Monthly Archives: May 2022

Godzilla was having some wee GI issues during this scene. The director was understandably irate. Until Godzilla ate him. After that, King Ghidorah quit whining about his co-star, given the lack of self-control during the rending of the director.
Oh, wait, is that Mothra? No? A suppository tool? Oh, ugh.

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964), with a previous review here, bears little resemblance to the previous review, leading me to think this is a different cut of the movie. After all, the previous review references Martians, while in this movie the extra-terrestrial is a Venusian.

Let’s go with that, because this did not seem at all familiar to either of us.

In some fictional country, the Princess Salno is leaving for a visit to Japan on her obviously model plane. Nefarious forces are at work at home, though, and the Princess is considered to be surplus by the Powers That Wannabe. As her plane flies through the night, a meteor storm entrances her to the extent that she opens the plane’s door and plunges out into the night sky, and the plane, ummmm, explodes, sure, let’s use that verb, moments later.

Meanwhile, that meteor storm brought more than illusions for a Princess. There’s a huge and growing meteor in the side of Mt. Kurodake, a madwoman running around predicting Rodan is about to pop out of his hidey hole, also in Mt. Kurodake, and maybe Mothra’s fairy twins, in town for a visit, shouldn’t take that ship back to Infant Isle, home of their master. Mistress. Deity. Cute pet? So hard to tell the difference these days.

And the Powers That Wannabe are becoming suspicious about that madwoman, enough so to send an assassination squad.

All this time there’s a brother (cop) and sister (journalist) who are pursuing the madwoman to see just what’s going on with her, and they collide with the assassination squad in a hotel. Fun!

Yeah, that rough character on the right is one of the worst Rodan’s I’ve ever seen.

As the madwoman undergoes analysis at a top researcher’s clinic, incidentally revealing she’s the last surviving Venusian and thereby winning a prize for the researcher, Godzilla, having randomly torched a ship – remember? – now wades ashore, while Rodan, a really bad Rodan in any way you want to take that, pops out of the mountain, much to the chagrin of a guy fetching a mistake made during a selfie. Yeah, selfies are not a new phenom.

Rodan and Godzilla get together and … act like spoiled children.

No kidding. And in the meantime, that meteor has burst and the forthcoming King Ghidorah, he/she/it/them of the three legs and three tails, the lightning coming forth and all that rot. Yeah, I’m not cleaning up that sentence, it reflects all the incoherence of KG.

But the Mothra groupies fairies are still around, and, informed that two rather large infants are having a go of it, rather than working KG over, sings a request to Mothra to come and make the kids shape up. Mothra arrives and finds KG to be a real handful, and in fact her, I’m sticking with that gender for what’s really just a giant larva, role appears to consist of being tossed around like a salad. Can she get Godzilla and Rodan to grow up and behave? Or will she die once again?

Uh.

And that’s the real disappointment in this story. In the first installment of this series, Gojira (1955), Godzilla comes across as baleful, almost otherworldly metaphysically speaking, creature with an inscrutable agenda, or at least a lust for destruction. This Godzilla and Rodan are just oversized brats.

And it really spoils an otherwise OK movie, which won positive commentary on its cinematography and something that actually resembles a plot from my Arts Editor, although the special effects are not impressive at all. It’s too bad, but don’t waste your time with this version, either, if you’ve seen Gojira, because it’s just demoralizing.

Erick Erickson is frantic to claim to his audience that the possible upending of Roe v. Wade is entirely legitimate, because any hint of dirty work will taint, and in fact legitimize a later reversal of this decision, should enough believers in abortion rights be appointed to SCOTUS in the near term.

So how is he doing? Not well. Here’s just one paragraph:

Fourth, the pro-life movement followed the rule of law to accomplish this goal. They elected Republican Presidents and pushed for pro-life judges. They elected Republican senators who approved those judges and justices. Ironically, it was the Democrats’ own rule-breaking that got the Dobbs case across the finish line. Had Harry Reid and the Democrats not ended the filibuster for nominations, this moment would not have come. Their rule-breaking ended Roe and progressive law clerks’ rule-breaking brought us the first notice of it. Pro-lifers followed the rules and were able to capitalize on the Democrats rewriting the rules. Ironic.

Where to start? I suppose in order of assertions is best.

They elected Republican Presidents …

They did? Shall we discuss the illegitimacy of the Bush Administration, when a Republican-dominated SCOTUS terminated a poorly run Florida election, declaring for Bush, before the recount was finished? Shall we discuss the intimidating Brooks Brothers riot?

The Brooks Brothers riot was a demonstration at a meeting of election canvassers in Miami-Dade County, Florida, on November 22, 2000, during a recount of votes made during the 2000 United States presidential election, with the goal of shutting down the recount. After demonstrations and acts of violence, local officials shut down the recount early. [Wikipedia]

That’s hardly legitimacy, now is it? But let’s finish off that first sentence:

… and pushed for pro-life [i.e., anti-abortion – hw] judges.

Illegitimate on its face, Erickson, and you know that. Judges do many things, but letting their opinions be shaped by religious doctrine is not one of those things. And we all should know that.

This one made me laugh:

They elected Republican senators who approved those judges and justices.

And didn’t even consider Judge Garland. Indeed, to better understand the issue, more context is needed. When Justice Scalia passed away, more than a year before the end of President Obama’s second term, Obama displayed professional behavior by consulting with Republican Senators and nominating Judge Garland, with their approval, a month or two later.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) then led his caucus in a series of bald-faced lies about how new Justices are never approved during the final year of a term, such ridiculous lies that I think we lost a few journalists to death by laughter. It was that silly.

But McConnell, by not even permitting the hearings required by the Constitution, if I may take a positive view of Constitutional governance, won his dishonorable point. When Trump defeated Clinton, permitting Trump to nominate and have confirmed Judge Gorsuch, we have one Illegitimate Justice; when Justice Ginsburg passed away in the final weeks of Trump’s term, McConnell couldn’t wait to break his own made-up rule concerning nomination and confirmation of justices, confirming Amy Coney Barrett to SCOTUS just prior to the election resulting in the easily predictable election of Joe Biden to the Presidency.

Count ’em: that’s two Illegitimate Justices.

And then there’s this utterly mendacious line:

Had Harry Reid and the Democrats not ended the filibuster for nominations, this moment would not have come.

The first lie is the most obvious: The Democrats didn’t end the filibuster for SCOTUS nominations.

In 2017 [when the Senate was held by the Republicans] the number of senators required to invoke cloture on Supreme Court nominations was reduced from 60 to a majority of senators voting. [Wikipedia]

A little more research reveals that this was used for the Gorsuch nomination. Erickson might defend by claiming he was talking about all the non-SCOTUS nominations, which would make his argument true, but that is made irrelevant by his own last clause, … this moment would never have come. That invalidates the argument.

But if we charitably – very charitably – give him that point, the argument I just employed makes it clear that the Republicans were just as likely, if not more so, to change the rules when it came to SCOTUS nominations.

And if he wants to claim that the Republicans were merely inspired by the Democrats’ action to remove the filibuster for non-SCOTUS nominations, well, I just may have to die laughing as well. Of course they would. The Democrats would not have approved far-right judges for SCOTUS, and the Republicans’ control of the Senate in 2017 didn’t extend to the necessary 60 vote limit. Given a choice between a reasonable judge to nominate and killing the filibuster in order to force through an arbitrarily far-right choice, we know what McConnell’s decision would be, because he demonstrated it already.

The other option, of a SCOTUS slowly eroding as justices retired or died, would not have been tolerable to the American public, especially the independents. The Republicans suffer whenever they are closely examined, and a decaying SCOTUS would have brought forth a lot of examination.

Erickson’s last bit:

Their rule-breaking ended Roe and progressive law clerks’ rule-breaking brought us the first notice of it. Pro-lifers followed the rules and were able to capitalize on the Democrats rewriting the rules. Ironic.

This is nothing more than a sparkly bit to make sure no one examines what he’s written too closely. Invoke the smug morality, certain that a Divinity is behind them, and the feel-good hormones will stop most sympathetic readers from thinking about this line of bullshit that our ever-pious radio talk show guy is peddling.

Another reason not to take Erickson too seriously.

In an unusual turn of events, this nomination comes via a politico, Tony Daunt, who has parted ways with the nominees – the Michigan Republican Party’s state committee:

Instead of focusing on Democrats’ “myriad failures,” Daunt wrote that “feckless, cowardly party ‘leaders’ have made the election here in Michigan a test of who is the most cravenly loyal to Donald Trump and re-litigating the results of the 2020 cycle.”

Daunt described Trump as a “deranged narcissist.” [The Detroit News]

It’s this last part that probably describes most Earl Landgrebe nominees:

“Incredibly, rather than distancing themselves from this undisciplined loser, far too many Republican ‘leaders’ have decided that encouraging his delusional lies — and, even worse — cynically appeasing him despite knowing they are lies, is the easiest path to ensuring their continued hold on power, general election consequences be damned,” Daunt wrote in his email.

“Rather than assembling the courage to do the right thing, at the right time, and guide the activist base towards the truth, they’ve repeatedly backed down and dissembled, hoping that just one more act of cowardice will be what does the trick.”

They’re in a position of power, finally, and why spit on their benefactor? He claims he could bounce them out.

So kiss the Trumpian shoes.

The article notes this:

Daunt’s resignation was another sign of growing divisions within the Michigan Republican Party ahead of the 2022 election, in which the state will elect a governor and fill every seat in the state Legislature.

No surprise. Fourth-raters are in it for the personal glory, and someone else getting glory isn’t part of the game plan. So backbiting and being the amateurs they are will not play well with many voters.

Amplexus:

Amplexus (Latin “embrace”) is a type of mating behavior exhibited by some externally fertilizing species (chiefly amphibians and horseshoe crabs) in which a male grasps a female with his front legs as part of the mating process, and at the same time or with some time delay, he fertilizes the eggs, as they are released from the female’s body.^[1] In amphibians, females may be grasped by the head, waist, or armpits, and the type of amplexus is characteristic of some taxonomic groups. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Male toad clings to female for 5 months waiting for chance to mate,” Luke Taylor, NewScientist (23 April 2022, paywall):

A species of endangered toad endemic to Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains is clinging on for dear life. The tiny Santa Marta harlequin toad (Atelopus laetissimus), which is just 4 centimetres long, can cling to the back of a female for five months without feeding until the pair are ready to mate.

The grasping behaviour, which is known as “amplexus”, is seen in many other animal species – but rarely continues for such a long period of time, says Luis Alberto Rueda-Solano at the University of Magdalena, Colombia. In some cases, it can even prove fatal. But finding a female early in the breeding season and holding on for the long haul comes with big reproductive benefits, he adds.

I guess the couple get to know each other really well?

With the rise of crypto, which I think is just Mary Kaye for tech bros …
– Erick Erickson

I love it!

I forgot to publish this post way back when, but it still amazes me. [7/2/2022]

I suppose this is better than prison, even country club prison:

US billionaire Michael Steinhardt has surrendered 180 stolen relics worth an estimated $70 million and agreed to an “unprecedented” lifetime ban on acquiring antiquities, officials in Manhattan have said.

Investigators found that Steinhardt, one of the world’s largest ancient art collectors, was in possession of looted artifacts smuggled out of 11 countries by 12 criminal networks, according to a statement from the Manhattan District Attorney’s (DA) office on Monday.

“For decades, Michael Steinhardt displayed a rapacious appetite for plundered artifacts without concern for the legality of his actions, the legitimacy of the pieces he bought and sold, or the grievous cultural damage he wrought across the globe,” said Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, Jr. in the statement. [CNN/Style]

He claims he was buying from dealers who claimed these were legal, so the ban suggests the government didn’t really believe him – or that he should have double-checked, as a guy with his resources could easily do so.

This made me prick up my antennae:

Legislation that would subject U.S. Supreme Court justices and federal judges to tougher disclosure requirements for their financial holdings and stock trades passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday in a rare show of bipartisanship.

The bill, approved on a voice vote after winning Senate passage in February, would make it easier for the public to see if a member of the federal judiciary has a financial conflict of interest warranting recusal from hearing a case.

The Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act now goes to President Joe Biden to sign into law. White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said that while he had yet to talk to Biden about the bill, “he has always been full throated about furthering ethics and transparency in government and restoring trust in institutions, and this kind of policy is aligned with those goals.” [Reuters]

I think we’re going to see a few judges, mostly of the Trump vintage, getting caught up in the gears of this legislation, as well as public opinion, because it seems that public officials of any background can sure misunderstand financial ethics rules.

But I expect the Trump nominated judges, both from quality and numbers, to be the most likely to get caught up. And then what?

Threats of impeachment. Resignations.

All over the next four years. I expect to see five ± three judges end up leaving the bench prematurely because of this legislation befouling their sails, if you’ll forgive the pun, and possibly giving the Democrats a chance to make up judicial numbers.

Hey, how do you cock this thing anyways?

The General (1926) is the story of a railroad engineer in the American Confederacy, transparently named Johnnie Gray, and his travails during the American Civil War. His attempt to enlist in a Confederate regiment has been rejected without a reason being given when the War begins, and he is shamed in front of his fiancee by her father and brother for his failure.

A year or two later, Union forces are knocking at the door to the South, and Annabelle’s father has been wounded in the fighting. She chooses to go to the front to care for him, and travels on Gray’s train, the engine of which is named The General. Stopping for a meal in a small town, the crew and passengers disembark, but Annabelle stays behind. This small decision leads to potential disaster as Union raiders, disguised as Confederates, steal the train and whisk Annabelle off to captivity.

Or so they think, but this is Gray’s former and, he hopes, future fiancee, and he’s off like a shot in pursuit, by foot and handcar and anything else he can lay his hands on, up to and including, eventually, the engine Texas. Shots are exchanged when the pursuit is discovered, including employment of one bloody large cannon, but the shots are more customary than effective.

When night comes, the Union soldiers believe themselves safe and stop to rendezvous with Union commanders, but Gray is sneakier and not only frees Annabelle, but hears the plans of the Union commanders. With morning comes his recapture of The General and a harried return to Confederate lines, bearing a warning to the Confederate generals. Will the notoriously incompetent Confederate generals deal with an imminent Union surprise attack properly? Will Gray retain command of The General?

And has Annabelle given her virtue to someone else already, much like the South gave it away in its thirst for prosperity for some, but not all? This is one aspect of the greater context given absolutely no attention at all. It’s a tricky question, of course: assuming the audience knows the context of the American Civil War when revisionism was running rampant in the 1920s. The movie gives no hint of the War’s underpinnings of racism and the injustice of slavery, leaving this to be an action-adventure tale for which the greater moral context is completely neglected.

This is one of the best silent movies that I’ve seen, with lovely cinematography, a good, tight story, and excellent acting. The only other annoying problem is the occasional bit of slapstick, probably thrown in as the lead actor, Buster Keaton, was known for his slapstick. But, overall, it all works quite well.

Recommended for anyone interested in film history, silent movies, or just a well thought out story.

Will it capsize all boats?

The discredited trickle-down economic theory, that lowering taxes on the wealthy and corporations will result in a supercharged economy as they invest in the economy, had a slogan attached to it, that rising waters lift all boats, wealthy and poverty stricken alike.

I couldn’t help but think of it while reading Professor Richardson’s latest post to her Letters from an American blog:

Far from the policy struggles of the Republicans and Democrats back East, in the summer of 1890, a new movement began, quietly, to take shape. In western towns, workers and poor farmers and entrepreneurs shut out of opportunities by monopolies began to talk to each other. They discovered a shared dismay over a government that seemed to work only for the rich industrialists, and anger that they seemed to be working themselves to the bone only to have the fruits of their labor taken by the rich. “Wall Street owns the country,” western organizer Mary Elizabeth Lease told audiences. “It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.”

Westerners suffering in the new economy began to come together. Reviving older Farmers’ Alliances, they distributed literature across the country explaining how tariffs worked and how railroad monopolies jacked up prices. Existing newspapers began to echo their arguments, and where there weren’t local newspapers, Alliance members began to print them.

Resulting in…

While congressmen and eastern newspapers fought over every scrap of Washington political gossip, western farmers and workers and entrepreneurs had organized. New newspapers, letters, barbecues, lectures, and picnics had done their work, educating those on the peripheries of politics about the grand issues of the day. When the votes were counted after the November 1890 election, the Alliances had carried South Dakota and almost the whole state ticket in Kansas, and they held the balance of power in the Minnesota and Illinois legislatures. In Nebraska and Iowa, they had split the Republicans and given the governorship to a Democrat. They controlled 52 seats in the new Congress, enough to swing laws in their direction.

While Professor Richardson undoubtedly is hoping for a similar wave this year, lifting the Democrats over the Republicans, from my vantage point I’m wondering if both canoes are going to end up tipped over. Could a political movement, independent of either major Party and the old smaller parties, achieve success in the scant time left to it in 2022?

Neither Party seems to be worthy of confidence. The Republicans feature amateur hour elected officials who run around howling that the last election was stolen, and sometimes even engaging in politically and/or legally dubious behavior. I do not exclude the former President from this characterization, as he has served as an inspiration to half-baked idiots nation-wide, as well as inspiring an attempt to interfere with the lawful procedures of Congress. He, and his devotees, live on the mistaken political philosophy that the only criteria a politician need have is a devotion to Party leaders and specified ideological/theological positions; experience, character, and expertise as a rhetorician need not apply.

The Democrats continue to labor under the twin crosses of their botch of handling the transgenderism issue and a whiff of arrogance that alienates independents. Add in a perception that certain elected officials’ philosophy, when it comes to crime, has led to an increase in highly violent crime – true or not – and a few other issues, and this appears to stir up the independents’ fears, as shown in the Virginia elections last year.

BUT – The problem with a new party is that it may be populated with smart people, or with grifters and power-seekers, and it’s unlikely to be populated with folks with relevant experience to the challenges of governing. Would we want that sort of thing? While the Republicans continue to howl out criticisms of how President Biden has handled the Afghanistan pull-out and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I have come to view those criticisms as hollow, being divided between those outraged that we’ve given up on Afghanistan, and those who just don’t like Biden and the governmental philosophies he represents. I think Biden, in the face of unremitting opposition from Republicans and traps set, clumsily as they were, by the former President Trump (R), has done quite well on the foreign relations front, while on the domestic front he’s been hobbled and unable to implement a full recovery program, although what has been implemented has done relatively well. Those squealing about inflation fail to consider the impact of Russia’s actions on the world economy.

And I don’t honestly see a new political party self-organizing in time to field candidates by 2022. But by 2024?

That’s a distinct possibility.

So, we’ll see what the people have to say. I’m looking forward to it, if with a little trepidation.

There’s a lot to be said for the observations of the disinterested expert, especially if they derive expertise from hands-on experience. Therefore, without further ado, here’s former Rep Charlie Dent (R-PA):

Far too many Republicans serve in Congress under a constant cloud of fear. Let’s call them the Fear Caucus. This group of decent men and women are unfortunately too worried about their own positions to publicly say what they believe about the former President’s conduct, temperament and fitness for office. What McCarthy said in exasperation about Trump’s responsibility for the Capitol riot probably reflects the sentiments of the majority of House and Senate Republicans. But what these Republicans are willing to say in public is too often another story. [CNN]

Too jealous of their position to exert leadership and speak out against madness spewing from one’s own side, whether it be theocratic or ideological, suggests third-raters afraid of the fourth-raters who are ruining the Party.

It’s perhaps understandable, but remains inexcusable, just as it does for Democrats who fail to denounce extremists on their flanks.

Dent’s statement functions as a useful fact in trying to understand the situation – and change it for the better, for all Americans.