Skiing

Such a pain in the ass and still worth it. A single long run on great snow is worth the price of admission. My older son said it was like riding a roller coaster, but you're in control. The secondary benefit: an appreciation of nature and the mountain. Kids learn to become self-sufficient, carry their gear, be prepared for weather shifts, and monitor food and water intake.  

Logging

Film: The Graduate

This time around, I was fascinated by Mrs. Robinson. Surely this is an age thing. When I first watched the film, of course, I was closer to Ben's age. And the film strongly takes his perspective. But now, being closer in age to Mrs Robinson, I can't help but think - what is going on with her? What is her deal? Why is she so thirsty and obvious? Why does she fear Ben dating Elaine? As best I can surmise, Mrs. Robinson resents losing her youth. She was forced into marriage because she got pregnant with Elaine. Now both she and her husband are alcoholics and miserable. Her seduction of Ben is about getting her youth back, but of course, this is doomed from the start, and even she knows it. Hence her melancholy. In this respect, the film is much wiser than how filmmakers of today would and do treat the subject. Today, this film gets made by a female director (or perhaps a female writer), and they would insist Mrs. Robinson is an empowered individual. But she is not. She's a hungry predator who has a shot at redemption but instead chooses to punish Elaine for "ruining" her life. Hence, she plots for Elaine to marry poorly and sacrifice her own youth as penance for stealing it from Mrs. Robinson. This is as far as I can tell what's happening psychologically with her. 

Next observation, the music. Much of the magic of the film stems from how the music interacts with the images - the two beautiful montages sections that bridge the affair and his loneliness plus the travel up to Berkeley section. One montage actually goes for two songs! Clearly the music inspired the movie and the movie inspired the music. You can't imagine the shots or the opening or the montages without the music. Films cannot escape the era in which they are made. So the question of: why can't we make movies like that anymore is a nonsense. Because we don't listen to new Simon and Garfunkel songs on the radio is why. And even if we did, it's just an exercise in nostalgia at this point. 

Deal

Makes sense. 

The NFL is free to hire Bad Bunny 

Bad Bunny is free to say what he wants, and in Spanish 

MAGA is free to boycott and criticize Bad Bunny 

Jon Stewart is free to call it hypocrisy 

I am free to try to harvest some clicks from the entire dwindling nontroversy

China-Taiwan

China could obviously "take" Taiwan if they had to. But could they take Taiwan+Japan? 

Could they take Taiwan+Japan+Philippines+Vietnam?

Could they take Taiwan+Japan++Philippines+Vietnam+India+US?

Logging

Film: Bugonia

Does it surprise anyone that the worldview espoused in this film turns off the vast majority of the planet? So ugly and disconnected from life. And the cinefiles cheer it on. Losers!

Logging

Film: Die Hard

When Argyle crashes the limo out of the metal garage cage at the end, the thought crossed my mind - why didn't you do that earlier? Fridge logic, I know.

A couple things:

-how does this film have so many iconic characters without famous or memorable actors? The black nerd terrorist? I can't name another film he was in. The hateable reporter? Holly Gennero/McClane? Ellis? Karl? Argyle? Takagi? I suppose the FBI guy and the police lieutenant were legit character actors and around a bunch

-McTiernan does a fantastic job staging iconic shots in this film - Hanz falling is up there with great villain endings of all time. Willis jumping off the building...these are simple writing moments, even cliche, elevated way higher by the direction.

Here We Are

The lie: 10,300,000 views and 327,000 likes 

The truth posted 12 hours later: 406,000 views and 2,700 likes

Remember when Google was the biggest, baddest tech company with the moto: "don't do evil." Now the tech companies are like - well, a little evil okay so long as it gets engagement.

PS - those who study films know the guy who says "don't do evil" means the literal opposite.

Why Weigh In

I feel a dumb obligation to have some sort of opinion on Bad Bunny...I shouldn't, I know. But the thing I'll point out is that when watching it, I feel like a foreigner missing all the nuance since I don't understand a word he is saying. I understand he is funny? That's nice. But to who? That the proponents of his performance can't understand how deliberately confusing and alienating to most Americans it is super bizarre to me. I mean, go for it...who cares...but if you think this is "bringing people together," you are 100% definitely wrong. 

I suppose we can expect some K-pop next year?

Watergate Part Deux

Isn't this the type of thing that brought down Nixon? Or at least Nicholson in A Few Good Men? Karen Bass ordered the code red, people. She needs to resign.

Salem Witch Trials

In the yoga studio.

Logging

Film: The Rock

My favorite of all Michael Bay films... an absolute sluggers line up of character actors... if you just embrace the absurdity, quite a lot of fun.

Indeed

Revolutions were fought over these issues. 

If I’m on stolen land why the F am I paying property taxes?

Pretty Evil

Putin continues to string us along. 

Hmmm...

So it appears Trump did the Maduro thing and is negotiating with Iran to make their oil available to world markets, so Russia can be induced to ceasefire talks in Ukraine?

Seems a bit complicated, but not exactly the worst idea in the world...better perhaps than the meat grinder offered by Biden and the Europeans...

Gifted and Talented

Nothing the midwit nepo babiy communists hate more than the gifted and talented programs.

90s LA Movies 

Funny how in a lot of 90s LA movies, there exists a run-in with some type of neo-nazi lunatic. Did these people actually exist (and if so, where did they hang out) or is this a figment of the imagination?

I'm thinking American History X, Falling Down, Heat (Waingro), Higher Learning...

Logging

TV: Landman S1 E4-6

Taylor Sheridan's worldview is basically a hillbilly version of BLM, which is to say, all structures and institutions are essentially in place for strong men to do whatever primal shit they want to do - kill, steal, rob, etc. 

Wouldn't It Be Funny If...

America won the AI race, but someone like Mandami or AOC wins the Presidency and uses AI to redistribute all the wealth it created?

Or, if Trump promised all illegal immigrants US citizenship if they moved to Greenland and did a political referendum for the island to declare its independence from Denmark and join the US.

We Are In

The Salem Witch trials... and ICE are the witches.

Aye 

Probably not much else matters other than not letting AI become evil.  We are in deep shit if this thing proves to be as powerful as folks say - because a determined and organized group of people could probably leverage it into causing quite high levels of destruction and mayhem.

The Gaza Obsessives 

These Gaza obsessives are hilarious. They are horrified by both re-building but also not re-building the strip. They blathered on for a year about a ceasefire, get their ceasefire, and now complain about it. I get it. They think a crime occurred. Problem for them is that the only people who agree with them are lunatics. 

Chinese Cars

You see all this stuff in the media about how amazing Chinese cars are. I'm skeptical. Do we ever see media gush over KIA's or Hyundai? Or Nissans? Or Hondas.  Subarus? These cars are all fantastic. So what's the proposition? The Chinese cars are better? Cheaper? I have trouble seeing it. Maybe I'm missing something. When I see the pictures, all the cars look like knock-offs of existing cars. And are affordable cars or car performance really a problem? Not one that I see. 

China-Taiwan

If China goes to war with Taiwan, we want them to be doing so with Generals who have zero combat experience. And then, importantly, not letting it go to a round 2.

Organized Insurrection

Penetrating the organized insurrection in Minnesota. To anyone vaguely familiar with these worlds, all this is obvious. Once you understand the Omnicause, everything falls into place.

Logging

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.

Logging

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.

Logging

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?

Logging

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.