Boris Johnson is pushing to get the job and supposedly someone will be installed by the end of July. Hopefully he and Nigel Farage can coordinate a way to get the Brexit finally done!
Category: Reviews
Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items
Over at the Hill Former FBI A.D. of Intelligence Kevin Brock Says Barr is After the CIA
Brock thinks things are moving along quickly and the targets are the Intelligence Agencies that fed the FBI the phony dirt that their operatives produced.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/444802-ag-barr-puts-former-intel-bosses-on-notice
Let’s hope he is right.
Brexit Party to the Rescue?
I very rarely read or link to National Review anymore. After their descent into NeverTrump madness, I mostly ignore them. But this article on Brexit is very informative and actually hopeful. If you’re interested in Brexit I recommend you read it.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/brexit-party-poses-an-existential-threat-to-the-tories/
The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 31 – The Trade-Ins
John and Marie Holt are an elderly couple and John has a medical condition that causes extreme and chronic pain. In this future, medical science has advanced to the point that replacement bodies are commercially available for the price of $5,000. The couple are interviewed by the salesman and he walks them through the displays of attractive young bodies that are available. And he explains their satisfaction guarantee. Within the first week if the patient changes his mind his old body is returned.
But when the Holts explain that they only have $5,000 the salesman apologetically informs them that government regulations forbid anything but a cash in advance payment. Marie tells John to have the procedure done for him first and she will wait. But John refuses saying that it will be all or none. The Holts leave greatly disappointed.
John finds a shady high stakes poker game and goes into it with his $5,000. He loses most of his money and in the last hand he can play the dealer asks him why he is risking his money in a game he obviously has no skill at. He tells him his story. Feeling pity for John he lets him win back his $5,000 and leave with what he started.
Suffering badly from his condition John relents and agrees to have his procedure first and earn the money afterward for Marie’s new body. When John returns after his operation he is elated by his health and youth and exults to Marie about all the things they will do. Every week an anniversary and every night a honeymoon. And at first Marie shares his joy but then when she embraces him and realizes how old she will be compared to this youth she is shocked and filled with despair.
But John sees the look in her eyes and immediately goes back to the medical facility and has the procedure reversed. He tells Marie if the price of being with her is pain then so be it. John and Marie leave the building together with their love intact and their understanding of life deepened.
Joseph Schildkraut plays John and he is a favorite of mine for the comical villain he played in “The Shop Around the Corner.” This Serling written story is a terribly sentimental drama. Rod has shamelessly tugged on our heart strings with this story. But I must confess I enjoyed it anyway. B+.
Sharyl Attkisson Defines the Possible Reasons for the Russia-Gate Travesty
Basically the Deep State is made up of either criminals or blind idiots. Seems about right.
The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 30 – Hocus-Pocus and Frisby
Now this is more like it. After those last two clunkers I was wondering if Season Three was all done. But this will do.
Frisby (played by the unique Andy Devine) is a general store owner somewhere in the southwest named Frisby. He is a spinner of tall tales and a terrible braggart. According to him he has invented just about everything and has studied almost every field of science and engineering. The customers of his establishment (one of whom is played by Howard McNear who was Floyd the Barber on the Andy Griffith Show) tolerate his lies because while he is pontificating, they are able to steal small pieces of candy behind his back. We are subjected to an almost constant barrage of these tall tales in the first scene of the show. Then a car pulls up to Frisby’s gas pump and while he fills their tank and regales them with the story of how he invented the rear mounted engine in their car the two men identify him as the man they are looking for.
Later on, as Frisby is closing his store he hears voices in the dark telling him to walk down the road to embark on a great adventure. When he timidly refuses, he is levitated into the air and toward the destination that he was invited to. On the desert floor we see a flying saucer (of course the one from Forbidden Planet) and the same voice invites him to enter. Once inside, we see the two men from the car we saw earlier surrounded by other crew members. They tell Frisby that they are aliens come to Earth to select a superior specimen for their menagerie. After hearing of all his exploits and accomplishments they assume he is one of the most remarkable humans alive. Frisby tells them that all the stories are lies. But they do not understand the concept. His lies have finally caught up with him.
When Frisby tries to leave they block his way. When he resists and punches one of them in the face, the face cracks and is seen to be a mask hiding a strange non-human visage. Seeing this Frisby faints. When he comes to, the unmasked alien talks to him and declares that they will be leaving Earth momentarily. To console himself Frisby begins playing his harmonica. But the music has a toxic effect on the aliens and as they stagger back from the sound Frisby dashes for the door which they gladly open to allow his exit. The saucer takes off to allow their escape from the “Death Sound” of Frisby’s instrument and he heads back to his store. When he gets there the customers are throwing a birthday party for him. He tries to tell them of his adventure but they laugh it off as just one of his wilder stories.
It doesn’t get much goofier than this one. But it’s a great farce. A-
Tyler Over at the Portly Politico Has his Review of John Carpenter’s “They Live”
No one can say I’m not a patron of the arts. Rowdy Roddy Piper takes on the Progressives and the Aliens! Imagine if he had had Stallone and Schwarzenegger to help.
20MAY2019 – American Greatness Post of the Day – Notes on the Great Realignment by Roger Kimball
I haven’t even finished this essay but I can already recommend it. Kimball looks at the Never-Trumpers’ reaction to President Trump meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and then talks about the reality of Orban himself. https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/18/notes-on-the-great-realignment/
Things going on in Europe are important because they reinforce the global nature of the attack on normalcy going on everywhere by our beneficent masters. Coordinating with our allies in Europe and elsewhere must be especially frightening to the Hive.
Max Boot seems to primarily exist as an example of hypocritical idiocy. He can’t actually believe the things he says but he is stupid enough to believe we’ll buy his lies.
The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 29 – Four O’Clock
Oliver Crangle lives alone in a cramped cluttered dark apartment and has a parrot that periodically squawks out the word nut. He is near-sighted almost to the point of blindness from obsessively documenting all his enemies and spends his day “investigating” people that he reads about in the paper or sees on television or meets in the street. He categorizes everyone and any that he deems evil, he harasses and attacks. If he thinks that the clerk in the post office is a communist then he’ll call up his boss and report him. If he reads about an accident victim that died in a hospital, he’ll find out who the attending physician was and report him to the hospital as negligent.
The wife of the doctor who he has attempted to vilify comes to Crangle’s apartment to find out why he is doing it. When Crangle asks whether the hospital is ready to discharge her husband she tells him that the hospital doesn’t believe the charge. But she says her husband is a sensitive man and the abuse is wounding him. But Crangle has no sympathy.
Later an FBI agent shows up and interviews Crangle about a complaint he has sent to the bureau about communist infiltration. While talking to the agent Crangle reveals his new plan. Crangle says that by using only his will he will turn all the evil people in the world into two-foot-tall midgets at exactly four o’clock pm. The agent tells Crangle to seek psychiatric help. Crangle reviles the agent and tells him that he too will be one of the midgets.
At four o’clock Crangle is reduced to two feet in height.
The previous episode, The Little People, and this present one are about height. But I guess that’s a metaphor for moral stature. This is a character study about a 1960s version of a social justice warrior. I wonder what Rod would think of how his side in the culture war has mutated into the thing he hated. Interesting inversion. The episode is a little thin for my tastes. Your mileage may vary. C.
16MAY2019 – American Greatness Post of the Day – Our Modern Satyricon – VDH
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist by training so it is perhaps unsurprising that he finds the analogies between Petronius’s Satyricon and the cultural rot of our own age.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/15/our-modern-satyricon/
But I still praise him for the accuracy of his point by point comparison. Comparing the present age to post-republican Rome has become a common trope but Hanson points out just how accurate it is. Nothing new here, just the scholarly expertise of the author pointing out the exactness of the analogy.