Month: November 2019

The Rust Belt Stands Pat

photog Current Events, On-Line Article Reviews, Reviews, Trump , , , ,

Back in May I read Salena Zito’s book “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics,” in which she interviewed a varied sample of Trump voters in the rust belt and identified why they abandoned the Democrat Party.

Well, in this article she went and checked back with these same voters to see if they had changed their minds.  Apparently their resolve is even stronger than in 2016 that Trump is their man.  And this jibes with the polls taken in these vitally important states.  Formerly, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were part of the Great Lakes Blue Wall that would prevent any Republican from ever entering the White House again.  But instead of adding Ohio to that Blue Wall it looks like Minnesota may be turning red instead.That would complete the Red Wall from Lake Erie to Lake Superior.  Or let us say from the Atlantic Ocean in Philadelphia to the Mississippi River at Lake Itasca in Minnesota.  Apparently the demographic future we’ve all heard so much about isn’t quite there yet.

Zito is a personal writer.  Her story isn’t about statistics.  It’s about individual people.  It’s like the Trump rallies.  There’s a personal connection.

 

Saint Greta’s Chinese Children’s Crusade Beckons (or Killing Two Birds with One Stone)

photog Current Events, Fake Science , ,

I just want to start off this post with a simple statement.  Greta Thunberg is emblematic of all that is wrong with our age.  Here is a confused mentally unstable child who instead of being instructed in the realities of her world is encouraged by her parents and teachers to indulge her flights of fancy and assume a mantle of wisdom with which she harangues her elders for providing her with the modern advantages that allow us to avoid cold, starvation and exhaustion, things that were the realities of human life for untold thousands of years before renaissance civilization discovered the secrets of modern physics.  This post is dedicated to mocking the world view that attaches importance to the petulant ranting and raving of this disturbed and disturbing child.

I recently read a report that China will add enough new coal fired power plants in 2020 to increase their electrical output by the total amount currently produced by all of Europe.  That means even if Europeans stopped using power completely and went to live in caves and kept themselves warm by donning squirrel pelts the Chinese would already have added back all that power usage in CO2 emitting coal for them.  Hmmmm!

This really got me thinking.  I’ll bet Saint Greta of Thunberg hasn’t heard about this.  She’s not going to like it.  That’s a lot of CO2.  I’ll bet she’d really like to start a children’s crusade in China to shut down those coal fired plants.  Why I’ll bet that there are millions of Chinese environmentalists just waiting for Saint Greta to show up in Beijing and harangue the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee on their use of coal.  Being screeched at by a stunted Scandinavian kobold; isn’t that something that the highly principled leadership of a transparent and humanistic administration like the Chinese Politburo would relish?  Hmmm!

But how to make this happen?  I mean Saint Greta is really busy practicing her scowling-in-a-mirror exercises, and the Chinese really have their hands full with helping out the happy citizens of Hong Kong.  How can the gig be set up?

Then it hit me.  Let’s tell her it’s the United States that’s adding the coal plants and she’ll be over here like a shot.  But what we can do is replace her billionaire’s catamaran with a Shanghai junk and send her on a voyage of discovery as she sails through the Suez Canal, around India and into the Pacific Ocean on her way to straightening out Xi Jinping.  That two-year trek, which will include scurvy, rickets, interaction with pirates and very little in the way of modern annoyances like electricity and modern sanitary conditions, should give her a lot to think about.

And when she finally arrives in China, she can spread the gospel of renewable resources and let the people there know that they were much better off back in the Cultural Revolution when they survived on their daily five ounces of rice and their buffalo dung heating stoves.  That should really turn them around on this whole industrial revolution thing.

And once she’s converted the countryside and marches into Beijing in front of her army of millions, I’m sure Saint Greta will be installed in the Forbidden City on a Throne of Jade and televised across the Middle Kingdom with her patented “How Dare You!” speech.  Oh yeah, there’s nothing tyrannical despots like better than to be upbraided in front of their slaves by a demented dwarf.

But what would really make the whole thing special is if Saint Greta could find the authentic life style she is hoping to give to the rest of us.  I’m sure the Chinese would be thrilled to lead Saint Greta to their neighbor North Korea and let her see what the glories of pre-industrial life are really like.  If you’ve ever seen those night time satellite photos of the Korean peninsula you’ll know exactly how well the North Koreans are following Saint Greta’s example.  And with respect to food, if memory serves me correctly Greta actually resembles the way a North Korean looks after living on the diet and lifestyle fostered in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

And after Saint Greta has had a chance to reflect on the virtues of starvation and frostbite maybe President Trump can use her as a bargaining chip in his negotiations with Kim Jong Un.  He can threaten to send wave after wave of demented dwarves into North Korea if they won’t come to terms on their weapons program.  Yep, it’s a win-win for sure.

 

Rudy Giuliani Want the Senate to Investigate Biden

photog Current Events, On-Line Article Reviews, Reviews , ,

Rudy Giuliani is a pitbull when he talks to the press.  He won’t let them buffalo him and he always has the right answers.  Listen to him here refuting the official narrative and getting his story out.  He says he has the goods on Biden and Son in the Ukraine.  Testimony like this would be amazing.  Let’s hope the Senate doesn’t weasel out of it.

 

 

 

Guest Contributor – The Fat Man – Movie Review – Joker – Todd Philips

photog Guest Contributors, Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews, The Fat Man , , , ,

The movie, Joker, could be easily dismissed as an attempt to extend on the successful formula established by Christopher Nolan in his turn at the Batman franchise, launched in 2005. But beyond the constant “dark” refrain, not enough was said about Nolan’s reformulation of the DC comic book character. When Tim Burton in 1989 first attempted to bring the character to film his movie temperament and the last shreds of maturity that remained in American popular culture required that he make it in its essence, comic. It’s true he leavened the film with instances of “adult” gravity, but no more than in his other comic book movies.

But Nolan did something that it took the success of the ‘80s and ‘90’s Batman movies to make possible, play Batman straight. By 2005 struck upon the formula for converting the comic book into a “serious” movie by making the films “dark”, thereby removing the tongue from Batman’s cheek. Nolan took the comic out of the comic book hero and the films became blockbusters. I suspect they did for the same reason space movies from 2001 to Star Wars were also so successful. The baby boomers and later Gen X-ers had a choice between the narcissistic atavism of their peers or withdrawal. The comic book fans were always outsiders so it was easy to choose withdrawal, and so they did, in droves. What has been truly remarkable was that most of the rest of America follow along, in even bigger droves.

But what does it mean to movies and America to make comic book movies without the comic? One might say that comic books, at least of the super hero variety, always played straight. They were more like the serial genre fiction that anticipated both the “soaps” and the novel. Fair enough, but the illustrations, primitive graphics and primary colors, were a comic proscenium, perhaps helping to suspend disbelief for the comic book reader, but not his sense of humor. Theatrical movies have no such proscenium, they have long been understood to be psychological, subconscious, in their effect. They do not afford the comic book distance, the healthy separation. We needed Burton’s fantasy gloss to create distance from the film. But Nolan’s success argues that this view was wrong, or at least obsolete, that audiences yearned for the Dark Knight’s subconscious payload, unmediated by winks at the camera.

Todd Phillips’ new contribution to the franchise, Joker, suggests that we might still need the winks. The movie attempts to use psychological clichés and bathos to establish a “natural” backstory to the one-dimensional villain. The attempt exposes the naiveté behind Nolan’s original reformulation. What is a joker, can one have a backstory? Lear’s fool never needed one. Jokers are allegorical place holders for dramatic elements like plot and action, even fate, but never character. They are anti-characters, devices, not anti-heroes. Ah, but Phillips would counter, I wrote Borat and most people thought he was real. Isn’t character fluid? Yes, it is fluid but not superficial. But what about the epics, they were full of the very same placeholders? Wasn’t Hephaestus allegorical? The answer is Hephaestus may be a myth and allegorical to us, indistinguishable from a joker, but to the Greeks he was a god.

Is Joker a god, is Batman or Thor, to us? The mind reels. So, Phillips may have wasted much of his runtime trying to pose Joachim Phoenix’s anorexic torso to evoke St. Sabastian and paint the decay of ‘70’s New York in renaissance yellows and gold. The adolescent retreat in the face of adulthood beaten by the American movie going public, however, is not a Christian martyrdom. Phillips’ attempt to tell Joker’s story as such is the latest landing in the vertiginous descent of American society into an arrested underworld. Must we now analyze the cardboard cutouts populating our comic book movies first as patients, to remove any moral question of their actions, then as victims, to instead apply a moral test to “society” and finally as martyrs, to establish our newly reconstructed deities? Foucault would be proud. This mental ritual has become so routinized by academic and political rehearsal the director seems unaware of its emptiness.

And that can be the only verdict reached for Nolan’s vision and Phillips’ realization. Empty. This explains the need to go to further lengths, to go darker, with each successive relaunch. The writers, producers and directors, even the actors, know they must work harder each cycle to pump up the crowd and distract from the inevitable descent. But by trying to make serious our comic book carnival posters, the Hollywood hucksters have drained the fun from their movies, and our laughs on the rollercoaster.

Michael Anton Analyzes the Impeachment Strategy and Summarizes the Possible Outcomes

photog Current Events, On-Line Article Reviews, Reviews, Trump , , , , , ,

In his sixty two hundred (!) word essay “The Empire Strikes Back” Michael Anton narrates the Deep State and Democrat controlled Media’s Ukraine-gate maneuver and how it’s supposed to justify impeachment and removal of President Trump.  Suffice it to say it is ponderous to read through the machinations they are going through to justify their treason and depressing to realize what nakedly illegal practices of their own they are trying to protect with the smokescreen of impeachment.  The Deep State and the Elites feed from the trough of federal spending that is funneled to lawless countries like the Ukraine.

I won’t attempt to even summarize his essay.  If you have an interest in these matters, which I do, you might read it.  But I’d like to quote some ideas from his conclusion.  Anton thinks that it is unlikely that even the craven Senate Republicans would be stupid enough to convict the President.  But if they did, he had this to say about the consequences:

“And it might. It worked against Nixon. It almost worked against Reagan. But let’s be clear: if it works this time, there are only three possible outcomes:

First, deplorable-Americans will meekly accept President Trump’s removal, in which case the country as a self-governing republic will be finished; the elite coup will have succeeded, their grip on power cemented. With all due respect to the vice president, this is not the way—these are not the people on the backs of whom—he should wish to enter the Oval Office. And I am confident he will not.

Second, deplorable-Americans will revolt at the ballot box and punish the elites in a series of elections that put in power serious statesmen intent on rooting out corruption and reestablishing democratic accountability.

Or, third, deplorable-Americans’ attempt to set their government aright via ballots will not avail, as it has not so often in the past; they will realize that it has not, conclude that it never will, and resolve by any means necessary to get out from under the thumbs of people who so obviously hate them and wish to rule them without their consent.”

That third outcome is the Dissident Right’s refrain, “we can’t vote our way out of this.”

And as to the outcome for the Senate Republicans if they did convict the President:

“Oh, and let’s also be clear about something else: if the Republicans “collude” with this sham and force the removal of a president whose approval rating within his party hovers north of 90%, and whose voters scarcely understand—much less agree with—the “case” against him, they will destroy the party forever. I don’t often make predictions, because I’m not good at it, but this one is easy. They will have removed all doubt that they are anything but ruling class apparatchiks, adjuncts, and flunkies of the administrative state from which they take orders.

And let none of them dare gaslight us with the trite dismissal that Trump’s removal would not overturn the 2016 election results because the president’s replacement was also elected. Trump’s intraparty enemies hate him, and wish to be rid of him, precisely because he is not one of them, because he stands for, and represents, something fundamentally different. Getting rid of him is, for them, a way to get back to business as usual. But there is no going back. A few of them in safely anti-Trump states or districts may survive the president’s removal but the vast majority will not. A new party—a Trumpian populist-nationalist party—will arise from the Republican Party’s ashes. More blue-collar in economic orientation and less in hock to coastal and financial elites, it will do a better job of attracting Democrats and independents—possibly pointing the way to the first real national majority coalition since the Reagan era. And that new party will not welcome the traitors, who will have to make do with contributorships on CNN and MSNBC. Assuming any slots are available.”

This assessment seems quite likely.  And the Senator I’d most enjoy seeing bounced out of his seat is Mitt Romney.  I would hope that Utah would enact a recall law specifically to remove him if he were stupid enough to aid in the removal of a popular president.  In fact, even if the conviction is unsuccessful, if Romney votes for it, I hope the people of his state remove him for that alone.

Anton worked for the Trump White House in addition to being an academic.  He is almost uniquely positioned to discuss the reality of our present situation.  What I find interesting is that even a mainstream and serious commentator such as Anton is now pointing to the apocalyptic realities of what would happen if the Uni-party Establishment decides they can overturn the 2016 election results by removing a popular president.  What that tells me is that the intelligentsia on the actual right has reached the same boiling point as the rest of us.  When a policy wonk joins the Deplorables it won’t be long before the pitchforks and the torches start showing up on the scene.