Category: Current Events

The Boys and I Give Superman (1978) a Try

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Because of the new Superman movie coming out I had a showing of the 1978 Christopher Reeve version for the two younger grandsons.  I was curious to see how they reacted to the somewhat slow startup to this version.  After all I think half the movie is gone before Superman actually dons the suit.  But from all appearances they liked it.

Now the youngest one is a very analytical viewer of science fiction and fantasy so he gave me a short lecture on why kryptonite kills Superman.  Come to think of it he gave me several lectures about various esoteric aspects of the Man of Steel; how he could fly, how he got from one galaxy to another so quickly, why he could never die of old age, how he was able to handle people without killing them by accident.  It was very interesting to find out he had worked out all of these theories in just the time since the beginning of the movie.

I could sense the greatest annoyance with the movie when Lois Lane was on the screen.  Apparently, the love story wasn’t intensely popular with this part of the audience.  But somehow, they soldiered through.  By the time Superman was flying around Earth at ludicrous speed to turn back time and save Lois from death I think they were prepared for the end.  I’m not sure they felt Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor and Ned Beatty as his mentally challenged henchman were sufficiently serious to be credible enemies for Superman.

But by the time the (extremely long) credits were rolling they seemed to forgive some of the weaknesses of the production and wanted to discuss viewing (at least) Superman 2.  Apparently, they wanted to see the return of General Zod after I hinted that he was much more formidable a foe than Luthor.  So maybe we’ll have a second Superman feature this month.

It was funny seeing this movie for the first time in forty-seven years.  What struck me most was how odd Margot Kidder was as Lois.  The rest of the actors and actresses came across as much more professional.  Kidder seemed almost like a fish out of water.  Maybe that was the vibe they were going for.  Probably the worst acting and dialog was Marlon Brando as Jor-El; Superman’s Kryptonian father.  All of the exposition and lecturing about his duty to help humans and his fate is a bit boring.  But I guess some introduction is necessary to establish how he ends up as the man flying around in the suit.

My impression of Christopher Reeve in the movie is very positive.  He brings enormous likeability to the character and he does the comedy part of the role very deftly.  As far as the special effects in the film, this was 1978.  All of the effects are non-CGI.  To a modern audience some of them are less than overwhelming.  There is a scene where Superman is causing an avalanche to stop a flooded river from washing away a town.  But the scene is so obviously done with a miniature set using some sand and pebbles that it’s kind of silly.  But that couldn’t be helped back then.

All in all, the boys and I gave a thumbs up to Superman (1978).  Now bring on General Zod and “Planet Hooston!”

We’re Fresh Out of “Give a Damn.”

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In the last three weeks there have been two opinion pieces in the New York Times that, to me, acknowledge that the Left’s narrative is starting to become untenable.

The first is called, “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back.” is from a fifty-something divorced career woman bemoaning that men no longer are interested in bringing her out to expensive restaurants.  She goes through this whole long description of a scene in one of these restaurants where all the patrons are women either in groups or alone and men aren’t present at all.  We hear all about how men used to value escorting “high-status” women out into society to signal their own high status as the possessor of such a trophy.  She finishes up with an embarrassing plea for all the good men to come back and be of service to her.

The second one is called, “Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?” and is by a woke loser who up until recently gave his brother-in-law the cold shoulder because he didn’t want a COVID vaccine.  His disdain was palpable in his writing and the only reason he relented is because he wanted to take up surfing and his brother-in-law is an excellent surfer and was generous enough not to reciprocate his callous political snobbery.  But the lefty snob makes the whole thing sound as if it’s his enlightened attitude that suddenly allowed him to lower himself to feigning friendship with his wife’s brother.  And all the shots he takes at his brother-in-law.  He’s only a lowly electrician while the writer is an Ivy League graduate and obviously part of the elite few.  He ends by sagely noting that by sharing this surfing hobby he is opening up a space where he can interact with even someone as benighted as this ignorant tradesman, who also happens to be part of his family.

So, what do these two articles tell me about the current state of the Left.  What it seems to signal to me is that the cancel culture they constructed to keep normal people out of their little echo chamber has worked a little too well.  They’ve excluded all the normal people and they’re trapped inside with just the psychopaths that really believe the stuff they’ve been gaslighting the world with.

The women watched one season too many of “Sex and the City” and convinced themselves that they would always be in demand and men would be beating down the doors to squire them around Gotham City for the chance to have geriatric sex with them.  So now instead of being a doting grandmother and spending her golden years with husband and family, she’s a lonely, frustrated single women hoping for some chump to show up and pick up the tab one last time before she checks out of the Hotel California.  They kicked all the men out of their club because they didn’t need them.  They could play girl boss and not need a man to be happy.  That is until they stopped showing up.

The guy with the surfer electrician for a brother-in-law was the typical COVID cancel-culturist.  He says, “Being unfriendly to people who turned down the vaccine felt like the right thing to do. How else could we motivate them to mend their ways?  I wasn’t the only one thinking this. A 2021 essay for USA Today declared, “It’s time to start shunning the ‘vaccine hesitant.’” An L.A. Times piece went further, arguing that to create “teachable moments,” it may be necessary to mock some anti-vaxxers’ deaths.”  Pretty close to that female pediatrician who mocked the Texas flood victims because they voted for Trump.

But now this Ivy League genius wants to add some human interest to his boring life and finds out that this rube related to his wife is accomplished at the thing that he wants to do.  And on a dime, he switches on his “live and let live” mode and now we’re all just one big happy family!  Funny how that happens after they lose a big election.  Real funny.

So, the New York Times is hinting that maybe we should “all just get along.”  It’s a funny thing about that.  It’s almost like I don’t care anymore what they want.  They tortured us for four years and called us everything under the sun.  They did everything they could to force us to kowtow to COVID and trans-madness and there is no inflation and “Biden is sharp as a whip” and every other crazy thing they could think of.  And now it’s, “let’s let bygones be bygones.”  Yeah, I don’t think it’s gonna happen.  We’re fresh out of “give a damn.”

Reaction or Revolution

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All my life I have had to listen to the analogy of a pendulum to describe how our politics behaves.  The theory goes each generation and each decade has its zeitgeist and after the culture swings to the Left, in the next decade or generation it comes back to the Right.

From experience I’d say there are several problems with this theory.  The biggest one is that no matter how much the population wanted a rightward correction the Uni-party has blocked it pretty effectively for the last forty-five years or so.  So even if there is some kind of periodic swing in popular political and cultural attitudes it’s never been allowed to influence real life.  Instead, what we have seen is a ratchet effect where at worst nothing happens during conservative periods and during periods of liberal ascendancy things lurch horribly leftward.

And so, we find ourselves after almost half a century of forced radicalism living in a toxic environment where every part of society is ruled by laws and institutions that directly and indirectly damage our society.  Our children are taught lies and left ignorant of useful knowledge.  The relations between the sexes have been poisoned and families crippled.  Relations between races have been sown with hatred and misinformation and our cities have become dangerous and mismanaged morasses of impoverished, lazy and drug-addled misfits.  And one party pushes these policies strenuously to make these conditions universal and the other party allows them to succeed through sheer greed and stupidity.

And finally, finally in the last nine years one politician has admitted that all this is going on and has offered to help fix this.  And he has been blocked by every power of both political parties and the permanent bureaucracy by any means available (up to and including assassination).

Now some people say Trump and his efforts are doomed to failure because eventually the Democrats will regain power and do whatever it takes to permanently block any further shift to the Right.  These people are of the opinion that violent revolution is the only way to break free of the Left.  These people go under various names.  The Dissident Right seems to be the latest iteration for their designation as a group.  They’re typically reticent to go into specifics when it comes to how the revolution will proceed.  Maybe because they have no idea either.  But from what I can glean they assume that at a certain point some braver souls will manage to draw a line in the sand and force a final break between some area of the country and the central government.  Now recently there has been some talk about the opposite situation.  Because of Trump’s deportation efforts the Left Coast (California, Oregon and Washington) have talked about seceding from the United States.  Of course that would be the best outcome.  I feel that the rest of the country would agree to this split and losing that much leftist population would leave the remaining states lopsidedly conservative and permanently governed by the Right.

Of course, the other portion of the Right (civic nationalists and the rest) hope that something short of secession could be achieved that would still solve all the dysfunction mentioned above.  They feel that the naturally center/right nature of the majority of the American people could over time correct much of this mismanagement and correct our laws and institutions.

So those are the two futures that are currently imagined for our side.  The third future is the Left’s current trajectory, leftist disaster.

I’ve lived for the last sixty plus years watching this battle unfold.  In 2012 I became convinced that the whole thing was hopeless.  Since 2016 I’ve seen reason to hope.  If one man has been able to upend the whole Washington racket, I could believe that a coalition of people who want to fix this could succeed.

Now I didn’t say will succeed, but might.  Currently I’m hoping to hang on long enough to see it happen in real time.  Stay tuned.

When I Was Your Age Television Was Called Books

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When I was a kid, I was a science fiction fanatic.  I went to the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and pored over the shelves.  I read everything they had and then I went to the next closest library and found what they had that was different.  And so on and so forth.  Until I reached the main branch; “Grand Army Plaza.”  And then there was no more.  So, all that was left until a new book made its way to the shelves was the monthly edition of Analog; the science fiction magazine where new stuff was to be found.  Sometimes there was a novel serialization by some well-known author like Heinlein or Frederik Pohl or Joe Haldeman or Gordon Dickson.  But more often there were short stories by anyone and everyone.  Not all of them were great or even good but they were still fun to read.  I had my own subscription for a number of years.  Then I found Camera Girl and I had too much to do with work and school to read anything but textbooks.  But I still saw the Analog covers at the local magazine rack down by the local El stop of the NYC subway.

But once I left New York, I confess I completely lost track of Analog.  I guess I just assumed that it (and its competitors; Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) were still out there chugging along even without me.

Turns out I was wrong.  Apparently, they’re all dead or dying.  The market for short science fiction has completely dried up.  Even the anthologies that used to collect these stories and sell them as books have stopped making money.

I guess none of this is surprising to folks who understand how the mass marketing of entertainment has changed.  I guess it only makes sense that the same generations that refuse to buy music and refuse to buy movies would also refuse to buy books and magazines.

Apparently, what they will buy are video games.  Now that reminds me of an old joke from an old movie.  There’s a scene at the beginning of the movie “The Princess Bride” where the grandfather played by Peter Falk is trying to read a story to his grandson who is playing a video game and objecting that instead of a book he wants to watch television so Falk says, “When I was your age television was called books!”

So, I’m at least two generations too late to imagine Americans reading short stories.  Now isn’t that amazing.  Or is it just paying for books that’s obsolete?  I think it must be the latter.  I understand there are free websites where authors provide their stories to consumers and they support these writers somewhat indirectly through Patreon or other means.  I guess this could be the new economy.  It seems as improbable as the world of the “Matrix” where human beings acting as bio-batteries power the cyber world they dream through.

Maybe I’d better find one of these sites and see if I can get these penniless zoomers to read my stuff.  I think I might see if I can play this three-penny opera thing that’s growing up in this brave new world.

Those Damn Gutians

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I was reading an old edition of H. G. Wells’ “The Outline of History” today.  The book is over a century old but in surprisingly good shape.  Well, anyway, Wells speculates that the pattern of nomadic herdsmen invading and conquering settled farming communities goes all the way back to Mesopotamia and the Semitic tribes raiding the Sumerian cities.

From what I remember the Sumerians are believed to be the first farmers.  And that goes back at least six thousand years ago.  That brings us all the way back to the neolithic.  So, for our whole history as “civilized” creatures we have been battling against the steppe barbarians just to keep the food that we grew ourselves.

And that brings to mind the movie “Seven Samurai” where the farmers pay samurai to fight off the bandits instead of handing over their harvest.  The problem is that bandits and samurai are almost indistinguishable depending on the circumstances.  If you think about it whether you give your tithe to the church and your “rent” to Charlemagne or have it stolen by the Vikings must have been a relative distinction.  Now, of course, the king didn’t burn your house, rape your wife and take you all as slaves (speaking by and large) but he did make it awfully difficult to get through a long cold winter.

So maybe we’ve come a long way here in the good old U S of A.  But consider.  Suppose you have a small retail store in Brooklyn NY and for the last five years every day several street criminals shoplift several hundred dollars’ worth of your stock from your shelves.  And the police have even stopped arresting these crooks because the George Soros backed District Attorney won’t prosecute them and won’t keep them behind bars for even a day.  In what sense are you any better off than a Sumerian farmer or a French peasant in Charlemagne’s day?  On paper you have the backing of the United States military, nuclear ICBMs and the New York State penal code in all its multi-volume grandeur.  But in a very real way you’re actually worse off than those ancient examples.

At least the Sumerian and French peasants were allowed to try and resist their marauders.  If they could organize around a local king or nobleman, they might successfully fight off their attackers.  But in Brooklyn if you took up arms (metaphorically of course, guns are strictly forbidden) and arrested the perps yourself, you’d probably be prosecuted by that same District Attorney for any and every bogus charge he could make up.  And God forbid the thieves were injured during the arrest.  You’d never see the light of day again.

We are reaching a point where the breakdown of civilization in parts of our country will make it impossible for people in the other parts of the country to do business with them.  The risk to life and limb and the losses in capital will make it impossible for people in the safer parts of the country to imagine walking into these death traps.  In fact, it’s already happening.  Chain stores like Rite-Aid and CVS are quickly closing down their branches in places like Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, and Oakland, California and New York City.  This will further degrade the environment of these places and hasten the day when anyone with any sense runs away from these hellholes.

I’ll close with the thoughts of the ancient Sumerians when discussing the marauders who afflicted their civilization:

“The Gutians, people who do not know permanent settlement, with human feelings but the instincts of a dog, body shape like that of a monkey, Enlil sent them from the mountains, like locusts they are covering the entire land.”

Well, apparently some things never change.

Real Hate

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More than a hundred Americans lose their lives in a weather catastrophe.  And what is the reaction of some of their fellow Americans:

Now this a female pediatrician.  If you were to guess what profession and which sex would score highest in empathy for children, I’d assume she’d be near the top of the list.  But in her case empathy is very clearly a politically dependent emotion.  Twenty-seven children wiped off the face of the Earth by a raging flood in her home state is merely a good way to score political points on a man thousands of miles away in Washington.  Well, it’s a remarkable insight into the humanity of these Democrat activists.

Here are some more reactions from Democrats in Texas:

I guess it’s some consolation that the pediatrician’s employer terminated her for this horrifically cruel and psychotic crowing over the deaths of children.  But it does provide a reference point when considering how we stand as “fellow citizens.”  You watch these videos and you are hearing the true feelings of these people.  If our children die then we are getting what we deserve.  When those two Minnesotan law-makers were attacked by a psychotic man no one was saying “they got what they deserved.”  No normal person would be stupid enough to say something like that.  Displaying your inhumanity like that is reserved for psychopaths who have no empathy and don’t even know how to fake it.  Normal people understand that regardless of differences on political policy we all have human feelings and wishing evil on children based on ideology is a sickness.

But here are people totally comfortable doing it.  One of them was actually a political leader in Houston at one time.  Now I make an exception for Rosie O’Donnell.  She is a well-documented imbecile and allowance has to be made for those who have been afflicted in this way.  But anyone of somewhat normal intelligence (and a medical doctor should fit that description) who wishes ill on innocent children should be shunned as a pariah.

Of late the Left has been rallying their psychopaths.  Antifa and especially the transgender core of antifa have been taking to the streets armed now with guns and knives.  They’ve decided they can come directly against ICE and other law enforcement agents.  Luckily, they are ill-equipped to be shock-troops and in the last few days a bunch have been arrested for attempted murder and one of them got himself killed when opening fire on peace officers.

But apparently not all of the psychopaths are armed with guns and knives.  Some, as shown above, are armed with hate of a particularly disgusting sort.  Laughing at the death of someone else’s children is so callous, so subhuman, that it deserves a special recognition.  And as it stands, there is one.  Dante identified the seventh level of hell for that kind of cruelty and specifically for those violent against their neighbors they were submersed according to their level of guilt in a river of boiling blood.  Well, that sounds about right.  Mocking the pain of a parent who has lost a child should be recognized with something awful.  Let’s hope Dante had the details right.

A Trumpian Refinancing

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The angry voices on the Left have been shrieking non-stop since the passing of Trump’s spending bill.  They’re complaining about many things.  Some real and some imaginary.  Among the imaginary things are claims that the bill will lead to millions of deaths.  Apparently, Alligator Alcatraz and other anti-illegal immigration programs will cause death and destruction to be rained on the heads of all kinds of good people.  I listened to a video where an unhinged middle-aged woman ranted for about ten minutes in a deranged strangling snarl full of obscenities and bile about how Alligator Alcatraz was a Nazi death camp.  Now granted, there was a certain entertainment value to her act.  But that wore off after about a minute and a half.  So, the fake complaints about the bill are somewhat tedious.

One of the real complaints is that this bill will add three trillion dollars to the debt over ten years.  Now this is a true statement.  This bill will not reduce the deficit.  Our country is spending much more money than it takes in from taxes.  This growing debt is a very serious threat to our future.  But Trump like every other politician knows that even balancing the budget (never mind paying down the debt) would throw the economy into a recession.  So, he plays the same game as all the rest of them.  He stimulates the economy by increasing the debt.  And he’s right.  If the economy stalls the Republicans will be voted out in the House and Senate and the Democrats will regain power.

So, is our problem insoluble?  It seems so.

The only way I can see to fix the problem is to reduce government expenditures drastically and then pay down the debt over the course of decades.  But how can the Republicans remain in power for decades?  They can’t.  I guess we could default on the debt but that would bankrupt not only countless American citizens but would also plunge the global finance system into worse than chaos.  It might even cause a world war.

So, what we are left with is the current status quo.  The debt will continue to grow until it becomes so unmanageable that hyperinflation solves the problem for us.  The dollar will become worthless and nobody will want to buy bonds from us.  Problem solved.  Of course, that will also spell doom for whichever party is in power when that happens.

I wonder what Donald Trump thinks is the solution.  Maybe he’s got an idea about making a deal.  He’s a man who used “too big to fail” any number of times to renegotiate debt on his shaky business investments; casinos and hotels.  What if Trump tells China and Europe and anyone else holding our debt that unless they renegotiate the interest rates we will simply default on the whole damn thing?  What could they say, no?  I bet they would take the attitude that half a loaf is better than nothing.  Combined with a balanced budget amendment could be a permanent solution to our debt problem.  Maybe this is his big beautiful plan.  After all America is the ultimate example of too big to fail.  Maybe all we need is the art of the deal.

All Things Considered, Considered

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Donald Trump has changed America.  Mr. Trump didn’t shift the Overton Window.  He put a brick through it.  His take on what’s wrong with America isn’t shocking anymore because his view has become the mainstream opinion.

So, all of that is true.  But has he changed America?  Well, yes.  On this and that he’s made changes and they are changes for the better.  His immigration policy and the results he’s getting on deportation are important.  His birthright citizenship fight is historic and if it succeeds it will change the dynamics of immigration into this country.

But how will I gauge whether Donald Trump’s second term is a success or failure?  For me success is permanently defunding PBS and NPR.  That’s the whole thing in a nutshell.  That is the litmus test.  I want David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart laid off by PBS due to lack of funding.  I want to see them on YouTube or Patreon making silly noises whenever someone pledges ten dollars for a super chat or whatever it’s called.  I want Big Bird and Elmo forced to go back to being waiters in the NYC theater district and I want that woman who runs NPR and testified before Congress that there was no bias on her watch, fired and forced to start an Only Fans channel.  Let’s face it.  As long as all of us are still paying for these people to insult and slander us on the public airwaves, we are not winning anything.  We’re just losing less.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I don’t need NPR or PBS to cease to exist.  I absolutely want leftists to have their own echo chambers.  This is a free country (theoretically) and if they want to buy tote bags and overpriced wine from their favorite fake journalists at “All Things Considered” or the “PBS New Hour” then let them go ahead and knock themselves out.  By all means do so.  But let them pay for the damn thing themselves.  They’re always saying how public funding is only like 15% of their total funding.  If that’s the case then they won’t miss our money at all.

But everyone knows that’s not the case.  If they suddenly had to get along without the federal government they would be broke.  Brooks and Capehart wouldn’t be able to afford their bow ties and spats.  And there wouldn’t be any money to fund their hard-hitting exposes on the health benefits of attending drag queen story hour in the Tenderloin.

So that’s it.  Trump can announce that he’s winning so much that people are getting tired of winning but as long as NPR still has journalism hacks in hushed tones declaring the body count from the break up of USAID then I won’t declare him the winner.  He’s just losing slightly less hard.

But I haven’t given up hope.  There’s still a window of opportunity for the bill that defunds these stations to be passed in the Senate.  Sometime in August that bill will expire and our last best chance to kill Sesame Street and fake news will end.  So come on Donald from one kid from the Outer Boroughs to another put your shoulder behind this thing and make us both winners.

On Patriotism

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All week long I’ve been seeing polls on patriotism.  Apparently, the Millennials and Gen Z aren’t patriotic.  Okay.  But why would they be?  Patriotism implies pride in a nation.  But we aren’t a nation.  We’re at least two nations, probably more.  Maybe these younger people are proud of people like them whom they feel are good people who believe in the right things.  And in fact, for many of them the right thing is globalism.  So, the “nation” they believe in isn’t a nation at all.  It’s the borderless “family of humanity.”  Instead of pride in the history and people of this “nation” they are deeply disturbed by the Europeans who settled and built America.  All they see is theft from the indigenous people and the enslavement of the Africans.

So where does that leave the rest of us?  Well obviously, we have no solidarity with people who despise us.  They aren’t our countrymen because they feel no allegiance to this nation.  Their allegiance is to a future in which the memory of this country’s birth and rise are eliminated and anyone who shows up here is just as much an American as people whose families built it.  What we have is the story of America as a legacy for us and our children, at least the children who aren’t in the globalist camp.  We need to pass along the legacy and the understanding of what a remarkable accomplishment the European settlers achieved.  They took a wilderness and turned it into a magnificent patchwork of farmlands and cities and industrial might and communities of strong intelligent people who invented amazing things that had never been seen before in the history of the world.  And made their home the envy of the old world.

Right now, patriotism isn’t something that most people associate with 21st century America.  Maybe it will be necessary for a separation between those who love this country and those who are ashamed of its history.  Maybe we must split into two separate nations before there can be a patriotic rebirth in the United States.  If that happens, I think it would more quickly solve our problems.  It doesn’t appear as if any other ending will provide a solution to the division that has grown up within our ranks.  We no longer believe in the same things.  We no longer are the same people.  We are moving in two opposite directions.  It would only make sense for us to live in separate countries.

Maybe the current battles over deportation of illegal immigrants will inspire California to decide on secession.  It would require a constitutional amendment and possibly more.  But if they were willing, I think the rest of the country would go along gladly.  Who knows?  Maybe the rest of the west coast and the Northeast would join with them.  And Canada could act as a northern link between the coasts and maybe a few other states like Illinois and Minnesota could join them.  It could really work.  They’d be rid of us and we’d be much happier without them.  And then both new entities would be free to come up with their own version of patriotism.  And boy would they differ.