#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
The New York Times issues one:
Correction: February 6, 2011
An article on Jan. 16 about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes, as an example of risks in any engineering endeavor. No cows, smuggled or otherwise, ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig.
Well, glad they cleared THAT one up.
Look, it was never a mystery. I have not seen one second of The Sopranos, but when I heard it was coming to an end, I knew that Tony would be whacked. I knew he would be whacked because he HAD to be whacked. Any half-skilled dramatist – and by all accounts, David Chase is a highly skilled one – knows that a drama has to end in death, redemption, or the completion of an odyssey. Since there is no secular redemption other than a wedding (or its extra-marital substitute) and I assumed that no HBO series would end in Christian repentance, and because Tony Soprano was an overt antihero, (therefore precluding the odyssey), there simply was no other dramatically possible option.
And no one who has ever seen The Godfather should fail to grasp the metaphorical significance of someone walking into a bathroom at a restaurant. Especially not in a television series about the Mafia. I would give no more credence to the idea that the fade to black at the end – which ended on the word “stop” – meant that the lead character got arrested than it meant he left his wife, moved to Las Vegas, and became a poledancer at a gay club.
It’s certainly an unusual take on the usual reviewer’s formula. And significantly more insightful:
Blue Valentine is an exploration of a modern marriage in the process of disintegrating, told via alternating scenes between the couple’s sordid present and their romantically heady past of five or six years ago. The flashback scenes aren’t labeled as such; the viewer knows they are flashbacks by the youthful hairline of Ryan Gosling’s character, Dean, and by the fact that there’s no kid around. The effect of the flashbacks is like a prolonged near-death experience, where the characters’ dying relationship is punctuated by gauzy vignettes of happier times.
Although the theater was filled with SWPL women probably on a bender from Glee house parties, don’t mistake this film for a chick flic. There’s too much truth told in the portrayal of a relationship hitting the skids for this to be anything resembling the typical sappy romance movie. For one, there’s no happy ending. Women’s faces after a manipulative cheese-fest chick flic show the telltale signs of throat-lumped weepiness: the glisten of fresh tears on cheeks. But the crowd of women filing out of the theater after Blue Valentine had only the vacant-eyed look of a shellshocked soldier who has just seen his buddy catch shrapnel. Or, in this case, catch a little too much reality.
Quite simply, there hasn’t been a movie in our lifetimes which depicts the fall of a man from charming nascent alpha to inept needy beta, and the loathing that this engenders in his lover, better than Blue Valentine.
There are apparently “spoilers” in the review, although since I assume most of the readers of this blog are about as likely to see Blue Valentine as I am to win the Powerball lottery, (never having purchased a lottery ticket in my life), there is no reason not to read it. And it’s interesting to learn that Hollywood, in at least this one instance, has abandoned the Disney Snowflake formula in favor of a more realistic Game-like perspective.
One uncomfortable observation that men would do well to accept is that even with the best will in the world, when a man makes a habit of automatically deferring to a woman’s wishes, it tends to cause her to develop contempt for him. It’s simply how they are wired; it can be astonishing to see how quickly a woman develops a prickly queen bee attitude towards others as soon as she has her social status upgraded for one reason or another. Also, because women are dynamic, (which is admittedly part of their charm), they can’t necessarily articulate what they happen to want at any given moment, so the gamma’s plea of “tell me what you want and I’ll do it” not only sounds craven and off-putting to them, it’s not even relevant. The correct thing is to simply do whatever it is that you do and understand that a woman will be with you as long as she chooses, all promises and vows notwithstanding.
Men should pay very little attention to what a woman says. That’s just a snapshot of her emotional state at the moment, which, for good or for ill, is guaranteed to change. In the end, it is only what she has done in the past that is informative and what she decides to do now and in the future that matters. And if she doesn’t want to be with you, why would you want her to stick around anyhow? There are literally three billion other members of the opposite sex out there, after all, and the chances are pretty high that at least one of them will appreciate you considerably more than a woman who has gradually come to dislike or even loathe you.
Alas, the noble radio show has gone the way of the Afghan warlords’ union:
As John Hinderaker reported earlier on Power Line, the six year run of our volunteer participation at The Patriot has come to an end. I won’t go into all of the details behind the move, John does a good job of that in his summary. I will say that it did come as a surprise when we were informed earlier this week that our time slot was going to be immediately turned over to more, shall we say, revenue generating friendly programming.
It’s too bad sufficient revenue couldn’t have been raised from our program alone. From my perspective as a radio listener, it was at least the equal of what the competing talk stations were putting up during that time. In terms of the quality of national guests and commentary featured, no shows on other local stations came close to providing it.
I enjoyed my phoned-in visits to the show, although I think the Fraters guys tended to view my libertarian extremism with far more delight than the Powerline guys did. (I’m not sure the latter ever got over my brutal depantsing of Michelle Malkin in their own house.) But I appreciated their willingness to host my non-debate with PZ Myers and I always considered it to be a very entertaining and intelligent show that routinely operated at a much higher level than most of the superficial chatter that passes for talk radio these days. Of course, it was the way in which they took politics seriously that ultimately deprived them of a sufficiently large audience since most Minnesotans want to hear about sports and celebrities, not politics and world events. But it was a solid six-year run, and I congratulate Brian, Chad, JB, King, Mitch, Ed, John, and Scott for their impressive accomplishment.
And let’s face it, NARN without Chad the Elder was like the United Front without Massoud.
It will take a lot more than suspending Keith Olbermann to convince anyone with more than one-quarter of a brain that MSNBC is an impartial media observer:
MSNBC TV host Keith Olbermann was suspended indefinitely on Friday for making campaign donations to three Democratic congressional candidates, apparently in violation of NBC News ethics policy. The announcement came in a one-sentence statement from msnbc TV President Phil Griffin: “I became aware of Keith’s political contributions late last night. Mindful of NBC News policy and standards, I have suspended him indefinitely without pay.”
So, Olbermann’s evening contributions in kind to the Democratic Party worth millions of dollars are fine, but contributing a few actual dollars to a few Congressional candidates are not. Olbermann is an ass, and a much less intelligent ass than he thinks he is, but this attempt by MSNBC to pretend it is anything but a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party isn’t likely to fool anyone.
Can someone just get this chick the job she obviously wants on Fox already? I have absolutely nothing against attractive blondes babbling nonsensically in ignorance, I just don’t think it belongs on the op/ed page:
What have we come to when we believe drunken college students over police officers? That is exactly the case in Boston. Several “eye witnesses” claim the authorities overreacted when they shot at 20-year-old D.J. Henry’s car in front of a local bar, which resulted in his death and the injury of his passenger. It has been reported that D.J. was supposed to be the designated driver and was only there to pick up some friends. I find that hard to believe considering his blood alcohol level was nearly twice the legal limit.
Understandably, D.J.’s parents are outraged and devastated, calling for an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. I can’t imagine the pain they must be going through. This is a tough one because on one hand you have parents who just lost their son, and on the other you have a drunken kid who allegedly fled from the cops when he was approached and hit two of them with his car as he accelerated. It’s not like D.J. was just minding his own business and the cops walked up to the car and shot him. He put himself at risk when he knowingly got behind the wheel while he was intoxicated.
Where does personal responsibility come into play? D.J.’s blood alcohol level was .13. He was in the driver’s seat and the cops were called to the bar due to an “unruly crowd” outside. Should they have let him drive home? Of course not; they’re going to do their job and approach him. If the authorities hadn’t gone up to the car and instead just let D.J. drive home, what would the consequences have been? Driving under the influence could have resulted in an accident….
The cops were doing their job. It seems like when they do that, their investigations are “fatally flawed,” as D.J.’s family put it – but when they don’t do their job they’re incompetent and negligent. Are we to blame police officers when they try to protect and serve?
Americans will stop believing “drunken college students over police officers” when police officers stop destroying evidence, lying about what happened, and exonerating themselves of any wrongdoing after leaving a trail of dead bodies behind them. Someone needs to explain to little Chrissy Chatterfield that “protecting and serving” does not involve murdering men who happen to be lightly intoxicated behind the wheel of a car. Or legally carrying while shopping at CostCo. Or sitting at home minding their own business with a door left open to provide a breeze on a hot summer evening. There are no shortage of unjustifiable police murders for which none of the responsible cops were even prosecuted.
What passes for her logic is darkly hilarious; it’s good for the police to kill a man in order to prevent the highly unlikely possibility that he might kill someone else in an accident. By this reckoning, police snipers should be stationed outside every bar and nightclub parking lot in America, picking off anyone who looks like they might have had more than two drinks. And more importantly, the police had absolutely no idea that the guy was drunk. They didn’t shoot him because he had a BAC of 0.13, which despite the absurd legal limits is barely into the range that is even detectable without testing, they shot him because he didn’t follow their confusing and imprecise orders. (At his body weight, D.J. Henry had probably had all of 5 drinks that evening.) Randy Moss would be dead if the Minneapolis police were similarly inclined to homicide.
Take note of the scare quotes around “eyewitneses”. Does little Miss Chatterfield not believe that these people were there on the scene? Does she have any reason to doubt their eyewitness testimony, which just happens to be the primary foundation of every legal system dating back to the Old Testament? Of course not, she’s just a clueless, conservative cop-lover who believes that providing a psychopath with a blue uniform and a gun magically transforms him into a heroic and faultless doer of good.
Miss Chatterfield may be on the cops’ side, but what she is too young and foolish to understand is that they are most certainly not on her side. Since her interactions with the police are probably limited to Norman Rockwell paintings and crying to get out of the occasional speeding ticket, she has no idea of the extent to which the police departments of America have been militarized, corrupted by drug war money, and populated by criminals. This asinine article is exhibit A in the mindless conservative support for the police that must come to an end in order to restore legitimacy to what is presently little more than a lawless government badge gang.
UPDATE: I missed the fact that WND’s cheerleader for the police state didn’t even manage to get the right state, let alone city, in her rush to defend a police shooting. D.J. Henry was shot and killed in Thornwood, New York by the Pleasantville police. The case, exactly or otherwise, had no connection with Boston.
UPDATE II: Well, I suppose this would be one effective means of addressing police brutality: “The entire police force of a small town in northern Mexico resigned after gunmen attacked their recently-opened headquarters with grenades and assault rifles, local news agencies reported quoting the town’s Mayor on Wednesday.”
I suppose it’s not so fun to wave your badge and your gun when the people start shooting back.
Just not, you know, about anything more intellectually demanding than the fall season’s hit new [insert type of television show] on [insert television network]. And Instapundit snickered:
ATLAS SHRUGGED, HAYEK WEPT. And the rest of us are kind of snickering. “The reporter covering the tea parties for the New York Times appears to think that ‘the rule of law’ is some sort of exotic term of art invented by right wingers.” Remember, the people who can’t get this stuff right regard the electorate as their intellectual inferiors.
And apparently they don’t know the difference between S corps and C corps either.
An article on Wednesday about the business culture at the Tribune Company after its acquisition by Sam Zell referred incorrectly to federal taxes on an S corporation, which Tribune became after the deal. S corporations pay no federal taxes because shareholders are responsible for all taxes; therefore, taxpayers do not become “essentially silent partners in the deal.”
The problem isn’t that people who work in the media are stupid, although they don’t tend to be brilliant either. From what I’ve observed in nearly two decades of working tangentially with them, they tend to fall in the +1SD to +2SD range. But what makes them look so stupid on such a regular basis is that they are almost uniformly and grossly ignorant. This is direct result of their narrow educations combined with a complete lack of experience of the non-media world.
Like teachers, journalists don’t actually learn anything useful or broadly applicable as part of their professional training. It’s mostly a lot of jargon and industry-specific minutiae that the average individual could pick up within six months on the job; in fact, that’s exactly how the media used to learn to do its job. And since the nature of the job is so fast-paced, they have to learn how to sound informative while making do with very superficial knowledge. That’s why they so often confuse having heard of something with actually knowing something; they actually believe the two concepts are synonymous on a subconscious level.
Of course, the problem has only gotten worse as a generation of media whores have gone into the business with the objective of reading teleprompters on camera. And now that the other networks are following Fox’s lead by hiring journalists on the sole basis of their sex, hair color, and facial features, the downward spiral is approaching its nadir just in time for the industry’s final collapse.
It’s all good.
I have to admit I am a little surprised at the backbone of the BBC. But Withrow is right and the orientationally-challenged of the world will have to learn that if they want to be celebrities in the public eye, they have to accept being mocked just like everybody else:
Gill sparked the row with his comments in a review of her new show ‘Britain by Bike’ in the Sunday Times last weekend.
He wrote: ‘Some time ago, I made a cheap and frankly unnecessary joke about Clare Balding looking like a big lesbian. And afterwards somebody tugged my sleeve to point out that she is a big lesbian, and I felt foolish and guilty.
‘So I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise. Sorry. Now back to the dyke on a bike, puffing up the nooks and crannies at the bottom end of the nation….
Balding was so incensed at the critic’s dig about her sexuality that she raised it with his editor, John Witherow of the Sunday Times.
But she was astonished when Mr Witherow told her she should accept occasionally being made the butt of jokes. His reply stated: ‘In my view, some members of the gay community need to stop regarding themselves as having a special victim status and behave like any other sensible group that is accepted by society.
‘Jeremy Clarkson, perhaps the epitome of the heterosexual male, is constantly jeered at for his dress sense (lack of), adolescent mindset and hairstyle. He puts up with it as a presenter’s lot and in this context I hardly think that AA Gill’s remarks were particularly cruel, especially as he ended by so warmly endorsing you as a presenter.’
Besides, who is dumb enough to put a fat lesbian on any form of two-wheeled apparatus and NOT expect someone to make a crack about “dykes on bikes”.
Ah well. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again:
Police have arrested Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old U.S. citizen from Pakistan, in connection with the attempted Times Square bombing. Shahzad is believed to be the purchaser of the SUV used in the plot, and was apprehended at about 11:00 P.M. Monday while already on-board a flight to Dubai from JFK International Airport:
I know I’m astonished. How about you? Let’s face it, about the only way a bomb would ever be planted in Times Square by a white guy is if he’s a Federal agent acting on orders.