MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – A Review By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on July 26th, 2019

http://politicalmavens.com/

For moviegoers old enough to remember the sickeningly grotesque details of the Manson family’s massacre of Sharon Tate, her unborn child and the other victims in her house, it will be hard to believe that the alternate massacre in Quentin Tarantino’s latest film is greeted with gales of laughter throughout that sequence. The theater was full at the 4pm weekday screening, and I was shocked to see how many of the viewers were at least middle aged and could be expected to have at least read about this shocking mass murder that took place in 1969.

At two hours and 40 minutes, notwithstanding constant background music from the sixties, fast moving cars and two excellent performances by Brad Pitt and Leonard DeCaprio, the movie lacks directorial pace. The scene where Brad Pitt as a movie stuntman comes to the Manson community populated by strung-out young hippies, lingers far too long on pointless dialogue before descending into extreme violence in Tarantino’s signature style. The scene with Sharon Tate kvelling at her own performance in a movie is similarly too protracted and frankly, one inducing a queasy feeling of disrespect for a young pregnant actress who was butchered by what can only be called monsters, some of whom have been released from jail.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Real Data On Energy Usage Francis Menton

Posted By on July 25th, 2019

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-7-24-the-real-data-on-energy-usage

Undoubtedly you read at least some organs of the mainstream media. Perhaps your go-to source is the New York Times, or maybe the Washington Post, or Bloomberg News, or The Economist, or maybe Reuters. And therefore you have the strong impression that the world is well on its way to a huge energy transition, away from the dirty fossil fuels of the past, and toward the low carbon and renewable energy of the future. Or maybe you steer clear of all of those propagandists, but you still have the same impression. Perhaps you are getting this impression from the politicians running places like New York, or California, or Germany, or Denmark, or South Australia, or Spain, or any of many other holier-than-thou jurisdictions that have announced the imminent end of their fossil fuel use. Anyway, with so many people so loudly proclaiming the approaching end of fossil fuels, surely by now fossil fuel use must have begun its rapid drop toward oblivion.

But where can you get actual information on world energy consumption of each type, and of how it is changing over time? One quite comprehensive source is the Statistical Review of World Energy, put out each year by the BP oil company. The 2019 version, covering statistics through 2018, just came out on June 11. It was covered at Watts Up With That by Larry Hamlin on July 23.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

“Thoughts on Trump’s Tweets and What We Ignore at Our Peril” Sydney Williams

Posted By on July 25th, 2019

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Those of us of a certain age were brought up in a time when spiteful words were common, unpleasant to endure, but not “harmful.” In those long-past days, if we came home in tears we were told to ignore what words may have hurt our pride or our sensibilities. Today, “harmful” words create victims, especially if directed at women, people of color, gays or those of the Muslim faith, and are deemed “harmful;” perpetrators must be punished. This attitude is prevalent in educational institutions, the media, the entertainment industry and among progressive politicians. The prohibition of uncomfortable remarks and dissenting opinions is reminiscent of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. It brings to mind a letter from E.B. White written to the New York Herald Tribune in 1947. The Tribune had defended the movie industry for requiring its employees to state their political beliefs: “…I can only assume that your editorial writer, in a hurry to get home for Thanksgiving, tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.” We are at the same point today, only now it is the Left doing the blacklisting, not the Right. 

 

This is not to suggest that words cannot have effect. They can and they do. We find solace in words from the Bible, beauty in poetry from Keats and Shelley, and meaning in writings from Shakespeare to Hemingway. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is a metonymic adage coined by the English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839. In speeches, Thomas Paine rallied Americans for independence. Adolph Hitler used the power of his voice to incite hatred of Jews, while Churchill’s speeches held a nation together as it fought alone against the tyranny of Nazism for over a year. Saul Alinsky was a master wordsmith. In his 1971 Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, a book that influenced Barack Obama as a community organizer in the early 1990s and later as a politician, Alinsky emphasized that ridicule was man’s most effective weapon. Political rallies are used to gin up enthusiasm. But just as we should ignore the words used in political rallies for those we support, we should not take seriously those used in rallies for those we oppose.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel welcomes Congresswomen Omar and Tlaib Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger See note please

Posted By on July 25th, 2019

I respectfully disagree…there is no point in a visit to Israel for those harridans . They will be shown Yad Vashem and come back and opine that America’s immigration policy mirrors concentration camps, and include several libels of Israel. I say “stay where you are” to the two harpies….rsk

Israel Ambassador to the USA, Ron Dermer, is correct to recommend welcoming a visit to Israel by House Representatives Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) – the first two US Muslim Congresswomen – “out of respect for the US Congress and the great US-Israel alliance.”

Israel’s high respect of both chambers and both parties in the US Congress supersedes Israel’s deep reservations about the two legislators’ support of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel; their identification with Palestinian and Islamic terror organizations (e.g., Muslim Brotherhood); their embrace of themes perpetrated by Palestinian hate-education, which have denied Israel’s right to exist; and their determination to weaken the 400-year-old bonds between the American people and the Jewish State, and undermine the mutually-beneficial US-Israel strategic cooperation. 

In fact, the worldview of these two legislators departs sharply from the vast majority of the legislators on Capitol Hill, as well as in the US State Legislatures, 27 of which have already adopted anti-BDS legislation. It was evident on July 23, 2019, when the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly (398:17) passed the anti-BDS House Resolution 246.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

PLEASE SEE THIS VIDEO: ANDREW BOLT ON THE MEDIA AND ISRAEL

Posted By on July 25th, 2019

Andrew Bolt is an Australian conservative social and political commentator. His current roles include blogger and columnist at the Melbourne-based Herald Sun and host of television show The Bolt Report each weeknight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPkR9mWGre4

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

FROM AUSTRALIA ON MUELLER’S TESTIMONY

Posted By on July 25th, 2019

Russiagate prober Robert Mueller testified yesterday on Capitol Hill for a total of five hours. Or perhaps he testified twice, which would be a reasonable assumption in the light of two diametrically opposed accounts of his performance.

Were you to invest faith in the report of ABC Washington bureau veteran Zoe Daniels, the Russiagate inquisitor’s turn at the microphone was a creditable performance. Here’s a little taste of how she saw the quizzing:

Democrats spent weeks practising for that exact scenario and strategically loaded their questions with all the phrases they needed.

# Cedric Richmond: “So, it’s fair to say the President tried to protect himself by asking staff to falsify records relevant to an ongoing investigation?”

# Hakeem Jeffries: “Donald Trump told [former White House counsel] Don McGahn that Mueller has to go. True?”

# Mike Quigley: Do any of Trump’s quotes about Wikileaks disturb you?

Mr Mueller answered in the affirmative for all those questions (and added “problematic is an understatement” for the last one). Democrats, surely, cheered internally.

So Mueller acquitted himself with aplomb? Not according to The Federalist‘s David Harsanyi, whose column touches on a number of matters concerning bias and prosecutorial incuriosity that somehow escaped Ms Daniels’ notice. Harsanyi writes:

[Mueller was asked] if he could cite a single example besides Donald Trump where the DOJ “determined that an investigated person was not exonerated because their innocence was not conclusively determined.” Mueller responded: “I cannot, but this is a unique situation.”

After lecturing everyone about how justice must be meted out equally to all Americans, we now hear that rules are malleable if we’re talking about Donald Trump. As [was] also pointed out, Trump should not be above the law, but he should not be below it, either.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

An Extremely Silly Girl’s Cunning Plan by Tony Thomas

Posted By on July 25th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York waitress-turned-congresswoman, has a grand scheme to make the US carbon-free by 2030 — a project so costly and so far removed from reality that it has naturally drawn the gushing support of left-leaning editorialists and green-brained columnists. There is quite a bit more to it however than simply making the weather behave itself.”

Small children are prone  to say things that are very true but best not voiced in polite company. There’s been a similar embarrassment described in the Washington Post last week. It involves the chief of staff to one of the so-called fresh faces of the Democrat Party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known for headline writers’ convenience as “AOC”. The 29-year-old New York bartender last year became the youngest-ever US congresswoman and maybe also the most socialist.  

The progressive media has built her up in half a year to household-name status. She was on the cover of Time as “The Phenom” and twinned in a Vanity Fair cover story in June with veteran Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker. Vanity Fair saw AOC as a “beacon of hope” and “youthful, charismatic and uncompromising”.

She continues in the spotlight with the “Justice Democrats Squad” of four black/brown congresswomen claiming last week to be victims of Trump’s racist rhetoric. Actually the Squad itself in recent weeks had been hurling racist insults at less-left Democrat colleagues, even including whistle-clean Nancy Pelosi.

AOC espouses a Green New Deal involving a hundred-trillion dollar mobilization of the US nation to go fully green by 2030. Her ten-year emissions makeover outclasses any two of Stalin’s five-year-plans. Adding to the Soviet ambience, AOC says her Deal would be implemented by groups including “worker cooperatives”. You might think, “Why waste time and ink on this?” Why, because left Democrats and the US media are mainstreaming her.  Five Democrat presidential candidates sponsored her Deal (including Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren) and AOC claims a total of nine candidates back it.

POLITICS Comments turned off

House Democrats: We Won’t Rest Until Trump Is Stopped . . . Okay, Time for Recess By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on July 25th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/house-democrats-we-wont-rest-until-trump-is-stopped-okay-time-for-recess/

A point I forgot to include in today’s Morning Jolt:

After Robert Mueller completed his testimony yesterday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared in a press conference: “There’s a cone of silence in the White House that is engaging in a massive cover up of obstruction of justice.”

Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, declared, “Martin Luther King said something that I — is in my DNA and is still in my brain, particularly right now.  He said, ‘There comes a point when silence becomes betrayal.’ And we refuse to betray generations yet unborn and the American people.” (Hey, it’s nice to see a Congressional Democrats recognize the unborn in any context.)

Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, warned, “we face a time of great danger.  Richard Nixon said he thought that the President was a dictator.  He said, ‘If the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.’ President Trump echoed that yesterday.  He said, ‘Under Article II, I’, that is, he, ‘can do anything I want.’  That is a totalitarian picture, not a democratic picture.  The United States must be safe from this. A President who engages in crimes, repeated crimes, to cover up these unpatriotic and dictatorial actions and this cannot go on.”

And House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff added, “accepting campaign help from a foreign agent is disloyal to our country, unethical, and wrong. We cannot control what the Russians do. But we can decide what we do. We can — and must — decide that this centuries-old experiment we call America is worth cherishing.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Yaakov Malkin R.I.P. By David Pryce-Jones

Posted By on July 25th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/yaakov-malkin-r-i-p/

Yaakov Malkin wrote a novel and then a play, and also books and pamphlets about whether he was an Israeli or a Jew or both or neither, only self-defined as a secular humanist. At Tel Aviv University he was a professor in film and television studies, and he made his learned disquisitions on everything to do with Judaism sound just as up-to-date. He was an intellectual with the difference that he thought rationality was irresistible so in the end things must turn out out for the best.

 

Yaakov was born in Warsaw in 1926 and had childhood memories of Poland. In the 1960s when I was researching Next Generation, my book about Israel, I got to know Yaakov and with him his father, Ber, who liked to wear a button-hole and kiss the hand of ladies — I once  found a flattering mention of him in one of Isaac Bashevi Singer’s books. Father and son could lecture about anything and everything to do with the arts and humanities. Yaakov’s wife, Felice, originally from Philadelphia, is an artist, and knowledge of the history of painting supplemented Yaakov’s knowledge of the history of literature. These were foremost creators of Israeli culture, a Western off-shoot responding to the novel setting of the Middle East. Aged 93, Yaakov died in Jerusalem. R.I.P.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Boris in Power By John O’Sullivan

Posted By on July 25th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/boris-in-power/It’s a virtual bloodbath for the Remainers.

Before Boris unveiled his new cabinet, the newspapers would have prepared a choice of three headlines: It’s Continuity Boris; Tory Unity Rules for Boris; and Boris’s Remainer Bloodbath! My guess would then have been that headline No. 2 would be chosen. And now that the list of cabinet ministers is almost complete, we can see it contains a respectable tally of (former) Remainers. In fact, there’s an almost 50–50 split between (former) Remainers and Leavers. But the third headline is the one that best reflects the massive transformation that the new Boris Johnson cabinet represents.

Forget that both the new and dismissed cabinet ministers are all Tories. That’s beginning to seem a historic description. What this new cabinet or — as some commentators have rightly observed — this new government signifies is that a Remainer administration has been replaced by a Brexiteer administration almost as completely as after a general election defeat.

That’s owing in part to the decision of six members of May’s cabinet to resign either as a protest against the new prime minister or to avoid being pushed out. They were not minor figures, either, but included the former chancellor Philip Hammond, the former justice secretary David Gauke, the former international-development secretary (and leadership candidate) Rory Stewart, and of course Theresa May herself.

In addition to those who left semi-voluntarily, Boris sacked another eleven ministers — and that number will certainly rise as the reshuffle continues. Again, those who got their pink slips included major figures in the last administration — notably, the former foreign secretary (and leadership runner-up) Jeremy Hunt, the former defense secretary Penny Mordaunt, the former trade secretary Liam Fox, and the former deputy prime minister David Lidington.