December 3, 2019

At the Late Night Café...

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... I can't call it the Tuesday Night Café because that's what I absentmindedly called last night's café. Anyway, the rule is you can talk about anything, and I like to say remember to use the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

The photograph is from yesterday, and it shows a sunrise, not a sunset.

96 comments:

Beasts of England said...

Orrin Hatch - yes, Orrin Hatch - is trolling Biden’s ‘No Malarkey’ bus with a photoshopped ‘No Tomfoolery’ bus!! We are not worthy. :)

pacwest said...

It looks like the Hong Kong insurrection may be spreading into the neighboring Chinese province.

Bill, Republic of Texas said...

I just watch 1:20 minutes of the Irishman on Netflix. What a horrible movie. The story is boring. The acting is awfully. The make-up or special effects make the actors look terrible.

Am I the only person feeling this Way? I was so looking forward to another good gangster movie.

Should I bother to watch the remaining 2 hours ugh.

J. Farmer said...

@Bill, Republic of Texas:

Am I the only person feeling this Way?

Haven't watched it, but you made it further than my sister. She said that she was going to give it another shot but just kept thinking, "What the hell happened to Al Pacino?"

J. Farmer said...

And speaking of movies, I saw Knives Out with my father during a matinee showing today. I loved Rian Johnson's first film, Brick, and I am a sucker for a whodunit, but I do not understand how that movie has such high critics' ratings and audience ratings. It was mildly entertaining but started off extremely slow, and you could see the plot twist coming a mile away. It had perhaps a handful of funny gags.

Hagar said...

Pelosi may go for censure as being the least damaging to the Party.
If they go for impeachment she loses control when the ranking members get equal rights.
Imagine the Republicans calling Joe Biden as an expert witness on Ukraine corruption, Jim Jordan rips into him, and Slow Joe starts babbling. Disaster ensues!

Michael K said...

I'm looking forward to seeing "Jewel" next week.

The Media hate it. I still think think the impeachment follies are all show. The few NTs around are desperate to see Trump go down.

hawkeyedjb said...

The dogs are barking, and what's done is done. What's done today is Kamala's campaign. What will soon be done is a dozen more campaigns, those of forgettable, unaccomplished dullards with great delusions. "I coulda been somebody!"

J. Farmer said...

I'm looking forward to seeing "Jewel" next week.

Me, too.

The Media hate it

A movie that (rightfully) attacks the US media and the Clinton Justice Department. I can't imagine why ;)

Beasts of England said...

Just read that Schiff has phone records for Devin Nunes and John Solomon, and that they’re included - to some degree - in today’s report. What the heck is going on? This seems, at a minimum, absurd.

Ken B said...

Bill Texas
You should stop. I thought the movie was OK, but the first half was the best. It doesn’t improve, and if you are already squirming ...

Bill, Republic of Texas said...

The new season of Peakey Blinders is kinda ok. I'm losing patience with that as well.
I don't know, maybe I'm just grouchy. At least Farmer's sister agrees with me about The Irishman. I was so hoping for another Godfather, Casino or Goodfellows type movie.


Hopefully Babylon Berlin 3 will be out soon.

Any suggestions for good shows or movies on Netflix.

Ken B said...

Beasts
How can it be relevant? It’s an abuse. Another abuse that will be permitted.

Ken B said...

Bill Texas
If you like over-plotted things Line Of Duty is fun. The Demjanjuk docuseries Devil Next Door i think is the title is very interesting. Better than the Irishman for sure!

narciso said...

I lost interest in blinders after season 3, yes you can guess the ending in knives, a mile away

Drago said...

Beasts of England: "Orrin Hatch - yes, Orrin Hatch - is trolling Biden’s ‘No Malarkey’ bus with a photoshopped ‘No Tomfoolery’ bus!! We are not worthy. :)"

It wasn't just Orrin Hatch.

Ben Sasse was whacking around Mini-Mike Bloomberg AND even that piece of crap Sen Burr was talking about how BS the dems tactics have been.

It's like a LLR Chuck/dem nightmare!

narciso said...

They should have adopted bernie gunthers tales.

Titus said...

Hi fellow Republicans. How are we tonight?

Titus said...

What liberal is angering us tonight?

Lucien said...

@Beasts: Wouldn't surprise me if Parnas was being surveilled and they picked up information on whoever he talked to. Might include Nunes or Solomon.

gspencer said...

Schiff gets ahold of Nunes phone records?

What!

Beasts of England said...

Thanks, Lucien. This is evolving like a second-rate spy novel. And it would be more entertaining if it weren’t so disgusting...

gspencer said...

"The Media hate it."

The Media hated the 2018 remake of Death Wish. I loved it.

stevew said...

Mindhunter is good.

pacwest said...

@Beasts

Shiff is not so obliquely accusing Nunes of being complicit in Trump's "schemes". Standard Dem playbook of discrediting the opposition. Expect Nunes to be called to the witness stand in Nadler's inquisition. I think they are going to wind up grabbing a tiger by the tail if they do that.

Bill, Republic of Texas said...

Thanks for the recommendations Ken. I'll check them out.

FullMoon said...

I'm looking forward to seeing "Jewel" next week.

Me too.

Saw Ford vs Ferrari. Not bad. The great engine sounds kept waking my wife up.

Jewel preview was great. Preview of another movie, name escapes me, looked good, very surprised to see main character is Adam Sandler. He might actually be a good actor.

Kind of related, as in comedian playing dramatic, saw Jim Carrey in a serious detective mystery on Netflix, or Prime. Worth watching for its terribleness.

Beasts of England said...

’Expect Nunes to be called to the witness stand in Nadler's inquisition.’

Wow. That would be rather dynamic...

narciso said...


This is one of those doug mcgrath comedies

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/nunes-sues-cnn-over-demonstrably-false-ukraine-report?_amp=true&__twitter_impression=true

Drago said...

gspencer: "Schiff gets ahold of Nunes phone records?

What!"

Not only Nunes, but reporter John Solomon's phone records AND Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

I wonder if there was a court order for those records, otherwise......

FullMoon said...

Immigrants turning red states blue.


This

Drago said...

Who else is looking forward to the dems next all white debate?

I know LLR Chuck is! He can't wait to see his boy Biden come back strong after Kamala dropped out!

The only downside?

Joe won't remember who he is so he won't fully enjoy the moment.

I'm Full of Soup said...

1- i'm not a good critic of movies.
2- I watch when i'm on my office treadmill - usually 90 minutes of walking.
3- I thought the Irishman was entertaining enough to get me through two days of treadmill work.
4- I'm lifelong Philly guy and my only beef was Deniro's accent was more New Yawk than Philly.
5- I thought Pacino was great as Hoffa.
6- It's entertaining but not the greatest. I recommend it to all who want to be entertaining.
7- I remember Food Fair grocery stores. Does Althouse?

J. Farmer said...

@FullMoon:

Jewel preview was great. Preview of another movie, name escapes me, looked good, very surprised to see main character is Adam Sandler. He might actually be a good actor.

Was probably Uncut Gems, where Sandler plays a debt-ridden gambling addict. I am looking forward to seeing it as well. Sandler actually first showed off his depth as an actor in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, but it didn't perform well at the box office and apparently scared Sandler into making a string of low-brow, dipshit films. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Except he made bad, low-brow, dipshit films.

mockturtle said...

Pacwest observes: It looks like the Hong Kong insurrection may be spreading into the neighboring Chinese province.

Are you referring to Guangdong? Looks like it's been pretty well crushed. But I doubt they will give up easily.

narciso said...

And pacinos doing another series about nazi hunters in nyc

J. Farmer said...

Immigrants turning red states blue.


This


Sadly, yes. The ethno-nationalist conservative movement has been screaming about this for years and getting called racist and told to shut up by the movement conservatives in return. People are finally waking up to it just in time to see it pass a point of no return. And yet just two days ago Kevin D. Williamson writes in the National Review: "Molly Ivins had one great line, that Patrick Buchanan’s 1992 Republican Convention speech 'probably sounded better in the original German.'"

Yuk yuk yuk!

narciso said...

Except the crux of that speech was about the la riots. An early 'center cannot hold' moment.

Birkel said...

https://mobile.twitter.com/RoscoeBDavis1/status/1202041655450320898

National Security investigations are Democratic scam for illegal 4th Amendment violations.

Cool!!

BlackjohnX said...

Re: Netflix - Recommend "The Last Kingdom" - new season should surface in the next few months. Very faithful adaptation of the novels, well acted and produced - if you like period pieces.

pacwest said...

@mockturtle
Yes, more about the crematorium than independence, but there's a lot of cross fertilization going on due to the proximity to HK. The telltale will be if it spreads to other cities outside of Guangdong. At that point it becomes uncontainable imo.

narciso said...



And canada is ever helpful (sarc)

https://mobile.twitter.com/GordonGChang/status/1202008141442891778

narciso said...


Oh:

https://mobile.twitter.com/GordonGChang/status/1201987941062463489

mockturtle said...

Per pacwest: At that point it becomes uncontainable imo.

There will be blood. And lots of it, I'm afraid. The people will persist but the CCP will not yield anything. Having read a fair amount of Chinese history I know that power there is difficult to attain but, once it is, it is much more difficult to relinquish.

Seeing Red said...

Melania looked stunning at the Palace.

narciso said...

Well they remember the boxer (righteous fists) and the taiping rebellion,

mockturtle said...

Narciso: I've always had a great deal of respect for Gordon Chang. He appears on Varney quite often. Varney & Co. is the only TV news I watch every weekday.

narciso said...


Sound like anyone we know:

https://www.redstate.com/brandon_morse/2019/12/03/hilarious-twitter-thread-year-shows-social-media-reacts-anything-trump/

mockturtle said...

Melania looked stunning at the Palace.

Yes. She does great credit to her husband and to our country. And she is aging beautifully due to her fine bone structure.

Drago said...

Timely reminder from Mollie Hemingway that Jerry Nadler laid out this entire contrived impeachment strategy on Amtrak literally the day after the 2018 election:
https://thefederalist.com/2018/11/07/incoming-democrat-chairman-dems-will-go-all-in-on-russia-impeach-kavanaugh-for-perjury/

When the russia collusion hoax collapsed the dems and FakeCon LLR's just inserted the fake Ukrainian non-scandal.

rehajm said...

We slogged through the whole thing over two nights. Did Scorsese watch Mamet’s Hoffa in 1992 and just forget?

We persisted, then watched a Marvel movie to forget it...

Ken B said...

Narcisco's thread is HILARIOUS. Imagine Chuck slipping on his own spittle into a sewer. This thread is even funnier.

pacwest said...

China has a long history of Emperors.

narciso said...

Well they were going from charles brandis acciunt, which came a decade after the film, and knowledgeable experts like dan moldea disdain.

narciso said...

Account, now sheeran was ruled out as the hitman in the initial investigation

Seeing Red said...

Trump was met with keep your hands off our NHS.

They don’t want to lower costs?

Get surgeries faster?

Churchy LaFemme: said...

The Mandate of Heaven can, however, slip away quickly and unexpectedly.

Ken B said...

So, of every normal human who has seen the Irishman I have had the most positive reaction: I thought it was okay, but way too long. No one else liked it even that much, and some really disliked it.
Why the critical praise, and now Best Film from National Board of Review?

Netflix money anyone?

It doesn’t feel like American Beauty or Royal Tenebaums, where critics wanted to rub people's faces in a steaming pile of Chuck's opinions. The movie is not a hate letter to the audience. So if it isn’t a sneer it’s probably payola is my thinking.

narciso said...

To make a sympathetic gamgster film you habe to have a character who is motivated by something other than money henry hill was one, so was sam rothstein (frank rosenthal) the latter loved calculatint the game, lefty ruggiero was a pitiful characdtin donnie brasco.

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

there's method to his dementia:

...Biden ramping up the "Vinnie the Chin" charades

But Yang-- wtf? Spraying cream into the mouth of a kneeling supporter??

...ok-- Buttigig, maybe.....but Yang??

narciso said...

Well tanenbaum could have been clipped a good hour, american beauty was vile. Continuing the real frank lucas was a vile predator, but denzel managed to almost make him just an aspiring businessma.

N

narciso said...

Wes andersons method sometimes is a little too cute for its own good. Local boy johnnie deop did a similar thing with georg jung

madAsHell said...

Just read that Schiff has phone records for Devin Nunes and John Solomon, and that they’re included - to some degree - in today’s report. What the heck is going on? This seems, at a minimum, absurd.

He has the phone records, but he can't tell you from where they came.

He's pulling shit out of his ass. Which might explain his appearance!!?!

William said...

I enjoyed The Irishman, but there seems to be a backlash developing against it. It's not really so much a gangster movie as a memory of a gangster movie. It's an old guy remembering what it was like in the old days. The stiff movements of old men pretending to be young and their uncanny, unwrinkled faces give it a dream like quality. You react both to the actor's performance and your memory of the actor's other performances in similar roles, and feel the heaviness of time and the certainty of death....It's supposed to be based on a true story, but some of the plot points sound like b.s. I don't think the Bay of Pigs was launched to help the mob regain control of operations in Havana. But that's the kind of self aggrandizing story a mobster might want to believe and that Scorcese would want to dramatize....The movie holds your interest but perhaps not in the way the actors and Scorcese intended, or maybe they knew what they were doing

pacwest said...

And the Maoists are no friend of the Emperor.

narciso said...

They have the meta data (sound familiar) but not the content.

madAsHell said...

...ok-- Buttigig, maybe.....but Yang??

Has anyone ever seen these two men in the same place, and at the same time??

pacwest said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
narciso said...

How exactly was he supposed to help he owned part of a casino, well the teamsters fund paid for the largest ones, he was a deputy chief of a mob family.

narciso said...

When did rendell retire from politics


https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.inquirer.com/philly/news/philadelphia_casino_license/226528041.html%3foutputType=amp

narciso said...

Now sheeran had lived in delaware where an up and coming pol was running for office, to defeat a republican

Bay Area Guy said...

I too enjoyed "The Irishman". But I'm biased because I love all that Teamster/Mob/CIA/JFK stuff. It was slow and damn long.

One small point: People forget how powerful Jimmy Hoffa was. There were no Govt employee unions back then, only private sector unions. The Teamsters were the biggest and baddest, the Longshoremen (Red Harry Bridges) were probably a close second.

Hoffa was the John D. Rockefeller of the working class. The Teamster Pension Fund had several hundred million, and Hoffa loaned it out to the Mob to build casinos and hotels. He was the banker to the Outfit.

Anyway, there's a lotta fascinating stuff there, and no doubt Hoffa: (a) hated JFK, (b) funneled mob money to Nixon and (c) was killed by a Mob hit for trying to wrestle control of the Teamsters after he was released from prison by a Nixon pardon.

narciso said...

Thats about as much as can be ascertained,

Pianoman said...

@AA: Your Facebook Doppleganger is Tina Weymouth, the bass player for Talking Heads.

https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/doppelganger-week-facebook-big-fad-article-1.457629

narciso said...

Wait but they told me:


https://mobile.twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1202061435855101952

Bay Area Guy said...

Does anyone have tomorrow's itinerary for Biden's "No Malarkey!" bus tour? I like to follow them on Twitter, as they tool around Iowa with the Cruise Control set at 35, and the Left turn signal on for miles.

narciso said...

Maybe its like prof x in logan, kind of a grim deneument to the series

Seeing Red said...

Via Insty:

The husband of Democrat Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-FL), who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, reportedly took $700,000 from firms connected to a Ukrainian oligarch who has allegedly been “accused of ordering contract killings.”...

narciso said...

Yes i found that a crunchy irony.

Daniel said...

If you haven’t watched “The Detectorists”, you ought to.

chickelit said...

Well the Ukraine churls really knock me out -- they leave the West behind.

narciso said...


Oh the guy who owns burisma

https://www.dailywire.com/news/husband-of-democrat-in-impeachment-hearings-took-700k-from-firms-tied-to-ukrainian-oligarch-accused-of-ordering-contract-killings-reports-say

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

Will Chamberlain unravels the Democrats’ impeachment report

https://noqreport.com/2019/12/03/will-chamberlain-unravels-democrats-impeachment-report/

Drago said...

Bay Area Guy: "Does anyone have tomorrow's itinerary for Biden's "No Malarkey!" bus tour? I like to follow them on Twitter, as they tool around Iowa with the Cruise Control set at 35, and the Left turn signal on for miles."

Ask LLR Chuck. I heard he has it tatooed on his stomach.

Mr. Forward said...

Any truth to the rumor that George McGovern is getting into the race?

virgil xenophon said...

Want a good movie? RUN, don't walk to view the Spanish produced (and acted) 4-season series on Netflix entitled Money Heist--something WAY more and complex than your standard heist movie. Helps to read the extensive Wiki treatment before-hand to fully appreciate it..

BUMBLE BEE said...

The most entertaining blog!

stevew said...

Sanders has jumped into putting out campaign ads on here in northeastern MA. This is in addition to Steyer and Bloomberg (last week or so for the little guy). Then last night Buttigieg shows up. I guess they all believe they are or can be in play in NH.

tim in vermont said...

Ukrainian “white supremacists” in Hong Kong to help non white protesters fight against communist oppression?

https://twitter.com/GrayzoneProject/status/1202107244785090560

Maybe they are being denigrated on account of they are fighting against communist oppression, not because they are “white supremacists” in a country where everybody is white. What does that even mean?

tim in vermont said...

I am retired and like to do road trips, and the signs I have seen the most around the country as a whole are for Tulsi.

tim in vermont said...

https://twitter.com/CurtMills/status/1202033685765206016/photo/2

Donald Trump asked probing questions of intelligence people who are upset that he doesn’t just believe everything they say. The nerve of this guy!

"Why do you think that?” Stuff like that. Impeach!

tim in vermont said...

Somebody commented on Twitter that the CNN piece complaining that Trump didn’t accept everything out of the CIA at face value is the most pro-Trump piece written in months. It’s almost like that Reagan bit on SNL, except it’s real life.

Mr. Forward said...

I thought Robert De Niro very convincing as a low life thug and that's what he plays in the movie too.

Jersey Fled said...

Wife is away so going to see Ford vs Ferrari today. I understand it's filled with toxic masculinity.

The Crack Emcee said...

Mr. Forward said...

"I thought Robert De Niro very convincing as a low life thug and that's what he plays in the movie too."

They're actually releasing "Anti-Vaxx II" and he's still a liberal hero.

The mind reels.

Marc in Eugene said...

I second The Detectorists. No glamor, no identities politics (no overt politics at all), no social media or social media influencers, doesn't make the audience endure anyone's sexual anticks or depravities, or outbursts of violence: stories of the human condition humanely depicted.