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Film: The Smashing Machine

Surprisingly flaccid film, although I'm only about halfway through. 

Film: His Girl Friday

Nothing to be said that hasn't been said ad nauseam. 

Bonkers

6K to all seniors in the US. This is while we have record budget deficits, young people facing a totally uncertain future, and a booming stock and real estate market. A heist of epic proportion and we're talking about ICE. 

Chicken or the Egg

Not sure if Boomers are the ones protesting "No Kings" and ICE because they are taken care of by the government or whether they are protesting as a guise to get their government benefits. But either way, this is a very strong argument against UBI.

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Film: Casablanca

One of the coolest aspects of the film - Lazlo goes to  clubs where he knows the Nazi's who are hunting him will be. Why? In the morality of the film, adults go out at night to socialize. They were indeed better people than we are. Maybe not morally, but spiritually. Now Victor Lazlo would be writing on reddit.

TV: Landman S1 E1-2

Allie Larter deserves an award for best acting job via FaceTime in a prime-time drama.

Tell Us What You Really Think!

Wow. Scott Bessent just roasts Gavin Newsom. 

He left out the two biggest economic boondoggles on Newsom's watch, though. The high-speed rail that isn't built and the EDD scam of billions of bucks by prisoners.

Free Speech

It's wonderful. The Leftist lunatics tell America what they stand for when they disrupt law enforcement and church services in Minnesota. I don't think Democrats will be winning national elections for decades. They turned it a bit around on transgenderism and are even showing signs of turning around on the Palestine question, only to ruin it with this madness. The funny thing is Trump seems to be bungling this Greenland thing but they won't be able to capitalize on it.

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Film: Resurrection (China)

Unbelievable filmmaking. Utterly confusing story. I fell asleep at the beginning. Is this necessarily a bad thing? The last three vignettes grabbed me better than the first couple. What percentage of human beings on the planet could watch this and get anything out of it? I guess over/under 1-5%.

Film: Juror #2

A dismissed film. Under no expectation of greatness and viewed as a simple one-off watch, I say quite good. I'd put it up against any old crime procedural on TV, and it adds a much weightier, moral dimension to the standard fare. I venture to say the old man still has it.

Stand Up: Nikki Glaser

I didn't laugh once and found her to be the one of two words you cannot utter. 

Bad Things

Sure, Trump's lawsuit against Powell is dumb. But not as dumb as California's wealth tax. Trump motivated by ego, CA dems motivated by envy. I'd rather deal with ego.

All True

This ICE chaos is fomented by the structures of the Democrat party. Here's how the scam works.

1) Refuse to "come out" for open borders, so you can maintain some ability to be elected.

2) But, refuse to enforce immigration law in any capacity, calling any such efforts racist. While there might be very good arguments for not turning teachers, etc into immigration enforcement officials - they actually argue all efforts are racist and unlawful. Very strange! So they opt not to enforce the border, or in schools, or businesses, or really anywhere. Nor do they even attempt to come up with humane alternatives. 

3) Resist any effort by those who lawfully want to curb illegal immigration. When the Feds attempt to enforce, Democrats create sanctuary cities and refuse compliance. This is illegal, of course but they figure if they all do it, the Feds can't really do much. The Feds need cooperation with local law enforcement to deport criminals but the the sanctuary cities block these efforts. 

4) Thus, Feds turn to more draconian efforts like ICE. 

Now you might argue that the Trump admin is using ICE as shock troops to usher in an authoritarian government. I'd be a whole lot more open to that argument IF Democratic cities enforced any type of immigration law at all. But they don't. So as a US citizen, on a practical level only get the option of open borders or ICE. 

5) The Far left agitators then rally in reddit and other informal spaces to "disrupt ICE" and provoke a backlash. This provides cover for the Democratic establishment. They don't need to actually pass laws or use their political power to disrupt ICE, they let their lackys do it. They just comment on the backlash and blame Trump for the instigation. Classic FLN playbook, the same playbook the Palestinians use. It just isn't gonna work anymore because everyone is wise to it. Defenses adjust in other words.

Logging

Film: Marty Supreme

My favorite film of the year thus far. Chalamet lays down the gauntlet in a movie star turn.

The Phones

I know everyone's worried about the phones for children, but judging by the ICE and No Kings protests, I think the phones for old white people might be the problem.

Wild Times

Trump doing some massively dumb and smart things at the exact same time really throwing me for a loop.

1) Going after the Fed and Powell. Massively dumb.

2) Capping credit card rates. Massively dumb.

3) Slow playing the Venezuela situation. Seems very smart. The critique offered by liberals that he's not replacing the regime, I'm like - what? You want a civil war and an Iraq situation in our hemisphere? 

4) The Iran thing. Smart so far. Let's see if he can keep it up. Bombing the facility looks to be paying off. The threat against regime targets for not attacking protestors seems to be paying off as well.

This world...

Belatedly Correct

AOC and Mamdani now saying "we support Hamas" is anti-semitic.

This position was available to all Leftists since Oct 8, 2023. But for some reason it took them 2.5 years to get there.

Iran

I'm as happy as the next guy for the Iran protests, but do we need to involve ourselves? Can we resist making it about us?

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Comedy: Robby Hoffman

Surprised at how much I enjoyed it overall. Two observations, though:

1) She seems to have completely aped Sebastian Maniscalco's style and delivery, but applied to her own content and writing. Never seen anything like it before in comedy.

2) Special felt too long...could use a 15% haircut.

For Those Who Can't See It

The woman shot by ICE in Minneapolis was wishcast and provoked by far left anti-ICE groups organized though reddit and other social media platforms. 

This was entirely predictable if you even remotely follow far left political agitation. A few months ago they were spreading blatantly incorrect propaganda about ICE raids in my town that popped up in a local reddit feed. I dumbly responded "this is a lie" already debunked and was promptly blocked by a reddit moderator. On these anti-ICE forums you are not allowed to dissent or say anything that "supports ICE" and apparently that includes pointing out factual inaccuracies. Why? Because the purpose of these groups are to agitate for political outcomes rejected by American voters. So...they go around and provoke ICE in a number of different ways. These are not the best and the brightest either. They are underemployed losers who gain some type of purpose by doing this stuff. In any case, going around systematically harassing law enforcement in numerous cities is a surefire way to get someone injured or killed. It happened yesterday. Now people are protesting. This is like pissing away money on sports gambling and then protesting you're broke. 

Trump's Insane Plan To Win Midterm Elections:

Arrest a scumbag to make the world a better place.

Side note: bringing back words like scumbag and crook would help a lot. Had we just stuck with terms like these, Trump would've never gotten elected. Because he would've just been a crook. But we "deconstructed" the language to redefine criminality because it implied racial biases, so the term crook no longer carried any weight. Can't go back now, I suppose.

Logging

Film: i hate myself doc

Girls meets Sherman's March if you want to watch something different and painful.

TV: Curb S2 

Just a casual watch before sleep and Rob Reiner pops into the episode. Surreal and weird. 

The Move

We ought to hold people who want to do reparations and redistribute housing to their word. Force them to sign legal papers to disinherit themselves before getting on with any public policy. Make them eat their own food.

Stocks and Bonds

Scanned 10 yr returns:

VXUS (total international): 8.54 per year

SLYV (small value): 8.8 per year

DVY (large/medium value): 10.79 per year

VTI (total US): 14.25 per year

SCHZ (total bond): 1.9 per year

To me, all the above stock returns are actually quite solid. Total US stands out but as obnoxiously large. The bonds suffered but if you got in after the crash in 2022, the last 3 years is 4.5% return per year. Not bad.

Going After Home Ownership

Yes, these people are crazy. Imagine for a minute they somehow convinced a polity to do this. You couldn't pay anyone enough to enforce - guns would be out.

Nabka

How do the folks who object to 75K Palestinians getting moved 75 years ago feel about the 8 million Venezuelans who fled their country and had their property stolen in the past 20 years? Funny they are passionate about one but could care less about the other.

Safe Assumption

Does everyone who wants to get rid of private property love shitting in public toilets?

 

Explain

Please ugh liberals explaina to me this...why are there hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of Venezuelan ex-pats who fled the country celebrating the arrest of Maduro? Why did they flee the warmth of collectivism?

Hahaha

OMG, NYC good luck my friends...

Paraphrasing..."for centuries, we've treated property as an individual good...now we're going to treat it as a collective good..." Beg to differ - we have many times treated it "not as an individual good" and all those places were found to suck ass!

Seriously, the word retard has returned just in time to save us... 

Law of the Jungle

The irony of all ironies would be Russia, China, and Iran push the "law of the jungle" onto the rest of us because they don't want to post WW2 international order only to discover the "law of the jungle" devours them much faster than us. They invite a FAFO world only to be its first victims. 

It's like the criminal who tears down a weak justice system only to realize the system was protecting him from angry, armed villagers who now just hang him instead.

"The Warmth of Collectivism"

Haha. More like the warmth of a public toilet. What a loser. 

Just Think About It

Say whatever you will about Elon Musk, if we didn't have him, China would be dominating space and autos. Maybe they still are but at least Elon makes it close.

The Bottom

Of Chinese society. It doesn't exactly sound hellish, but I'll point out a few things that are interesting:

1) Spends more on cigarettes than food

2) Must own a mortgage to send kid to school

3) Doesn't live with family

In US, there are people with such an arrangement. Truck drivers for instance. Or folks who live far away from work - a trend picking up in the Bay Area where folks live far outside, like 2 hours away from their employment.