they have, it will still be the last things they ever launch.

        2. It’s always blame the victim with them. They are the ones behind school policies which hold accountable the kid who punches back, after all.

          Wasn’t there a Washington Post columnist who openly (idiotically) expressed the desire that we could trade Trump for Kim? Were it not I would have to suffer the consequences I could hope her wish granted.

          1. That was, per a quickie internet search, Chelsea Handler (a so-called “comedian”, nothing to do with the younger Mrs. Clinton; back in November she called for the US military to overthrow Trump), claiming that Kim’s response to Trump’s UN speech “sounded a little more sane”.

            Not that she seems to have all that strong a claim on sanity herself…

          2. The response to such idiocy is “You can, any time you want to — and I’ll be happy to help you with paying for the plane ticket.”

          3. Hey now, don’t be too quick….

            Pretty sure that multiple public murders and assassinations are impeachable, so we would get rid of Kim quick, and if we assume Trump didn’t get slaughtered by the generals in two seconds flat he might actually be able to save that country without a wave of refugees.

        3. Though I don’t find anything on the web, it was always my understanding that we just had a cease-fire with North Korea, and that we were technically still at war.

          Or at least, North Korea thought they were still at war, and we were just ignoring them.

              1. This. NK is the reason it expired, as well – they didn’t want it to continue. Which is weird that they’re still doing the Pamunjon thing, given how that and the DMZ are all part of the ceasefire arrangement.

                But somehow it’s Trump who’s trying to “start” the war….. *smdh*

                2. “But somehow it’s Trump who’s trying to “start” the war”

                  Their minds are made up, don’t confuse them with facts.

                  Their interests lie not with accurate analysis of the situation, their interests are in finding ways to blame Trump (and his deplorable supporters) for all social ills.

                  Because then it is not their fault, nor is it beyond their control.

      1. I quit listening to NPR when it came out in Boston they had given their donor list to the Democrats. Which explained some fundraising mail I got and I was not amused.

        They assumed all their audience was leftists and after that I was happy to help them work on it.

      2. I practically stopped the election night when Bush faced Gore. I tuned in and found a Gore pep rally. Ironically, I turned the radio on when NBC called a state for Bush and I thought there were too many uncounted voted to know one way or the other. Gulf War II pretty much confirmed they were naught but National Propaganda Radio.

        So far, every time I go slumming at NPR, what I hear confirms it hasn’t changed. NPR is the reason I don’t think public broadcasting should get any government money at all.

    3. I like classical (well, 1450-1930, more or less) music, and so listen to MPR/NPR on the drive to/from work. Until the various announcements between pieces. Then I’ll often switch to something else until they’re done talking.

      I always switch as fast as possible away when the one that starts “you value us for our unbiased news coverage…” begins. The goal is to beat out “unbiased”, and if I’m good… Which is better than snarling at the radio, which seems to bother my wife for some reason.

      1. We are fortunate in our area to have four NPR(-ish) stations. The UNC-based system direct from Chapel Hill (and relayed throughout the state public radio system) now seems to be nearly all-harangue, all the time. There is some relief on weekends with The Thistle & Shamrock Show and similar, but anytime I tune in during the week I hear their lectures on the evils of America news and talk shows declaring Amerikkka hopelessly irredeemable. Wake Forest, out of Winston-Salem, offers some relief, as does the Virginia station out of Roanoke, restricting their “news” programming to Morning Edition and All Things Considerable … and, of course, the banalities of Terry Gross’s Stale Air.

        Happily, there is a station out of Raleigh (probably owned by NC State) which plays excellent classical all the time … and which is in range when I am on the East side of town, which isn’t often.

        Sigh. I find we are setting the television to the cable channel offering “Light Classical” more and more often.

      2. Recently bought new phone. Tried new apps. Found a nice one for assorted radio stations. Tried an NPR station from where I once lived… for a few minutes there was nice classical music. And then the begging (“Pledge Drive”) and I remembered one of the MANY reasons I gave up on NPR. NPR/MPR (Minnesota) might have been (slightly) LESS biased than ABC/CBS/NBC… once upon a time. Now? Biased all the way into cutoff as far as I am concerned.

        Want GOOD ‘net radio? Consider “Hank’s Gumshoe Radio” – old time radio Private Eye/Detective story radio shows. Or, well, anything 1940’s or earlier. Maybe 1950’s. After that… good luck to you!

        1. Want GOOD ‘net radio? Consider “Hank’s Gumshoe Radio” – old time radio Private Eye/Detective story radio shows. Or, well, anything 1940’s or earlier. Maybe 1950’s. After that… good luck to you!
          Thanks for the tip. Back in my cabbie days one of the big city radio stations that I could pick up out in the sticks where I lived used to do about two to three hours a night (late night really) on the weekends with “Theater of the Mind” and played old radio drama’s like “The Shadow” and such. Will check it out when I have the time to relax and listen.

  23. If NFL players who are paid more in a year than most of us are in a lifetime want to talk about racism and white privilege and the injustice of living in America and thereby let us know all about the aristocratic privilege of sports celebrities, and their general, ignorance, ingratitude, folly, and contempt for their own fans, I could blog about it for years and not be half so convincing.

    If Mrs Clinton wants us to compare her to Cersei Lannister and judge her fitness for the Presidency of the United States thereby, I say, Please. DO go on. The more evidence you can give of your own lack of moral character, the easier it is to support your political opposition. Even if that is Donald J. Trump.

    And so it goes. A wise man once said “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh”.

    1. Considering many of the tales I’ve read about how fans approach players/actors/celebrities I suspect I can understand the low regard held for fans. That doesn’t justify expressions of contempt, of course, especially as those admirers who approach are likely not emblematic of the majority of the fans.

      Still, all would do well to follow the example of Mae West …

      “JUDGE: Are you trying to show contempt for this court?

      MAE WEST: I was doin’ my best to hide it.”

      1. Referencing the above convo I can’t believe I didn’t create a top four.

        Been a fan of West, who in 1930 was what a lot of female pop stars today claim/pretend to be.

          2. And actually independent and master of her own career…the closest right now, afaict, is Taylor Swift…Gaga, Madonna, and every actress who thinks she is knows nothing.

            Actually, Jenna Jamesison might be the closest in terms of being master of her career.

  25. SESTA update: Introduced in the Senate, one list of sponsors says ‘Portman, Blumenthal, McCain, McCaskill, Cornyn, and Heitkamp’, another of supporters says ‘Portman, Blumenthal, McCain, McCaskill, Cornyn, Heitkamp, Blunt, Capito, Casey, Collins, Corker, Cruz, Flake, Graham, Isakson, Klobuchar, Lankford, Lee, Nelson, Rubio’. So, it is Senators, not Representatives that are the highest priority. I also would’ve thought Cruz more savvy about the intersection of politics and the internet.

        1. In fairness, they may not realize how insane things are, and think this will be a more contained change to the laws than we anticipate.

          Our theory of there being a problem has three components.
          1) That facilitates human trafficking will be unreasonably interpreted to include political speech.
          2) That in the current climate, activists/mentally ill will seek to use the law as a weapon against speech they disapprove of.
          3) That in the current climate, enough federal judges will pretend to find this theory plausible to have a chilling impact on speech.

          The first element would not be a natural conclusion for any sort of lawyer who would otherwise be an ally to us.

          The second element would not be obviously a problem for regular folk to a high profile old person who has spent decades insulated by a staff

          As for the third, these people aren’t operating from the same sources we are, plus their analysis will differ, so their conclusions about the significance of concerning the decisions isn’t necessarily the same.

            1. I was more speaking to some of the others. My specific opinion of McCain is not very high.

    4. I called my rep last week and Sam Johnson’s office called me back and he’s looking at opposing. I’ll call Cruz and Cormyn this week.

    5. Dang it, I posted about it repeatedly and yet I’ve been forgetting to contact my representatives. Since one of them is Cruz, I’m going to make sure his staffer hears the reasoning for opposing that bill.

      1. I’m not sure if this has been mentioned. IANAL. In addition to the federal law, this enables state law, potentially making all fifty sets of relevant state law apply. It enables civil law, but it is not obvious to me what protections from frivolous lawsuits apply. (Popehat doesn’t have anything on this yet.) The bill’s title mentions ‘users of interactive computer systems’, but you and I and Steve have the background to imagine all sorts of interestingly horrific scenarios.

        2. The “right” place to start here is almost certainly the EFF link posted here back on Sept. 21 (late in the comments and from *Australia* IIRC), and the various other links from there (they have about half-a-dozen further update items by now). When you say or cite “Electronic Frontier Foundation” most people who know much of anything about this subject already understand these are people who both know their stuff and essentially never do alarmism.

          [www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/08/internet-censorship-bill-would-spell-disaster-speech-and-innovation] — which is https not http (and from which I’ve dropped the prefix to hopefully avoid any WP “helpfulness”)

          One of the nastier potential scenarios I’ve not seen discussed anywhere else yet: if sex traffickers (real ones) can even mildly disguise what they’re doing, they could operate on sites they don’t like for just long enough to create a problem — even if it’s just a fear of prosecution. Say, Web sites for support of trafficking victims, or even anti-trafficking organizations; such activity would both be completely real, and something active traffickers are doing already, somewhere.
          And this (if it’s realized) would just add to the general chilling effect against such sites discussed in another EFF post (linked from the above reference).

          2. Actually, it probably has at some point, because it’s a specific example of a tactic much favored by Puppy Kickers and other Leftists in general: send trolls over to write something vile in the comments, then take screen shots and “See! This is what {insert blogger here} allows on their site. They’re just too cowardly to type it themselves!!!!eleventy!!!” And of course, once the harassed site owner finds it and removes it, it’s “because we exposed them”.

        3. I may well have less legal knowledge than you.

          There are two major reasons this is dangerous, one from a close reading of the current situation, one more general.

          The more general reason is how much internet infrastructure is shared. Situations where the computer marketing systems one interacts with not being tightly under ones control include intermediate mail servers and ad networks. Does one count as involved if one routes ones email through the same server, or if one sees a banner ad? (If someone is surfing a pornographic website, one may see a banner advertising local women, and ignore it as one does banner ads. It may not be obvious which ones are matchmaking services and which ones are illicit prostitution based on human trafficking.) Is there established case law, or would case law have to be established. It is a problem that I would have to become familiar with the case law. Especially as this law also makes state law applicable. Case law in fifty states would be particularly challenging to stay on top of. (For this reason, while I do not concede that this is a proper law, if it were it should be restricted to Federal jurisdiction.)

          The second reason is internet activist nutjobs, the ability this provides to find a jurisdiction with a politicized nutjob judge, that political speech on immigration policy potential facilitates sexual trafficking, and that the civil liability aspect of this law is designed to permit a ‘victim of sexual trafficking’ to sue anyone who facilitated their trafficking. There are a lot of websites that discuss immigration policy, and few of them have the pockets to cover the financial risks of a systemic effort to abuse this law. Popehat et al only have so much ability to provide free legal support.

          sent to sahoyt @ hotmail

    6. The sponsors of HR 1865 are Wagner, Beatty, Smith of NJ, Clarke of NY, Poe of Texas, Carolyn Maloney of NY, Royce of California, Roby, Kinzinger, Jenkins of Kansas. It has been referred to the Judiciary sub committee on Crim, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations, and the Energy and Commerce sub committee on Communications and Technology. I’ve only linked the first, please use it to find the link to the second, and check both to see if any of your representatives are on it.

      http://clerk.house.gov/committee_info/index.aspx?subcomcode=JU08

      Thanks to analytical-engine-mechanic for pointing out my head up my rear.

    7. I called both senators and left detailed messages (paragraph and concern) and wrote letters. We’ll see what comes of it, if anything other than fund-raising mail and phone calls.

  26. See, I hope you’re right, but all I’m seeing around me are people who are proud of these assholes and say they’re protesting and that it’s good and anyone who disagrees is racist. You can’t even talk to them and I’m sick of it.

    1. Case one: The people around you may oversample lawyers, and lawyers as a whole, through organizations like the American Bar Association, are effectively colluding to defraud the public by advocacy for more complicated law, requiring the public to pay for more services. Overuse of the race card is a legitimating narrative for advocating inconsistent legal principles. Therefore, some of the people around you may just be saying that because it helps change the United States into a place they are better able to personally profit from.

      Case two: The Neo-Nazis have bizarre mystical notions of race. A group activity around mysticism is a religion or cult. Therefore, Aryan Nations et al are a protected religious group, and any criticism is motivated by racism. Throw the charges of racism back in their face using as an exact a parallel to their case as you can manage. Says the fellow who does not consistently do so.

      1. I’m actually not surrounded by a lot of lawyers since my job is a little sideways of the field, but I am in a little blue dot in a red state. And the blues are loud. 🙂

      2. Complaining about problems you can’t fix is a good way to move attention away from the problems that are merely extremely difficult to fix.
        For instance, complaints about cops shooting blacks takes attention away from the greater number of blacks shooting blacks.
        The first give people votes. The second would involve a whole lot of unpopular cultural changes.

    4. Just today/yesterday a long established business decided they no longer wished to do business with/for the NFL. Money talks. Some just said “Good riddance!”

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