THANK YOU, GARBAGE PEOPLE OF THE LEFT, FOR SHOVELING DIRT ON BLACK LIVES MATTER’S GRAVE:
Austin Metcalf’s family buried their son and now they’re receiving death threats for it. The same movement that called Karmelo Anthony the victim is now threatening the family of the kid he killed. There are no words for how sick this is.
SOMALIS NOT GOING OUT OF THEIR WAY TO LOOK GOOD TO THE COUNTRY THAT IS LEANING TOWARD DEPORTING THEM ALL:
Somalis stomp on the American Flag while holding a photo of the referee who was denied entry to the U.S. for alleged ties to a terrorist organization at a protest in Somalia pic.twitter.com/wjedt6oZEl
A quick side by side of things legacy media outlets will describe as Nazi-adjacent when they’re about Trump vs. how these outlets talk about Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo, which an ex-gf of his confirmed to the NYT was deliberate.
Another recurring controversy in French classrooms concerns the teaching of the Holocaust. A 2020 survey of young French people between the ages of 15 and 24 by the Institut français d’opinion publique (IFOP) found that 21% of students criticize Holocaust education for excessive emphasis and question aspects of the genocide, and 13% of students outright reject it being taught because they find it offensive to their cultural or religious identity. Moreover, 70% of those surveyed agreed that teachers experience “real difficulties teaching about the Holocaust in schools located in the banlieues.” Already in 2004, the Obin report, authored by then national schools inspector Jean-Pierre Obin for the Ministry of Education, revealed growing tensions in several French schools regarding the teaching of topics such as the Holocaust, the history of religions, and evolution. These tensions included cases of student resistance, Holocaust denial, teacher self-censorship, and, in general, serious difficulties in delivering the curriculum within a framework of secular neutrality.
All these fundamental flaws in the system, which have been in place for years and which President Emmanuel Macron carries on today, are also what have allowed the existence in France of so-called no-go zones: neighborhoods where the gendarmerie either cannot or will not enter and where, in some cases, Sharia law is enforced unofficially. This failure of integration is the first dimension of the collapse of Europe’s multicultural experiment. The second is poverty and crime, since isolation cuts many immigrants off from the institutions and opportunities that could help them improve their education or find employment.
Does this explain the gratuitous violence that accompanies these celebrations? In theory, no. In practice, perhaps it does. There is a large population of French citizens of Arab and African origin who have grown up in cultural and religious bubbles where hostility toward the West is commonplace and, by extension, hostility toward France and what it represents in Europe. Among the most disadvantaged—nearly 40% of African immigrants in France live in poverty—that resentment is often compounded by frustration at having failed to achieve the aspirations that motivated migration in the first place. Life in the banlieues also exposes these communities to particular social problems such as unemployment, educational failure, drug trafficking, and the influence of radical Islamist movements.
Meanwhile in Belfast, the same authorities who cheered on 2020’s mostly peaceful but rather fiery protests in Minneapolis are breaking out the water cannons on their own citizens:
This black and white 1972 BBC documentary, titled “Moving to a ‘Town of the 21st Century,'” is simultaneously dreary and hilarious as hell. It’s about a young working class couple leaving their cramped flat and moving to Thamesmead, a brutalist concrete mixed-use project with both apartments and shops. You may not recognize the name of the development, but you’ve seen it:
Thamesmead’s style of architecture was brutalism, a concrete-oriented architecture dreamed up by France’s Le Corbusier, after WWII, to cheaply build tower apartment blocks:
The use of béton brut was pioneered by modernist architects such as Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier coined the term béton brut during the construction of Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France, built in 1952.
“Brutalism,” as a dominant architectural style, was a choice.
Gone were soaring columns, noble statuary depicting American heroes or abstract figures like Justice or Liberty, and welcoming spaces.
Instead we got modern architecture — which, as Tom Wolfe notes in his delightful book “From Bauhaus to Our House,” was quite literally designed to promote socialism.
Modern architects blamed bourgeois values for the horrors of World War II and wanted to promote socialist values instead.
They disdained “bourgeois” adornment and designed buildings to dwarf individuals, not uplift them.
As scholar James Scott points out, the French architect Le Corbusier, noted for his huge buildings amid vast, sterile plazas, dedicated his book “The Radiant City” thus: “To Authority.”
Mr Jarcy said that in “Plans” Le Corbusier wrote in support of Nazi anti-Semitism and in “Prelude” co-wrote “hateful editorials”.
In August 1940, the architect wrote to his mother that “money, Jews (partly responsible), Freemasonry, all will feel just law”. In October that year, he added: “Hitler can crown his life with a great work: the planned layout of Europe.”
Mr Chaslin said he had unearthed “anti-Semite sketches” by Le Corbusier, and ascertained that the French architect had spent 18 months in Vichy, where the Nazis ran a French puppet government, where he kept an office.
The Le Corbusier Foundation, which works to promote the architect’s memory and works, barely touches on this side of his life, relegating his Vichy role to an “extended stay” in the town.
Until quite recently, I had assumed that the extreme ugliness of the city in which I live was attributable to the Luftwaffe. I imagined that the cheap and charmless high rise buildings which so disfigure the city-scape had been erected of necessity in great gaping holes left by Heinkel bombers.
* * * * * * * * *
“A great shame about the war,” I said to the store assistant, who was of an age to remember the old days. “Look at the city now.”
“The war?” she said. “The war had nothing to do with it. It was the council.”
Embrace the healing power of and, to coin a phrase.
Regarding Francois Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, James Lileks once wrote:
The only convincing dystopian movie I’ve ever seen is “1984.” Other moves look dated. They dress the set with a few Futuristic Things, change the collars on the jackets, tweak some element of society so something we take for granted is forbidden and bad. Old age is bad, or food is scarce, or overpopulation ruined everything — a particularly amusing claim for “Soylent Green,” as if you could feed a teeming population with compressed rectangles of old people. Same with Fahrenheit 451 — it appeals to an adolescent’s need for unambiguous cackling illiberal villains.
Here’s what I find interesting: whenever the sci-fi movies of the 60s and 70s wanted to set something in a horrible totalitarian world, they just shot on location at a government housing project.
Observing the families in the BBC video moving into the exterior set of A Clockwork Orange brings to mind another Lileks quote: “You realize: no one in a dystopia probably thinks they’re living in a dystopia.”
At the end of the video, Geoffrey Horsfall, one of Thamesmead‘s architects, tells the BBC, “I’ve got every confidence in the future of Thamesmead and I think that it’s something that many of us will see, but certainly you younger people, you know, you will see this finished and complete and will be able to say, ‘Well, that chap I heard talking wasn’t all that wrong.’”
Lee County was hit Tuesday with a deluge just before the match. But Freddy found a friend:
“I love Americans. We were about to walk an hour to the stadium in the rain to save on an Uber, and the receptionist at the hotel we were parked in front of decided to drive us there.”
Once inside Jordan-Hare, Freddy seemed surprised by a familiar sight to Alabamians. “There’s an eagle flying around the stadium,” he wrote.
Apparently, his upper deck seats were memorable. “This is the craziest stadium I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to a lot of ones.”
With the view of the stadium as the sun set, Freddy was in awe. “This is the most ‘The European mind can’t comprehend this’ moment of my life,” he wrote. “One of my friends said, ‘Punch me five times tomorrow and I’ll still think this isn’t real.’”
As fireworks erupted following the match, he said, “What an experience.”
It was too late for Freddy to sample some lemonade at Toomer’s Corners, but he did make a tour of campus before a 1 a.m. stop at Buc-ee’s.
It seems to me that when a substantial part of the Dem base is unable to accept the most clearcut murder convictions because of racial animus, that's a MUCH bigger societal problem than the GOP base being overinvested in proving voter fraud. https://t.co/2z0yBtFkqC
“Disclosure Day” boasts a trippy cast, a timely premise and the potential for endless thrills. The result is a mess, suggesting that the iconic storyteller’s best days are behind him.
Boy, were those days movie magic. Now? The only illusion here is thinking this saga is worth its bloated running time.
* * * * * * * *
“Disclosure Day” sounds so intriguing on paper, but nearly every element offers surface-level thinking. Even worse?
The dramatic stakes are all over the map, arguably the film’s biggest lapse. And then there’s Hugo (the great Colman Domingo), trying to thwart Noah’s plans. Hugo is part of an effort to tell the world all about the aliens hidden by dark, nebulous forces.
Who are these forces? Why are so many aliens visiting Earth? What is their purpose? Is there a reason for their repeated visits? If they’re so sophisticated, why are they constantly in peril once they reach our planet?
Make some of this make sense.
“Disclosure Day” asks endless questions while offering few answers. The story quickly falls into a stale pattern of chase, escape and chase anew.
It’s not fair to Disclosure Day or screenwriter David Koepp—who apparently wrote this in conjunction with Spielberg, who has described it as the culmination of his interest in the subject of alien life—to compare this film to something like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a genuine masterpiece of sci-fantasy wonder. But there’s something to be said for the earlier movie’s sense of detached awe, the innate curiosity at the heart of its desperate hunger for the truth and the uncertainty that comes with unknowing. That’s a movie that was written and directed by a young man who felt he still had so much to learn, so much to see, so much to do. It’s a movie made by a man who can understand abandoning his family and getting on that ship and taking it to wherever the little gray men want to take him. In many ways it’s a movie about that man, an unconscious synthesis of his artistically minded mother and scientifically minded father.
Disclosure Day, on the other hand, is a film made by a man who has seen it all—or at least enough to think that he has unlocked the key to it all. It’s a movie that has its feet firmly on the ground, more concerned with the mundanity of man’s petty squabbles, and the potential ugliness and destruction always lurking nearby, than any exploration of the cosmos. It’s a film that blithely dismisses the upheaval that revelations about extraterrestrial life would unleash, choosing instead to argue that a worldwide information dump about the existence of little grey men would be such a unifying moment that we’d all simply stare at our phones in wonder and forget about little things like “wars” or “North Korean ballistic missiles.” (Okay, fair enough: This is probably the smartest point the film makes.)
But perhaps not to the level that Spielberg thinks, in order to hype his film:
Would aliens break our faith? Or affirm it? It’s the latter possibility that secular sci-fi never seems to contemplate as an option, taking it for granted that more advanced species would of necessity be more materialist than us. But that’s question-begging, of course. If we… pic.twitter.com/XMv74gKrcA
Stahl is 84—even older than Joe Biden. She lived through 9/11 and the Jimmy Carter administration. She witnessed the self-inflicted debasement of her former colleague Dan Rather after he reported on forged documents purporting to cast doubt on President George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard. That was pretty bad.
What else might the iconic journalist have experienced in her career that was almost, but not quite, as traumatizing as corporate restructuring in a dying industry?
Well, Stahl’s first story as a 60 Minutes correspondent was about child trafficking in Romania after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu. She visited a family that wanted to sell their four-year-old son for $500 to buy a camcorder. The following year, Stahl interviewed survivors of Josef Mengele’s twisted human experiments at Auschwitz. In 2020, she was forced to endure interviews with Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, cofounders of the much-maligned Lincoln Project super PAC.
It’s entirely plausible that Stahl was more disturbed upon learning that a handful of journalists had been fired by CBS. After all, she is a journalist, and many journalists have described Pelley’s termination alone as one the greatest tragedies to befall mankind.
Stahl has unintentionally (well, I think unintentionally) channeled Mel Brooks’ classic 2000 Year Old Man character, who told Carl Reiner in 1963, “To me, tragedy is if I’ll cut my finger. That’s tragedy. It bleeds, and I’ll cry, and I’ll run around, and I’ll go into Mount Sinai for a day and a half. I’m very nervous about it. And to me, comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die. What do I care? That’s comedy. My finger is important.”
Scott Pelley concurs:
Having lost a job and lost a spouse in my lifetime, they are very, very, so much not the same. https://t.co/tTEyYTIYwM
REALITY BITES WARNOCK: The Georgia Democrat senator told the New York Times a few days ago that the South became Republican when the old racist Democrats failed to stop the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Just Facts Daily marshals key facts and I add some more, based on having been born and raised in one of those “Solid South” states where most voters would “vote for a Yellow Dog if he ran as a Democrat.”
TEXAS PRIMARY VOTERS SEEMED TO HAVE FIGURED THIS OUT ALREADY:
Like Tillis, this idiot admits he lied to voters for the last 10 years. https://t.co/nObcKSLF9E
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