I’d like to pick up on Holly’s guest post of yesterday.
When I was reading it occurred to me that the problem of art is the problem of traditional publishing, it’s the problem of any centralized power and information.
We are social apes. Naturally and instinctively we tune in to the group we live or work with. It’s normal. We have all been members of groups that skewed slowly off normal — in minor and harmless ways, normally — and which made adjusting to the rest of the world more difficult after. (The gentlemen who said “Yeah, this comment section” can go to the corner for half an hour without books, thank you.) I mean even my writers’ group gave me a wicked addiction to popcorn, since that’s what we always ate when critiquing.
The problem comes with concentrating functions of society. When it’s something free-market (ish) based, it just means the entire field will fail. But when it’s government supported and/or subsidized it just tilts away from what the people would do with their own money, and gets more expensive and utterly offensive and useless.
So, take what Holly said about art. Public art, paid for with government money, might be good art (maybe) but it’s good art for people who are immersed in art and art education. Which means for the normal human being, it’s either stupid, useless or outright ugly.
In the same way, though in a free-er (look, the centralization of publishing itself was part the result of technology, and part the fact that the government puts its thumb where it has no business being. Tor power tools is one of the least egregious though most recent thumbs on the scale.) market, publishing, particularly genre publishing having relocated to NYC and being a small, incestuous field, where everyone knows everyone else, and where everyone goes to the same parties and the same restaurants, it started mostly catering to itself.
What do I mean by this? Well…
Take cozy mysteries. They were incredibly popular, but then for … reasons all the publishers started talking about how cozies weren’t real mystery. And it should be absolutely forbidden to have amateurs solving mystery, because the professionals were best qualified. Etc., etc., etc. And then they stopped accepting cozies.
You see, two things made this easy. The fact that everyone else who worked with them thought cozies were stupid, and the fact that they could stop just accepting them is because by that time for various reasons the publishing houses could determine if a book swam or sank. So curtail cozy distribution and publicity, have it not sell and then go “see, cozies don’t sell. Nobody wants it.” And stopped accepting it.
I don’t know what happened there, if it was just a happy coincidence with someone publishing this one off craft mystery and its doing really well or if the bottom line crashed so badly they tried to accept cozies without accepting cozies. “We know cozies don’t sell, but how about with crafts?” And then those sold, and suddenly were everywhere.
Same happened in science fiction with space opera and then with all of science fiction in favor of fantasy. Baen was about the only hold out on that. Because, of course, if the only science fiction you allow is hard sf you’re only going to hit a small group of connoisseurs, while Planet Stories was wildly popular. (Yes, yes, there’s a post on science fiction, possibly, eventually for Mad Genius Club.)
Same with “clean” romances. The editors were tired of them, so they didn’t want that and–
Fortunately with indie publishing all the “but we don’t like it” are making a come back.
But the same type of thinking, the same “but our in group doesn’t like it” is now dooming Hollywood. They’re essentially making movies for themselves.
It’s not even malicious. It’s that they’re tired of the things that the public perennially loves. Because they see a lot of it and it gets boring. And they forget the public hasn’t seen it every day for years. And they forget that whatever they think is virtue signaling woke in their circles is not hot at all in ours, but boring because we get it from every institutions and often our jobs.
And upper education. And educator “certification” is insane bs, that concentrates and distorts teachers into an in-group. Which in turn hardens a lot of insane ideas into what the entire group thinks, and tries to push on the kids (or adults) they teach.
And this is why government is in the mess it is in. Exact same reason. Even when they’re not raging commies, government employees as a group are obsessed with problems that aren’t problems: Income inequality, climate doomerism, etc etc. TO THEM these are vital. And they don’t understand the rest of the world is not really interested in any of this and in fact that most of these are only a problem in their minds.
Again, this is a reason for government being as distributed as possible. And where everyone, including bureaucrats are routinely changed. It should be normal for the president to fire everyone int he bureaucracy and hire his guys. Yes, yes, that means a period of confusion where no one knows “how things are done.” Too bad so sad. Perhaps “the way things are done” has tilted so far away from normality that it should change. And perhaps resetting to normal humans on the regular would stop us having government only interested in its own obsessions and at war with its people.
According To Hoyt 
But but… They are the experts and everybody should obey the experts!!!!! [Very Big Sarcastic Grin]
you hit the nail on the head here. Now if you could only hit it hard enough to drive it into the boneheads that need to hear it.
Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that. Benjamin Franklin
Imagine when this process involves a professional service like law or medicine. It explains a lot. OMG and The Military as well.
I know.
The original intent of the various ‘public service protection’ rules was to reduce patronage — the incoming president rewarding his cronies with prestigious government jobs.
As with most simple solutions to complex problems, this one has created a much worse problem: the President has nominal authority over the executive branch bureaucracies, but without the power to fire anybody, he has no actual control. The Democrats like it that way because the bureaucracies are packed with Leftroids and Democrat activists. A Republican President’s own government is at war with him from Day One, and even a Democrat dares not oppose the will of the bureaucracies.
It appears to me that the executive branch of government has to be run as a dictatorship. A President must have effective control over the bureaus and departments under his authority or he has no authority.
Used to be, an incoming President would wield a New Broom and sweep away all the accumulated cruft and corruption left by the previous administration. He’d accumulate his own cruft, of course, but at least it wasn’t left to fester for decades on end. Today’s bureaucracies have been festering since the 1960’s.
———————————
The government can mandate stupidity, but they can’t make it not be stupid.
Heck, the bureaucracies have been accumulating since the 1880s. The Civil Services Act of 1883 was the reaction against the assassination of President Garfield by a disappointed job-seeker. I think we may now judge it to have been an over-correction, or at least a correction that left too much room for parasitical infestation.
Second look at Chester Alan Arthur as the worst President in American history? (All right, it’d be a first look, but I am willing to consider the matter.)
Republica restituendae
et
Hamas delenda est
P.S. See some of you in Lebanon tomorrow.
Lebanon, Tennessee – home of Cracker Barrel!
As opposed to Lebanon, Oregon, home of cities named after something else. (Dallas and Milwaukee come to mind right now.)
Portland, which isn’t even on the ocean.
I skipped Portland and Springfield because the first is a port, and the second because so many states have a Springfield in them (Illinois, Mass, Missouri all show up on the first page for DDG).
Though, I should have mentioned Salem. (If S. King were a conservative, he could have come up with a really scary novel… [VBEG] )
I will be there too, perhaps late, have biology class to teach in the morning.
Things have gotten to the point that when a Republican president fires the attorneys (which is fully allowed), it’s considered a big deal.
Of course when a Democrat does it, the press doesn’t report it.
Bureaucrats are not necessarily leftists. However, at least in some fields, you get certain personality types. As in, 25 of us in Army logistics fields (provisioning, tech writing/editing, etc) took the Meyers-Briggs together, and 23 of us came out ISTJ – methodical, stubborn, comfortable with routine, possibly too much so. All traits that help you survive in the bureaucratic environment.
What I saw was not so much overt leftist as the rise of new “Old Boys Networks,” mostly benefiting minorities. And again, not necessarily the competent ones. What it’s like in social service agencies rather than DoD I don’t know.
Definition of “Old Boys Networks”. Happens whether traditional or non-traditional version. Depends on who is in power up the chain, who is trying to curry favor with whom, and who you know. In the ’70s & ’80s if you were female the perception was you were where you were because you were female (with backlash in ’90s, which always happens, eventually). Now, minority and non-traditional orientation (with backlash coming). For those who meet those categories who actually work for their positions and are competent, are tainted by those who use the system and aren’t (thus the eventual backlash). There is also the need, for the competent, to guard against being promoted past what one is ready for. In large firms controlled by families that “Old Boys Network” means family members, closer blood relationship the more likely, sometimes even gender blind (rarely backlash despite inadequacy of the promoted, because “family”). “Old Boys Network” is nothing new, just who is the target.
I worked a lot of years in government and the 1980’s were “bad” but by 2020 it had become toxic and pervasive. In the 70’s and 80’s you could dodge a lot of the crazy and goofy stuff. It was easier in the past to be able to do good at your job and actually accomplish something and hide from the more insane people in the system but the bureaucrats just got worse over time.
I was often able to work in my own little sandbox and get something done but by the time I retired I had to keep pushing away the crazy ones who kept trying to steal my sand and worse, the fools who kept bringing cats to my sandbox to poop. I don’t miss it at all but still feel sorry for those still trapped.
Cozy Mysteries. There are a few publishers, (mostly Christian, but not all) that have successful subscription services for hardbacks. A subscriber gets a new one every month.
Some of our patrons will donate them to my library, and we’ll catalog and put them on the shelf.
They are amazingly popular! Easy and quick to read without any political BS or woke ideology. No sex and usually no violence. Patrons will check out an entire shelf and read them in a couple of weeks.
Cozy Mysteries aren’t popular? I don’t think so!
But they’re not popular with the right kind of people! The masses are stupid. We need to correct their ignorance and adjust their attitudes about certain topics by forcing them to buy books with the right messages, and if they’re buying rank entertainment instead of our high-brow offerings, that will never properly happen, so we must remove all other options until there are only books with the right kind of stories left to buy!
Okay, that hurt to write. I’m gonna go read an entertaining as heck, 180 page, Louis L’Amour story about manly men and the women who recognize their value to get the taste out of my brain.
And then they are puzzled because with only books with the right kind of stories available to buy, people stop buying books.
” We need to correct their ignorance and adjust their attitudes…”
[cough] Google Gemini [cough]…
We must edify them!
I’m reminded of my aunt’s shelves of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books that kept me sane in the summertime when we were miles from the library. Every summer there would be 4 new “sets” of books to read after the evening farm chores were done. I think she got a new volume every quarter or couple of months. Years later I read some of the better offerings in unabridged format.
Yep. Mom took the books, and between trips to the nearby library, the odd paperback, condensed books and cereal boxes I almost had enough to read. Almost.
@ Larry > “Years later I read some of the better offerings in unabridged format.”
I grew up reading my parents’ shelves of RDCB and loved them. I also read some of the originals much later, and then wondered what had been abridged out of them, so I did a page-by-page comparison of a Dick Francis mystery that I happened to have on hand (don’t remember now which one).
Looking at all the stuff that was removed: they were the parts that developed the unique characters, or described the location in perfect detail, or added to our understanding of the racing world, or…. you get the picture.
All that was left was the bare-bones plot of murder and solution.
Which was still pretty good (it WAS Dick Francis, after all).
I described the process to a like-minded bibliophile friend as being akin to taking a 3-scoop banana split, scraping off the cherries, nuts, and sauce, and removing two scoops, leaving one lone chunk of vanilla on a bland banana.
Which doesn’t mean I didn’t appreciate being able to get acquainted with lots of authors through books which I would never have read the whole thing as a child-youth.
Oh, good, my friends are insisting that I return to my life of crime.
I have them planned to write….
I attempted to donate some books to the library in my old area and was told not to bother–they would go straight onto the sale shelf because they hadn’t been approved by the selection committee.
I donated books to the local branch of the county library. The librarian figured they’d shelve half the books, mostly later Tom Clancy (with “guest” authors) and sell the rest, mostly older SF that I’d read enough times. One or two got walled instead of donated. Ecch.
My local library used to have all Charlotte MacLeod’s Peter Shandy mysteries. Now they don’t, augh….
Ah … another genre which the insular NYT publishing world decided was old, stale and not popular was westerns. In spite of still being enormously sought after; writers who were this generations answer to Louis L’Amour and Elmer Kelton were just to infra dig for agents to rep and for publishers to publish. When I was doing the rounds of agencies, trying to interest someone in my own books, at least half of them had posted on their websites that they didn’t rep the western genre. And quite a lot of my rejection letters had a snotty note saying the same. (Me protesting that it was a historical novel set on the mid-19th century American frontier cut no ice at all. So f**k it – I write westerns, m’kay? May as well embrace it.)
And yet for all that, westerns are still madly popular among readers.
Go figure.
I still say you should get in touch with historic museums in places you write about. The Donner Memorial could stick your book To Truckee’s Trail in the gift shop.
I loved that book!
I did, when the book first came out. I also contacted the Oregon-California Trail Association museum – I think it’s in Independence, MO? There was a weird email exchange with a man who was IIRC a member of the board, who had also done a website, documentary and book about the Townsend-Greenwood party … I got the feeling that he was terribly proprietorial about the topic and seemed to think I was poaching on his subject. It was an odd exchange – I got a forwarded email that they weren’t aware of having sent to me. He and the friend that he had communicated with were not happy with my book. I dropped the thought of doing anything with that museum.
Smaller museums and gift shops on the western end of the various trails?
I know “Annie’s Story” (not fiction) was on various local community college and boutique book shelves, in Oregon (boutique shops: southern Oregon, I-5 corridor, mostly). Most copies went to children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. I have a copy.
The part when she discusses taking her two (oldest at that time) children, ages 5 and 2, to the turkey shed and making them stay in a safe place while she tended to the almost grown turkeys, my reaction was (youngest) “that is dad!”
Just something to think about who might shelf the book.
Why is Amazon doing this?
Look for “Annie’s Story Life In Early 20th Century Western Oregon”
Different link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12165101-annie-s-story
The current WIP is a YA adventure, of a family on the California Trail in 1846 – I will definitely make it known to various pioneer museums along the way, and remind them of To Truckee’s Trail, while I am at it.
Keep track. Send a form-letter to all the rejectors: “I have made X dollars from Westerns, from which you did not get a dime.”
Best get-even is living well.
Miles Vorkosigan: “Where I come from, someone’s head in a bag is generally considered the best revenge.”
There are no good answers, not even nuking D.C. is a good answer. The problem is people forget the reason they are in DC in the first place. To help and protect the people. Now most of them hate the people they are sworn to help and protect. So they help and protect themselves. Human nature. Move all the museums, take all the good stiff out, then nuke the place. Another help would be to put the Capital in Kansas, no one really wants to go to Kansas. It’s Nebraska only flatter. Praying for a miracle, hell why not?
Wherever you put the center of power, the leeches will gather. Such is their nature.
The only way to prevent that is to not have a center of power. Take a chainsaw to the federal government and prune off about 95% of it — and then decide how much more to cut. Repeal the 16th Amendment, abolish the IRS and most of the other 3-letter agencies. (Shouldn’t they be 4-letter agencies? They sure put me in a 4-letter mood.)
The only executive departments we should have left are Justice, State and War.
———————————
People can make stupid mistakes, but only the government can force everybody to make the SAME stupid mistakes.
Any federal body that requires permanent headquarters needs that permanent headquarters at least three states away or 500 miles from any other such department. The core of the federal government gets offices for the next four years in the state that gave the sitting President the smallest percentage of the vote. Their offices and so on are lent by the state government. Any sitting body, such as the SCOTUS, is bound by law from having a headquarters in the home state or resident state of any member.
Congresscritters have home offices rather than Federal offices, and meet in person only to verify that they actually exist before a major vote.
My opinion. Take it for what it’s worth.
Before the congresscritters, we need to verify that the voters actually exist, and are eligible to vote. For example, breathing and a pulse should be a requirement.
I just noticed that you shared my opinion. It’s a good opinion.
The Constitution also requires a Federal Post Office, IIRC.
I’m not sure we can forgo Treasury. Somebody has to pay the bills (and get the means to pay them).
“Any federal body that requires permanent headquarters needs that permanent headquarters at least three states away or 500 miles from any other such department.”
We have a federal post office. Hundreds of them, across the country. We have the technology, make that one more office that doesn’t have or require a centralized control center.
And roads between them. See also Interstates, which were ruled valid under defending the country.
So a few years ago the Great and Golden State of the Bear Flag Republic decided to try and get some mo’money from the Feds by converting CA highways in the SF Bay Area to US Interstate Freeways, and thus put the Feds on the hook for upkeep funding.
They were shocked, shocked I say, to discover that their underpasses were not up to the Federal standards, and that said state freeways would require costly work to make them a bit more roomy vertically underneath before they could be Federalized.
On digging further they were subsequently appalled to discover that the requirement for a certain amount of underpass headroom was driven by a military requirement, nominally to allow a main battle tank on a transporter trailer or similar to go through at speed, to go kills commies if needed.
The sharp reports of heads exploding up in Berkeley and across the bay in SF proper were audible for several weeks after that hit the news.
They eventually converted part of one so it suddenly changes while crossing under another in the heart of San Jose, where as it goes under Interstate 280, Interstate 880 suddenly becomes CA17 as it continues southward to the edge of the valley and up over the Santa Cruz mountains to the beach.
This is only really of note while driving said freeway with the advent of mapping apps – as one toodles along in that section with three through lanes each direction, suddenly one’s mapping app voices a concern one might get lost and tells one that one needs to continue on the new freeway, which appears to the unaided-by-technology human eye to be the same dang freeway.
But I guess they’ll have to offload the tanks right there at Valley Fair Mall in case they get a wave of uninvited commies over in the People Republic of Santa Cruz and proceed on tracks down to Los Gatos and over the hills.
In case? Kalifornia is already stuffed full of commies. Biggest infestations are in Sacra-de-mento, Berzerkely, San-Fran and Hollyweird. The colleges are full of carriers, too.
———————————
Anybody that can’t distinguish between employment and slavery needs to experience actual slavery until the stupid is beaten out of them.
Thus “uninvited” commies, though in the Revolutionary Peoples Republic of Santa Cruz that concept itself is likely foreign.
At UC Santa Cruz I think they have a “Visiting Professor of Commie Mass Graves” fully funded.
Let it be noted that most of the commies in Sack-o-Tomatoes were sent there, and would move away if they were allowed. Or if we turned off the AC to the state Capitol building.
Before escaping to the great state of Potatopia, I used to live in the mountains between Los Gatos and Santa Cruz, and I very much remember the kerfluffle to which you refer.
As a humorous aside, one of the local ice cream shops renamed it’s Rocky Road to Highway 17.
Yes. Post office was one of those things that Congress was supposed to do, along with weights-and-measures, and copyright/trademark.
We’d need to phase out the Department of Interior rather than dumping it, because the states need time to ramp up the staff they need to deal with the federal lands that would go to the states. Parts of the Department of Ag (Forest Service) as well.
Wags hands. I have a problem with Dept of Interior and Department of Ag lands defaulting back to the states. BLM and USFS timber, and range, etc., lands, yes. National Park and Monuments, not so much. Not that the states won’t out compete to maintain the parks (state parks anyone?) and monuments, but still. Main complaint I have with BLM and USFS is both departments way undersell the resources, be it timber, range land, or mining.
But many of those national parks were controlled and managed by the states before the feds decided to steal them in the name of environMENTALism.
Why NOT give them back?
Many. Not all.
Also have a bit of problem with “resource access” problems. Which frankly without following closely hard to tell whether, with a few exceptions (*trophy hunting) whether federal or state control would be worse.
((*)) Might be a bit of a grizzly bear and wolf huger (meteorically, not stupid). Grizzly bears need to be spread around more. Even relocating to other traditional wilderness locations. Even Cascades, Sierras, southern Rockies, and coast ranges. Before trophy hunting is allowed, even then, hunters need to be required to actually use the meat! Trophy hunting with dogs OR baiting needs to be outlawed. Huge problem with luring wolves with baiting to outside national park boundaries to be “legally” taken. Poor sportsman hunting (IMO, YMMV).
My opinion is that with modern technology, congress critters should have to live in their district and teleconference with their colleagues. There kids need to go to school in their districts. I need to be able to visit them if I have an issue.
It’s really really bad for the reality they live in to be a close knit group of political families that all grew up together, separated from the masses.
Put the capital in Lebanon, Kansas (at the geographic center of the 48 contiguous states) but build no additional transportation services to it. All heating and A/C must be provided by wind and solar.
No real need to build more roads or other transportation infrastructure. Make it a dedicated server farm and make everyone work from home.
Nobody wanted to go to DC before we put the federal capital there – it was a swamp. That’s why it was open to be the national capital. All the good places to put a city on the Atlantic Seaboard were settled before independence.
“If you build it, they will come.”
In other words, the founders put the USA Capitol in the most unpleasant central place they could find.
It was actually hazardous, way back when.
Oops… Shoulda banned AC, screens, and drainage.
Most of them are in DC for their own gain period, the political class has nothing to do with doing anything for some imaginary constituents
I’m going to say more later, but right now I’m just going to baldly state that the time for not assuming malice has passed. It’s deliberate and it’s malicious, at this point.
some of these things are stupid enough it’s not malicious, just stupid. It’s hurting THEM and helps nothing.
Note then they tried to panic-publish woke space opera 10 years ago and are in shock it didn’t sell.
Woke space opera? The Jemisin lameness?
and others. A lot of others.
Woke space opera?!? I can only rejoice that I dodged that particular bullet, and was never aware it existed…
(Of course, there was the Star Trek spinoff with Stacey Abrams as President of Earth… [gag])
STD was Trek In Name Only – the diversity hire writers room knew better than the audience, didn’t feel any need to tell any good stories or even look at what worked for five decades before. They could preach and posture and push woke crap and have the ship run on mushrooms and Mary Sue all over the place. They had no need to be bound by any silly canon just because they were playing ina well defined 50 year old sandbox – besides, only icky white male fans would complain.
The producers had such disdain for canon that they fired crew who had worked on real Trek when said crew respectfully and quietly pointed out “that’s not how that works”. Not just told them “thanks but we’re doing something different, you can go back to lifting the lighting thingee”, nope – fired them.
And it’s lost Paramount a ton of money. Rumor has it the only thing keeping it going were the subsidized DEI implementation loans Kurtzman arranged from various investment firms which had penalties if they cancelled it too soon, plus the termination penalties built into the Paramount/CBS contract with Kurtzman.
I am glad it’s finally dying its well deserved death.
ST Disco is of a kind with the Starship Troopers movie – a completely different thing with a thin overlay from the source work, maliciously corrupting the original.
Thanks; that’s more than I knew about that fiasco. As for the Starship Troopers movie, the less said about it the better. It was almost as bad as the Dune one, albeit for a different reason, and I put both in the same “unwatchable” category as Highlander II and The Sorceress.
Most of the Star Wars stuff.
I’ve mentioned this here before, but…
Timothy Zahn is the only Star Wars author that’s still selling well.
A while back, Disney Star Wars started a new era setting called “High Republic”, and the first novel sold quite well. But with each subsequent novel, the number of sales dropped more, and more, and more. It’s effectively dead at this point, as far as novels go. There’s a TV series (‘The Adept’) that’s supposed to be set during this period, but it’s been “being worked on” for years now. And there’s an upcoming video game set during the era. But aside from a teaser trailer that didn’t really reveal much about what’s going on (aside from a bunch of aliens in a drum circle), there’s been virtually no news about it.
What was notable about High Republic?
Well, first and foremost it removed the Space Opera from Star Wars. There was no big bad. You had jedi, and presumably adventures of some sort. But there apparently wasn’t any sort of arc-villain, or anything like that. It sounds like the bad guys were mostly random pirates or other sorts of scum.
As usual the Powers that be looked at Cause and Effect and got the arrow going the wrong fricking direction (or perhaps totally missed the point).
People Loved the Space Operas and the Planetaries because they had outsize heros and actual plots and interesting story lines. Most of that class of SciFi is about as hard Scifi (and I am about to commit heresy) as Star Wars. It differs from fantasy mostly in the setting and the trappings. Kimball Kinnison has a MK XVII blaster and a Lens rather Than Fafhard’s Broadsword or some Grey Mouser with cantrips.
Seeing that maybe there WAS a call for more epic style Scifi (rather than Contemp Lit with future settings) they looked around and found someone that wrote Contemp Lit (or perhaps Contempt Lit) with a vaguely Space Opera setting. They then started to push it to the CHORFs until it further debased a once glorious award. And they sold a few thousand copies to the CHORFs a perhaps a few hundred other suckers. Then they scratched their heads in puzzlement because sales did not rival what the expected. They do not realize we mere mortals read for Enjoyment and pleasure. Our reading habits are NOT those of the CHORFS whose motto would look like the reading equivalent of the “Masochism Tango” and want to be debased and derided in each line of fiction they read.
So I still prefer space opera to outright fantasy because it allows us to dream of the future.
Ah, the Masochism Tango; that, Guadalajara and Poisoning Pigeons in the Park are some of my favorites. Tom Lehrer was (is?) a lefty, but he did do some entertaining songs. 🙂
I’ve no ideas on his politics, but being surrounded by the miasma of Massachusetts I would be surprised if it had changed. IIRC he released all his songs to the public domain last year, so most likely still is alive.
Actually, “lefty” was probably a slur; he was (and probably still is) a “classic” liberal, not one of the current crop of intolerant idiot Marxists. And he’s still with us; Wiki says he’s 95.
And FWIW, I misremembered a title; it was “In Old Mexico”, not “Guadalajara”; old guy brain fart. 😳
I believe Mr. Lehrer was a math professor at Harvard. He was likely a classic liberal. He pokes fun at Both sides. See “Whatever Became of Hubert” and “New Math” from That Was the Year That Was. He is still around, WGBH trots him out every once and a while during begging season when they run a recording done of him in Copenhagen in the Late 60’s with many of his classics. This (making fun of themselves) is something that modern Liberals have lost. It stems from their utter certainty that they are right and this is end pf the world serious, even though they often make the Marx Brothers Duck Soup look like an educational model for governance.
Math professor at UC Santa Cruz. I have a friend whose parents met in his class.
In re the wonderful Professor: https://tomlehrersongs.com/
In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs.
So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.
NOTICE:
THIS WEBSITE WILL BE SHUT DOWN AT SOME DATE IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE, SO IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING, DON’T WAIT TOO LONG.
Tom Lehrer
November 26, 2022
I read somewhere else that Doomsday is Dec 31, 2024, so get cracking.
I’ve downloaded about a third of his oeuvre so far.
Incompetence and stupidity do not rule out malice. They hate us, all right.
Sure.
The good news is that incompetence and stupidity partly dilutes the effects of the malice.
I was out running around town earlier, read your post and felt the need to comment enough to drag out the laptop for a sec.
I do grant that things like the persistent fruitbat Alex MacFarlane insisting that -ALL- SF must henceforth be non-binary is just virtue signalling so she can stay in the Kool Kids Klub. Her malice seems reserved for the mighty hordes of god-botherers she imagines America is filled with, all baying for her cute little non-binary head of course. So brave, so transgresssive, preciousss…
However there is a difference between useful idiots and those using them. I would go so far as to agree that the entire publishing industry forms one gigantic useful idiot for The Party. But the party itself is evil. Not stupid.
My evidence du jour:
“Justice Minister Arif Virani has defended a new power in the online harms bill to impose house arrest on someone who is feared to commit a hate crime in the future – even if they have not yet done so already. The person could be made to wear an electronic tag, if the attorney-general requests it, or ordered by a judge to remain at home, the bill says.”
“Bill C-63 is designed to curb the proliferation of hate online, but it also establishes a new hate-crime offence, which would carry a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.”
(Reminder that the current maximum sentence in Canada before the offender is eligible for day passes and parole is twenty years.)
The new Department of Pre-Crime will decide what individuals must be silenced now, in case they might commit a hate crime in the future. Given that they’re talking about the Interwebz, the hate crime itself will be… on-line. As in verbal, written or possibly done on video.
The above, my dear friends, is not stupidity. That, what you’re looking at there, is malice. They hate the people of Canada, they will force them to shut up, they will chuck them in jail for life if they decide they want to, and ultimately there is MAiD for the hard cases.
Praying for you all in Canada. If this sort of stuff comes to the US then I know I’m already on a list, since I bought a Bible last year.
You probably already hear that the US government was using Bible buying as a sign of right-wing extremism.
Ya know, these [rude word]s can’t even come up with an original form of oppression. How many sci-fi dystopias have that as a feature?
Well, it’s kinda basic to have injustice in a dystopia.
I dunno, “Hate Pre-Crime” has a certain puzzlingly-novel ring to it…
…and ‘Hate Speech’ is whatever they say it is — even if you never actually say it. You can be imprisoned for life just for being accused of thinking ‘Yngvi is a louse!’
Are they calling it Thoughtcrime, or are they not that self-aware?
“Department of Pre-Crime”? They’re now treating The Minority Report as another training manual, to go with 1984, Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451?
PLUS Atlas Shrugged, Orphans of the Sky, AND Harrison Bergeron.
That’s appalling and scary.
But even more of both, it’s also not remotely shocking or surprising, because it’s not even close to unique. “Sounds like Ireland” used to mean something so very different… and can anyone who saw it ever forget the covidiotic spluttering rant from Australia against the “unvaccinated” who should not think that going to work to put food on the table and a roof over the table is enough of an excuse to leave your home, without being multi-jabbed with a (later proven neither safe nor effective) first-time-ever gene-based biological experiment.
But, practically, house arrest (itself) isn’t going to stop Internet usage; maybe (likely?) I missed the context where they also cut off your Net access, so you literally can’t do anything but sit home and not be able to work or pay your bills or buy food till you starve in the street. (Sounds like “J6” in a Canadian accent.) Because, they suspect you…
“Hate Crime” : what happens when people in power really, really hate you and decide to hurt you bad, in case you might do or say something inconvenient for them. See, “War Crime” but without any need for ongoing armed hostilities to qualify.
My (direct) experience of Canada is limited and brief; but I can’t help thinking “what can’t go on won’t go on” and then of a certain poem, Et Dona Ferentes by Kipling.
Meantime our thoughts and prayers go out…
The government in Helldivers is supposed to be satirical…
I always laughed about that silly red-dress-and-hats book having people trying to flee across the border to Canada.
I figured the other direction was far more likely to continue to be the case.
So will the Mounties shoot to kill at the snowy border crossings to stop pre-crime fugitives?
They’ll be shooting fugitives to stop them from -leaving- just like East Germany and North Korea.
Absolutely no one will be trying to get in.
c4c
“Public art, paid for with government money, might be good art (maybe)”
But for me, for a few decades now, I interpret it as propaganda, intentional or not. And as such, it’s no longer just ‘art’ for me. Just as NPR is no longer just a network.
Right now public art will almost never be good art. This is because What is viewed as artistic has moved far away from any representation that would be considered. For Example consider this travesty https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fnews%2Fnbcblk%2Fboston-unveils-embrace-sculpture-mlk-coretta-scott-king-rcna64990&psig=AOvVaw2MRFNybOloSAQ14tG0wt5h&ust=1709333347225000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CBMQjRxqFwoTCOj4_4vR0YQDFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE
The sculptor (Hank Williams Thomas) is apparently known for (pardon my french) dumb ass pieces of giant statuary involving just arms (google him if you must I’ve used my 1 link already). It is “supposed” to represent a famous photograph of Coretta King hugging MLK when he received his Nobel Peace Prize. The sculptor clearly CAN do representation of figures, the arms look like the arms in the picture including how the jacket lays on MLKs arms. But the overall appearance (especially in person) is of a 23′ paen to tentacle (or arm) porn.
A really good sculpture of both of them hugging based on the photo, would have been more meaningful for me visually, you could focus on the event and the joy. The sculpture in question just keeps confusing me is that an arm? Are they hugging internal organs? Is that the heart? Intestines?
Transporter accident.
I’m a Heinleinian. “An artist supported by the government is a whore. An incompetent one.”
I’m not quite in agreement, but publicly paid art most always must satisfy the patron, the government in this case. The WRA tried to be neutral, by some accounts, but it’s been a long long time since our government has been even neutral towards those who disagree even in the least. Since it’s propaganda, it should be eliminated.
Since when do streetwalkers limit themselves to government money?
(grin)
Ditto, my first response/thought to the post was ” … specialization is for insects”.
Meaning? I enjoy (thanks for the promos by the way, although my bank manager now hates you) reading authors who … aren’t ‘just’ writers (they have former or current careers in wildly different areas, and their experiences ‘inform’ their writing). So many writers are just that, and it ‘can’ show [I, early-onset Alzheimer’s again, can’t remember the story or author but wasn’t there an alien contact story with a linguist and and an engineer as first-contact team? Where the linguist, who could speak fluently, had nothing to say and so failed in a needed allegiance, and the engineer, who couldn’t say squat but knew engineering, … did, and didn’t].
The ‘incestuous’ nature of, what has become of, our institutions is the problem. That they have all simultaneously gone from “this is good because ‘we’ like it” (all the better if the hoi-polloi ‘doesn’t’) to full-on “we’ll punish anyone who doesn’t do as we tell them” is all part of the same thing.
People overreact; it’s what we do.
I’m sure that protecting the civil service was (or at least seemed like) a good idea at the time. The same with popularly electing senators. I’ve heard (not researched) that it was pretty awful and the “something must be done” refrain went up.
The annoying thing is not that we overreact, but rather that we somehow cannot change our minds.
Yes, the civil service was incompetent and fearful because they were always getting fired. That is not the problem NOW. Yes, senators were corrupt puppets of governors, but that is not the problem NOW (well, the “corrupt” part is still an issue).
We tried a solution. It didn’t work. Why can’t we try something else?!?!? That’s what makes me scream.
Prohibition is an excellent counter-example.
You are history’s greatest monster for daring even to suggest such a thing.
Have you not learned that such refrains are virtually always astroturfed in order to serve some evil end? That it was taken up by the (yellow) press should tell you just how genuine it was. Yes, there was local corruption. I’ll take fifty different competing varieties of corruption over the nationalized uniparty we have now.
Not quite sure what you mean, here. State appointment of Senators was a deliberate device to contain and minimize corruption, and thus was, in a way, extremely pro-individual-freedom. Prohibition was anti-freedom, the result of a deliberately whipped-up national hysteria campaign that, again, was taken up by the yellow press, the theater (there was an entire genre of anti-alcohol plays called temperance dramas, illustrating the evils of demon drink), the cinema, and more.
Just on the face of it, it is exactly the same kind of disaster that the change from appointment to popular election of Senators was, stage-managed in a very similar way, in the same timeframe, by the same sorts of meddling tyrants who always want to control you For Your Own Good.
The point isn’t what the ideas of Prohibition VS Method of Senator Selection. The point is that Prohibition was determined to be anti freedom and then was repealed. In the same way the current selection of senators by popular vote can be repealed and return the method to the States. If it has to be by popular vote still, then it needs to mimic the national vote for president and vice president. Representative by county population with every county having a minimum of 3 votes, higher population density would also have a higher representation vote. Just like national, each state has a maximum based on the number of state senators and representatives. (Also how the national delegates should be allocated too. Pipe dream, I know. But can dream big! Why should Portland metro get to decide how the entire state votes just because they are bullies and outnumber fly over falls, and all the smaller population counties, combined?)
THIS
What I don’t understand is people like Candace Owen’s announcing, “actually, Prohibition did a lot of good. It’s misunderstood.”
That’s simple. Candace Owens is a midwit narcissist who says contrarian things to gain attention.
(And if you don’t think she’s a narcissist, she posted a series of reaction videos: her reacting to herself a few years earlier.)
Could be. I don’t pay much attention to Candace Owens. But from what I’ve read, the rate of alcoholism went way down and has never come back up to its pre-prohibition high — which does qualify as a good thing.
I wouldn’t defend prohibition on that basis (it was one of the worst ideas of an age that was bursting with bad ideas), but I would say that nothing is unalloyed good or evil, not even that incredibly stupid episode.
And Mussolini made the trains run on time.
Violating individual rights “for the people” or whatever the euphemism for “the collective” is at any particular time, is always wrong.
The Legislature-selected Senators were loyal to the wrong people. The Progressives (lol) wanted them loyal to the Party, not to their respective States. Thus converting Senators to a popular election, thus ultimately beholden to Party for office and not to the State they notionally represent.
“Corruption!” often means “won’t obey -me- !”
Public art, paid for with government money, might be good art (maybe)–
I’ve seen some really great murals and such from the 1930’s in a lot of places around the Bay Area, because the WPA and their ilk needed to keep artists busy one way or another. Some were “okay,” but quite a few of them were pretty good and often had a patriotic theme of some kind.
(And are often being “fixed” or painted over or covered here because they have Evil White People on them. You have to hate them, dontjaknow?)
Explaining to people that I have nothing new to read that isn’t manga or iffy-quality KDP books requires explanations that I might as well print on a FAQ sheet and hand out to people.
Wait a minute, isn’t first two or three books in a new “space opera” series from TOR or MacMillian or anybody but Baen a good “space opera” story? It has all of these awards…
Either I go “it’s terrible and not space opera, let alone good space opera” or I have to-
*Spend ten minutes explaining why most mainstream SF awards are absolute s(YAY)t these days.
*Add another five minutes and a few samples explaining why the Sad Puppies weren’t a hate group and why people like Larry Correa and such thought there was skullduggery around…
*Spend another ten minutes explaining how the author has no clue about maintaining consistency of plot and technology and basic laws of physics…
*…and then five minutes explaining that “it’s magic/rubber science” or “it’s not supposed to be serious” is not a fucking excuse for massively inconsistent writing-especially when you’re making stuff up…
*And then we get to another five to ten minutes where my audience needs to have plastic sheeting because my vitriolic spittle about how their book was terribly written to incorporate (CURRENT YEAR) woke politics and how if I was to point out nearly fifty years of peer-reviewed papers that were overturned by one Lysenkoism paper that wouldn’t even make it past the editor in the ’90s of most reputable science magazines but because the paper was written by a “bisexual” AIDS-infected trans-sperm-whale-identifying “male,” it was of course accepted…
*And this doesn’t even get into books published in other universes, where canon is not so much “disobeyed” as “raped, sodomized, tortured, and taken out back and shot in proper KGB form.”
So, do I spend an hour or more ranting because this frustrates the hell out of me, or two sentences that explain nothing? Either way, I’ll be considered a terrible snob-the only question is will I be considered a terrible snob or a terrible racist, sexist, bigoted, trans-phobic homophobe snob?
Yes, I have been called that.
Multiple times.
(And don’t get me started on KDP books. “Great story by an author who Amazon likes!”
(Reads about half the book and deletes it from my iPad because there’s no real editing, the plot jumps around far too much, assumptions are made that are terrible, and the lack of consistency makes my teeth grind…
(“No, I didn’t like it. At all.”)
There’s a market out there for all of these “lost” genres. Money can be made selling these books. I know it, you know it, Great Aunt knows it, somebody at the big publishers has to know it, but they won’t sell anything in it because it doesn’t match the (CURRENT YEAR) political cant they have to obey.
My ability to have hope just…malfunctions these days.
I think it is time to start a cozy mystery, space opera, western publisher…. The goal should be to find the good stuff so the readers don’t have to read everything.
The mainstream people just want to push there stuff. Started reading manhwa on tapas app to read ‘The Grand Mudang Saga’ which I recommend, but the thing is that the app pushes the alphabet people so hard, but if you look at what seems to actually be being read the most it’s not those genres. They prop up what they find significant. The most troubling thing about these people is their inability to accept others being different than themselves and having different tastes, and that it’s not a moral failing to have different tastes or even have different purposes for reading. I read different things depending on my purpose. Sometimes I like something that makes me uncomfortable, but usually I just like the exercise of figuring out how the world works in a science fiction or fantasy setting while the hero works on saving the world through their own effort and falls in love with a significant other, or develops other interpersonal relationships, while doing so.
There should be a publisher company that does everything it can to do mid-list books. Do everything you can to build up authors, that kind of thing.
Without disagreeing, there are two other factors at play, one good or benign, and one ugly.
The possibly-good, or at least benign, one is captured by the distinction between “readers’ writers” and “writers’ writers”. There are authors who appeal to everybody, and authors who are working at a “higher” level (at least arguably) who are appealing mostly to other authors.
Heinlein, in at least one letter in Grumbles from the Grave, talked at length about how thoroughly he enjoyed John Barth’s Giles, Goat-Boy, while making clear to the person he was writing to (I want to say his agent, Lurton Blassingame, but it’s been thirty years since I read it, so I’m quite possibly wrong) that most readers wouldn’t even begin to “get it”, it was aimed, he thought, very directly at working storytellers. He said this not as condescension, but mere observation. As a working craftsman, he could see all the subtle, clever things Barth was doing with his craft; anyone reading just for the story would be disappointed, at best.
Something similar happens in cinema. My vote for greatest filmmaker of all time is Akira Kurosawa, but he held Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky in the highest regard, felt that Tarkovsky was the best ever to work in the medium. Other cinephiles hold Tarkovsky in similar esteem. Personally, despite being a lifelong cinephile, I have never managed to get through one of Tarkovsky’s films. Not because they are bad, but because they are deliberately slow and obscure. And despite the fact that two of his films are science fiction, based on SF novels that at least some people consider classic, I still bounce off of them, hard. They are not bad, but what they have to offer I either just don’t get, or am not ready for yet.
In music this happens, too. Jazz was the popular musical art form until artists stopped playing for audiences, and started playing for each other. After a first flush of success (Miles Davis’s brilliant Kind of Blue album, 1959, is the best-selling jazz album of all time), rock and roll took over and jazz became ever more obscure and poor-selling.
So, okay, maybe not always good, but not something done with questionable intent. Creating at a level only other artists can appreciate has its place. Always has, always will. But if you only do that, the public will stay away in droves.
But the more insidious version are the people of no talent, with nothing important to say, but who see the above dynamic at work, and create an artificial one to make themselves seem important. Call it the Emperor’s New Art Style. They con the Really Important People into seeing them as Important, too, by appealing to vanity. This is what happens with most “public” art. It is not the great and versatile artists who gain appeal with the trust fund brats, it is the manipulative con artists, by and large. (This also explains a lot of what happens in Hollywood. The people who control the money mostly wouldn’t know real talent if it punched them in the face, but the more superficial things easily impress them. And that’s before taking into account the contempt for anything “flyover” people might like.)
“They con the Really Important People into seeing them as Important, too, by appealing to vanity. ”
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/general_summary.html
“When they scratched the reindeer-bone,
Some one made the sketch his own,
Filched it from the artist — then,
Even in those early days,
Won a simple Viceroy’s praise
Through the toil of other men.
Ere they hewed the Sphinx’s visage
Favouritism governed kissage,
Even as it does in this age.”
Although I like Leslie’s interpretation.
Or, to take it to Gilbert and Sullivan:
It’s a very old business, and yet, still profitable.
Not the second but the first is what I’m trying to describe. Art for artists. etc. is a sin the gatekeepers fall into.
I don’t think engaging in it, or appreciating it, is a sin. It’s when it becomes the focus, to the exclusion of all else, that it’s a problem. Couple it with status anxiety, and it gets ugly, fast.
yes
I’ve seen this in music too. I used to play trombone. There’s a lot of good popular trombone music, but the musicians themselves can tend to wander off into the technical mastery side and lose non-expert audiences.
Christian Lindberg has good examples of both.
On the one hand, his trombone version of Pictures At Exhibition is absolutely phenomenally beautiful on levels anyone can get.
On the other hand, his things like the “Motorbike Concerto” just… I can appreciate the technical skull required to do it, but it’s not my cup of tea.
Or how top flight bass trombonists will do a lot of work on the Beach Cello Suites. They’re excellent for mastering the instrument, but really don’t sound that great, otherwise.
The late, great Terry Teachout had at least one absolutely brilliant column/blogpost about why jazz died. He marked “Kind of Blue” as the transition point, but really, it was 1959 in general, as that was also the year of Dave Brubeck’s “Time Out” (another phenomenal bestseller everybody loves, but is undanceable), Charles Mingus’s “Mingus Ah Um”, and Ornette Coleman’s “The Shape of Jazz to Come”, one fo the earliest free jazz albums. I love three out of the four (and have yet to contend with Coleman either way), but it is absolutely the case that jazz, as a whole, stopped playing for the audience, and started basically playing jam sessions for each other right about then.
(Yes, yes, yes, the actual history is a lot fuzzier and arguable than that, I know.)
Another Teachout observation that bears on the larger discussion here. He wrote a magnificent biography of Duke Ellington, and there’s a section on the rather complicated set of circumstances that lead to Ellington stopping writing music for a time, and relying on his mentee Billy Strayhorn (best jazz name ever!), which lead to the composition of “Take the ‘A’ Train”.
The section on “Take the ‘A’ Train” ends with it falling off the charts, and concludes:
Simply worded, and yet with such an impact that you suddenly understand how an artist can come to hate his most popular piece. (Teachout never even implies this, and AFAIK, Duke never hated it. But the impact is there nonetheless.)
“by that time for various reasons the publishing houses could determine if a book swam or sank.”
They could make a book sink, but they could not make a book swim.
And (rather off topic), in honor of Leap Year Day (still ongoing in North America though not in the blog’s “official” Eastern Standard time):
Still working on the Martian calendar(s) 2.0, both calendars and guest post. (It’s called Martian Practical Calendars for a reason, this is more like engineering than anything else.) The 1.0 version did need more work, and there’s that new paper about Mars’ rotation speeding up…
Not so off topic: a lot of the ‘prior art’ on this one (and it goes back a century or more by now, look it up) can’t even count to 7 reliably. And I mean by this Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Monday being all consecutive days kind of stuff. This is (amazingly but allegedly) in some bizarre way or other “not a bug but a feature” far out there in utopian-reformist land.
What it really is, among other things, is art for its own sake; asking or even just expecting people to go along with nutty stuff like this, just so you can have a slightly simplified calendar format (“every month looks the same” or almost). As if they really don’t think people would keep on counting to 7 accurately and starting to say, “Today is calendar-Sunday but of course it’s really-Tuesday.”
Some things in calendar design are hard, or at least complex. Counting to 7 is not one of them.
What do you mean by Planet stories?
IMO “Planet Stories” were/are action adventure stories set on human-livable worlds.
Burroughs’ Barsoom stories were “Planet Stories”. Leigh Brackett’s stories set on Mars, Venus (and other planets of the Solar System) were “Planet Stories”.
There were also plenty of “Lost Colony” (a sub-set of Plant Stories) novels where a human colony lost technology and lost contact with Earth. These were stories of human action/adventure set on an alien world.
Then there’s the inverse version, in which we’re the Lost Colony. See Mutineer’s Moon, among others.
Battlestar Galactica being the best-known example.
Oh, I’d never heard them called planet stories before so I was a bit confused. That’s a fun genre, I really enjoy it. Lost colony stories too.
There was a magazine <I>Planet Stories</I> I believe so the name is rare because of confusion.
“Sword and Planet” is the term I’ve usually seen for the genre.
Drake and Stirling’s Raj Whitehall books were all “Lost Colony” stories.
By the way, another term is Planetary Romance.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetaryRomance
Hollywood assumes that since they get paid for and praised for pushing an agenda, the audience is of similar mind.
beebeeebeeep … error. does not compute. Norman coordinate…..
Back when they got paid for “WOW! Entertaining!” we occasionally would see movies of “WOW! Entertaining!”
Once those Red Leftroids infected the place with their “profit is evil” “Revolution!” “tear it all down” “art is refined for the few” horseshit, the “wow” folks got crowded out. And so did th e profit lifeblood.
Soon, DEIsney will go the route of major newspapers “HEY! We are too important! Subsidize us! Like for NPR! For the Good of Democracy!”
No. “DEI” in your own filth and ignorance, idiots.
Oh, Hollywood is still all for profit* – they just are upset that the crap they are pushing rarely generates any.
—
* Profit in reality, not on the books: Gotta keep everything at a tax loss at the bottom line, and gotta keep from paying any percent-of-net to anyone stupid enough to sign contracts for that.
If Hollywood was still “for profit” they would be burning their idiots out with flamethrowers. Because “message” probably wrecks the bottom line when your industry is based on “wide appeal”. “The fans are assholes!” is a -lame- excuse, except maybe for hardcore punk stuff “…thus so are we!”
They are “for message” and act accordingly. “This MCU movie could be a box-office monster by essentially fanservice and cannon-keeping, or hammer home these Important! Messages! that most Fans are Toxic! Malevolent! Irredeemable! Jerks!” … “Send that Message! up to 11!”
The question is “Profit” for whom? Corporate shareholders are obviously right out, but those massive production budgets go to lots of pockets, some a lot more than others, and a lot of money changes hands even on a massive loser like “The Marvels”.
That all goes somewhere, just never not ever to the bottom line.
The thing recently is that the productions are still massive money flows, but there’s not any income after release to spread around to the corporate accounts and pay for those mansions that fall into the ocean during storms in Malibu. But the DEI enforcement teams still gets paid, and the pierced and dyed writers room, all the normals on crew and makeup and wardrobe, and the effects shops and musical score and recording studios, and camera rental companies, and especially the talent and directors and producers.
I look at Hollywood as a very high end jobs program with the elite making out like bandits, but corporate shareholders getting a trickle of a pittance – but nowadays they don’t.
“all the normals on crew and makeup and wardrobe, and the effects shops and musical score and recording studios, ”
And guess who they’re getting the AI to replace first? A fellow consultant on my current project mentioned that a friend he went to college with started out in software and then opened a recording studio to do sound production for movies, games, musicians….
He got told by a long term client that he had the lowest bid on a project, and they’d always liked his work, “but we’re going to pull it back in house and use Sora.”
The left is looking for that gotcha moment with their new movies, they want every movie to be another Thelma and Louise. Unfortunately for them they don’t have stars that are appealing anymore, all they have are harpies that parrot their own insanity and perversions. They forgot who their audience is and what that audience likes and wants. So now they flounder and people buy and watch the old stuff. Tough women you want, watch some of the old movies and even not so old. Ripley? Sarah Connors? Maureen O’Hara? Lauren Bacall? They made movies by being tough without any super powers, they were just human. Oh yes there are many more, and you can find their dvd’s everywhere. Screw Hollywood until they come to there senses. Pass the popcorn, a feel a “Thin Man” marathon coming on, Myna Loy another hottie from the past.
“It should be normal for the president to fire everyone int he bureaucracy and hire his guys.”
He doesn’t even get to do that with his own nominees. Unless you remove Senate confirmation entirely, you’ll have UniParty nominees.
Anyone remember when Vichy Mitchy and Snake in the Grassley refused to allow President Trump to fire Sessions? Pepperidge Farm (and the internet) remember.
https://www.gopbriefingroom.com/index.php?topic=273614.0
Reality bites.