For almost the entire past two years most of the media and many elected Democrats were on the verge of orgasm about the imminent release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, telling anyone who would listen or watch that this report would prove that President Trump and/or his campaign colluded with Russian individuals in and out of government in order to defeat Hillary Clinton and steal the 2016 election.
MSNBC led the charge, with virtually all of its analysis or news programs being devoted to breathlessly listing everything they thought Mueller must have been doing. "Sources say this" or "Reports claim that" were the most common phrases heard on these programs as DC insiders and parasites competed to show us how much they were in the know. The media told us that Mueller was beyond reproach. His conclusions must be trusted, the media told us. The media invited a number of former intelligence industry personnel, people known to be well, liars, to tell us what they thought Mueller was going to find.To a man or woman, they were all certain that Mueller was going to finally get the goods on the treasonous Trump.
Dissidents from this narrative were not welcomed in the media, particularly not on MSNBC. In fact anyone who had questions was dismissed as a Russian useful idiot, a bot, or worse a Russian sympathizer. Well as it turns out Mueller released his report, though it has not yet been made public. But we do know that Mueller isn't going to be seeking any more indictments, most especially not any indictments against President Trump and his family. According to Attorney General Barr:
Special counsel Robert Mueller did not find that the Trump campaign “conspired or coordinated” with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 elections, according to Attorney General William Barr’s summary to Congress delivered Sunday.
Man Eater
by Gar Anthony Haywood
This book is seemingly written deliberately to be very similar to Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard, screwcap films by Preston Sturges, It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and perhaps most of all to Everybody Smokes in Hell by John Ridley. As many of the #metoo, Sony hack and related allegations and revelations have shown Hollywood can be an amoral, even immoral cutthroat environment where everyone is out to get over on everybody else and maybe get laid in the process.
Like the stories referenced, Man Eater posits that the streets and their twisted tenets of respect, honor and vengeance really aren't all that different from Hollywood. The stakes are higher in the streets perhaps but it's really the same game.
Ronnie Deal is a mid level project executive for a Hollywood studio. She has a secret past which she doesn't share with anyone, least of all her insincere female boss and a male peer who's trying to prevent Ronnie from moving up the ladder by any means necessary. Ronnie is also stunningly attractive, something which she cynically uses when she thinks it's necessary.
Having been temporarily embarrassed and outmaneuvered by her aforementioned male rival, causing her to lose a movie deal, Ronnie travels to a bar after work to stew over the insults and general sexism of the world. She's in no mood then, to watch quietly as a intimidating muscular man named Neon Polk starts to harass and assault a tiny woman named Antsy Carruth. Surprising herself with her aggression and fearlessness, Ronnie decides to strike one for the sisterhood by sucker punching Neon upside the head with a beer bottle and doing a Texas two step on his face. Both women flee.
The 2016 Presidential election still vexes Democrats. Few pundits thought that Trump could win. Most experts argued that not only would the electoral "blue wall" of upper Midwest states prevent a Trump victory but also buoyed by demographic change as well as gender solidarity, Clinton would win in states that had long been Republican leaning-i.e. Georgia, Texas, Arizona and North Carolina.
We know what happened. Clinton won the popular vote but lost the election. Trump became President. Some Democrats still blame Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders. Others blame Russians. And so on. Democrats blame a number of people or events besides Clinton for Trump's victory. But lately more people want to blame the country's political institutions and rules: the Senate, the Electoral college, the voting age, separate state elections, etc. As discussed before some people are furious that Wyoming and California have the same number of Senators. They're irked that running up the popular vote count in one state (as Clinton did in California and New York) is not helpful to winning the Presidential election. Some Democrats want to make the Senate representation proportional by population (if not jettison it entirely), and eliminate the Electoral College.
It remains a source of amazement and amusement to me that some people still believe that the earth is flat. From what I can tell this is only a very small minority of folks. Some of them are obvious trolls. Others believe everything is a conspiracy. Still others are just low IQ people with an extremely limited grasp of science and logic. Some think that being contrary by definition means being smart.
Others flatter themselves that they're just smarter than everyone else. And some are people who reject all science, logic and math as Eurocentric and thus by definition untrue and racist. So it goes. But it's funny to me that when the evidence conclusively disproves the flat earth theory, flat earth adherents drop the evidence and not the theory.
In what may be one of the most satisfying TV moments we can recall, a group of conspiracy theorists have accidentally spent thousands of dollars to prove that yes, actually, the Earth is round.
The scene in a new Netflix documentary called Behind the Curve, which follows a group of Flat Earthers, a "small but growing contingent of people who firmly believe in a conspiracy to suppress the truth that the Earth is flat".
One of those Flat Earthers is Bob Knodel, who hosts a YouTube channel entirely dedicated to the theory and who is one of the team relying on a $20,000 laser gyroscope to prove the Earth doesn't actually rotate. Except... It does.
I wrote before about Andre Williams here. He was one of the last of the old time rock-n-rollers/R&B giants. He just passed away at 82. If you happen to like old school R&B/jump blues/rock-n-roll and don't mind an occasional little lyrical smuttiness/nastiness in music then you might want to give his music a listen.
As people have pointed out the Good Lord wouldn't have given you a tail feather in the first place if He didn't want you to shake it from time to time. RIP to a Detroit musical giant and one of the dirtiest old men who ever walked the planet. Andre Williams, who carved out a place in the 1950s rhythm-and-blues scene with earthy songs distinctively delivered, then fell on hard times as a result of addiction before enjoying a late-career resurgence, died on Sunday in Chicago. He was 82.
His son Derrick Williams said the cause was cancer.
In a decade when mainstream white audiences were watching “Father Knows Best” on television, Mr. Williams was recording provocative songs like “Jail Bait” (1957), a sly warning to men inclined to date teenage girls. It ends with a narrator pleading with a judge for leniency and promising to abandon his lecherous ways:
I ain’t gonna bother none 15,
I ain’t gonna bother none 16,
I ain’t gonna bother none 17,
I ain’t gonna mess with none 18,
I’m gonna leave them 20-year-old ones alone too,
Gonna get me a girl about 42.
Never Grow Old
directed by Ivan Kavanaugh
This was a chilling Western with both classic and revisionist themes.
It is sobering to grow older and see actors of your generation who once played sarcastic teens move to playing alienated young men then change to playing pudgy middle aged dads. In another ten years or so they'll be playing grandfathers. So it goes. Time waits for no one.
There are some cultures that and some people who consider a stranger mentioning a man's wife to be a faux pas at best and an intolerable insult or threat at worst. Although we now tend to view such interactions thru feminist eyes and claim that such negative responses are bad because they imply that the wife is her husband's property, the point remains that in certain charged circumstances or situations asking "innocently" after the well being or presence of a man's wife or other female relative is indeed meant and understood as a serious insult or deadly threat.
It's no different from the classic mob hoodlum telling the bar owner that he has a beautiful establishment and that it would be a shame if something happened to it. In this movie, a dark-both visually and morally- Western that attempts some modern revisionist surgery on classic Western themes while also upholding them, the bad guy Dutch Albert (John Cusack) is introduced in a late night encounter at the protagonist's home.
I've written about how I am not overly fond of police. In my experience and those of many people I know, police tend to be overly aggressive with black people, particularly with black males of any age. Police actions cause fear, contempt, and hatred.
I think that police too often reflexively choose the harshest penalties when interacting with black people: racial insults, unnecessary searches, use of force, citations and tickets when a similarly situated white person gets assistance or maybe a warning, etc. All that said I've also written about how irritating I find it to have people (usually teens) walking in the middle of the street. The sidewalk is for walking. The street is for driving. I don't drive on the sidewalk and have the audacity to get upset when someone says that the action is wrong.
So before watching this video I was all set to blast the cops but afterwards I don't see what the police did wrong. The police officer could have stayed in his car and drove on, but that's similar to saying the police don't need to pull over a highway speeder who has slowed down. Most of the times they don't. But every so often they do. In and of itself that is not a crime. Unless you are ready to hold court in the street and kill or die, you won't win confrontations with police. If the police order is legal, most people will end up complying with it, willingly or not. If the police are committing a crime, then I do believe that we have the right to refuse the illegal order and defend ourselves. But that's not what the below video shows. The orders were legal. Few cops will let a citizen ignore them and walk away from a legal detention.
