I know the current Democratic Party and its agents, the mainstream media, are immune from self-awareness, but I would think pious reflections on the bravery of the heroes of 9/11 would be so flamingly insincere coming from them that they would just explode from internal and irresolvable inconsistency.
1. Then there’s the NFL…The current demonstrations by NFL players on the field, resuming yesterday as the pro foot ball season “kicked off,” and the leagues’ pandering to them, are, I read in the Times, due to the “killing of George Floyd” and the “shooting of Jacob Blake, and are meant to address “systemic racism” and “police brutality.” However, there is still no evidence that the death of Floyd was a result of racism, and increasing evidence that Officer Chauvin’s admittedly brutal treatment didn’t kill him. As for Blake, he was not profiled or singled out for his race, but confronted because he was threatening a black woman whom he had previously raped and assaulted. Although the investigation isn’t complete, there is a significant chance that no “police brutality” will be found to have occurred in Blake’s shooting.
Meanwhile, David Bernstein identified the following people who were killed as a result of the Black Lives Matter/ antifa riots and looting:
1. Javar Harrell
2. Dave Patrick Underwood
3. Chris Beaty
4. Dorian Murrell
5. Italia Kelly
6. Marquis M. Tousant
7. Marvin Francois
8. John Tiggs
9. Jose Gutierrez
10. Victor Cazares Jr.
11. David Dorn
12. Horace Lorenzo Anderson
13. Tyler Gerth
14. Antonio Mays Jr.
15. Secoriea Turner
16. Jessica Doty Whitaker
17. Aaron Danielson
I don’t call it “The Great Stupid” for nothing.
2. NFL, Part 2. Last night, the 20% crowd at the NFL opener between the Chiefs and the Texans booed either the Texans’ decision to skip the National Anthem (they weren’t sure what to do, we are told), or the nauseating, grandstanding, “moment of unity” that had all of the players locking arms like they were going to plat “Red Rover” rather than football, or both. Good for the Kansas City fans. I don’t want to see the House of Representatives play football in the Capitol, and I don’t care to see NFL players making political statements on the gridiron.
3. The second most significant ethics-related event that took place on this date was the arrest of Fatty Arbuckle, a silent-film comedian at the height of his fame, for the rape and murder of aspiring actress Virginia Rappe. He was acquitted after a sensational trial, but just as the “Naked Gun” movies never seemed quite as funny after O.J. was revealed to be a murderer, Arbuckle’s career as popular comic actor was finished. He died, ruined, twelve years after his acquittal. Notable:
- He was the first entertainment celebrity tried for such a serious crime, though John Wilkes Booth would have been, had he lived long enough. His acquittal after two mistrials began a pattern: juries find it hard to reconcile a celebrity’s image with vile deeds, cognitive dissonance at its most powerful.
- It appears, and appeared at the time, that the politically ambitious San Francisco district attorney was determined to prosecute Arbuckle, even though his star witness was unreliable, with criminal record of her own. Several other witnesses later claimed that the prosecution had intimidated them lying to convict Arbuckle.
- As with O.J., no individual responsible for the murder was ever apprehended, named or suspected after the trial. Arbuckle had the good taste not to swear to hunt for the killer, however.
- Fatty Arbuckle, once the equal of Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton as a silent film innovator and box office draw, was, in today’s parlance, cancelled. No studio would hire him. He is now more famous for his involvement in the murder (there were two Broadway musicals about it, and a movie) than for his contribution to film.
4. Wow! Jake Tapper did actual journalism while interviewing Joe Biden! From the transcript:
TAPPER: Doesn’t he deserve some credit for that? It’s better, USMCA is better than NAFTA.
BIDEN: It is better than NAFTA. But look at what the overall trade policy has been, even with NAFTA ? We now have this gigantic deficit in trade with Mexico. Not because NAFTA wasn’t made better, because overall trade policy and how he deals with it made everything worse.
TAPPER: I guess my only point is: I’m a blue-collar guy sitting in Macomb County, Michigan, if I were that person.
BIDEN: Yeah.
TAPPER: I’m sitting here listening to your pitch and I’m thinking, “I like what he has to sell but he’s part of the establishment that has been selling my jobs down the river. He supported NAFTA, he supported Most Favored Nation status for China and Trump renegotiated NAFTA and Obama and Biden didn’t.”
BIDEN: I’ll tell you what we did do. We inherited the greatest recession short of a depression….
Observations:
- I wonder how often any journalist will challenge Biden like this, and follow up on weak response.
- Note that despite Tapper’s prodding, Biden won’t give Trump credit. Those are the rules: Trump is to be blamed for everything bad, and must never be praised when his policies work out. Doesn’t the unfairness of that begin to register after a while?
- In that exchange, Biden doesn’t seem any slower or more addled than he always was, perhaps boding well for the debates.
- Biden’s “Look over there! The Aurora Borealis!” response at the end is hilarious.
Ethics Alarms 
4. Pretty pathetic when Tapper’s questioning stands out as decent interviewing. (I don’t think it is.)
Ever since the Clintons interviews have turned into reporters asking questions and politicians spouting random talking points in the order they appear on the memo with no regard to the content of the reporters’ questions. There’s no such thing as a follow up question, unless the interviewee is a Republican.
“Well, that was wonderful. A good time was had by all. I’m pooped.”
“Yes, I should be–good lord, what is happening in there?!”
“Aurora Borealis?”
“Aurora Borealis?! At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your kitchen!?!”
“Yes.”
“May I see it?”
“Er, no”.
Great, HT, now I’m hungry for steamed hams for lunch.
2. Now they’re trying to deny that anyone booed at all.
“…though some fans in the stands contested that account, taking to Twitter to say they didn’t hear any booing at all, while others pointed out that some fans were bellowing “CHIIIIIEFS” — a common tradition in Kansas City — not booing.”
https://sports.yahoo.com/texans-chiefs-showed-what-to-expect-from-2020-nfl-season-including-fans-reaction-to-protests-060431779.html
I read that and immediately thought “what a glorious example of it isn’t what it is.”
And this, of course. https://youtu.be/Vb_eeVIpDw8
Can we maybe take ma minute to talk about how there’s been more progress on peace in the middle east in the last month than the four decades preceding it, and the media writ large are either ignoring it, or trying to spin it as a bad outcome? Bahrain and Israel are normalizing relations, and Bahrain wouldn’t have moved without at least a nod from Iran. Have you heard of this on a TV?
Only on Facebook where half of my friends are convinced the Second Coming is imminent.
Of course, with the pandemic, the riots, planetary alignments, comets, giant asteroids, locust plagues in Africa, sandstorms reaching the U.S., murder hornets, west coast burning to ashes, the move toward totalitarianism by people we used to call liberals and the lack of utter compassion and empathy we are seeing around us, I can’t say I don’t wonder myself
In fact, the Nobel Prize should be ended:
More nonsense from the oft-discussed hack.
What were the lists people had developed months or years ago… how during Trump’s term, we’ve managed to get the Left to hate puppies….hate baseball…etc….what else was there?
Now we can add, we’ve gotten the left:
1) To defend pedophilia
2) Cover for the destruction of downtown city blocks
3) Booing peace progress in the middle east
4) Reliance on 9-11 memorials to dunk on the sitting President
On Pedophilia, see below.
Yep, I read it, solid.
Don’t forget mourning a mass murdering mastermind terrorist…
I can’t believe I forgot about the austere religious scholar!
Well, you know Biden’s Steamed Hams (or Clams) were burning.
With the exception of the Arbuckle section, almost everything in today’s entry reflects America’s growing weariness with The Great Stupid and all the hypocrisy, incompetence, unfairness and unAmericanism it encompasses.
Sports fans boo? Good
Jake Tapper gets a spine for a minute? Good
Images of soot-and-ash-covered police officers fill Facebook for an entire day? Extra good.
There’s a guy who stands on the overpass above I-465 every September 11 holding an American flag. I hope he’s out there today. I want to remember when we were one united country.
rottentomatoes.com/m/cuties
We talked about this back in August, but it released today, and the responses are…. predictable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a drastic reviewer/viewer ratio. It’s heartening, maybe that the top reviewers are much more mixed than the (in my opinion) ideologically driven proletariat reviewers, but not by much.
I watched Cuties, because I figured if I was going to hate it, I should watch it first and hate it from a position of knowledge. Protip: Make a drinking game out of it. Maybe a shot every time you see a preteen’s underwear. Because if you’re going to decide to watch something that makes you feel like an awful perv, you might as well end up blackout drunk.
Addressing the elephant in the room, it seems like a fundamental lack of self awareness that led someone to make a movie that ostensibly addresses the difficulties of childhood and the sexualization of young girls by overtly and continuously sexualizing young girls. The message, believe it or not, isn’t a bad one, and especially the juxtaposition of old world/new world values was almost interesting, but it could have been achieved without resorting to softcore pedo porn, and it’s really hard to get past that. The cinematography was ridiculous, particularly around the “dancing” (and I use that term ever so loosely) scenes where the camera inevitably focused on the ass, crotch or chest of girls too young to have an ass, crotch or chest. It was so obvious and egregious, that for one scene, I timed the parts of the scene where you could see a face, and the time you could see an ass, and the ass won. It was not close.Put plainly, the film delivered on both the hopes or fears of the trailer, depending on your point of view.
Moving past that though, the film was… bad. I found the plot criminally disjointed. It feels like either there was either a whole lot more film or that the film was supposed to flow differently than the finished picture, and it was absolutely massacred in the cutting room. Transition between scenes was always at least awkward, and were often outright jarring, I found myself continually asking “how the hell did I get here?” and I hadn’t even started the shots yet. There was also a problem with buy-in, the plot seems fundamentally unable to demonstrate consequences to actions, even as the protagonists behavior devolved into more and more extreme acts, both from the position of the cultures she was superficially a part of, and the culture of the audience (unless, it bears noting, your audience is comprised mainly of pedophiles).
As to things that were OK; The acting was passable, the actors did as much with the source material as they could have. Although, (and I realize that despite writing “moving past that” a paragraph ago, I really haven’t) that starts to beg some really uncomfortable questions like: “How long did these girls have to spend with how many adults, over the course of how many cuts, to say those words right or do those actions “properly”? The other thing that I can’t really find fault in is the OST. Throughout the film, the soundtrack either clapped (as most booty music does), or adequately framed the scenes in a way that didn’t make it any worse than the contrivances were in and of themselves. That’s really it.
I find the ratings of the professional reviewers to be nonsensical. There’s no universe where someone watches this film and objectively thinks that the film delivered anything good in any meaningful way. Even if you were able to CGI the girls in to remove all the ethical considerations of having 11 year old girls twerk-whore themselves out of trouble (that happened), the movie failed every aspiration it could possibly have.
I give it 1 out of 17, which is the number of full and empty shot glasses I had when the film was done, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Given how the Star reported the booing, you’d think it was a bad thing. Though if you ask me, assuming what black people think because they’re black, claiming that we should unite under an organization that promotes marxism and racial superiority by people who make more per game than most Americans make in a year, and feigning sadness at having to hear boos meant for people that don’t respect their country is the worse position. But at least Kansas won’t try to put you in house arrest, I mean quarantine, if you went to the game last night. Unless you weren’t wearing that mask. Then you might get house arr… quarantined.
The other “narrative” is that someone called out Trump’s name, and that was what triggered the booing.
That ranks right up there with the idea that white supremacists are REALLY behind the rioting.
RE Tapper interview with Biden. If Tapper had any understanding of history he might have asked Biden if the housing crisis was not brought on by legislation pushed by Barney Frank and his Democrat allies to force banks and mortgage firms to relax credit worthiness standards, which in turn resulted in lenders selling bundles of mortgages to lessen their risk. If I recall correctly Bush tried to push against relaxed rules but was rebuffed by Dems on this issue.
Or how about Bill Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall and outfits like Goldman Sachs forming federally chartered banks and getting bailout money from the Fed.