Althouse: Sunrise

November 25, 2022

Sunrise — 7:10.

25 comments:

Lem Vibe Bandit said...: I’ve watched Netflix Stutz. It confirmed at lot of the things I’m trying to make my own, the tools I’m trying to use like second nature (the film intimates a first nature use of the tools may never happen) The film has a lot of the familiar stuff from Alcoholic Anonymous without so much of the the higher power Alcoholic Anonymous is very much dependent on.

Very good. If you don’t find therapy talk tedious. Without giving too much away, I also identified with the loss of a close family member as did the two characters in the film.; 11/25/22, 6:10 PM
Gusty Winds said...: It’s amazing how fluid the Twitter situation is. I guess some prominent ANTIFA accounts have been suspended for using Twitter to coordinate violent activities. Also, some ANTIFA accounts seem very angry over Musks crackdown on child pornography and exploitation.

They are threatening to vandalize and burn Tesla dealerships and outlets. They can do anything they want in Portland. And you know Portland won’t do a thing if a Tesla dealership is targeted. Just like WI Gov Evers didn’t do a damn this for three days while Kenosha burned.

Gotta give Musk credit. The dude’s got balls. He’s being attacked from all sides (all sides left of center of course). Just for using is wealth to do the right thing, and correct an egregious wrong.

I’m rooting for Musk. If that makes me a “fanboy” so be it. Better than being a real fascist disguised as an anti-fascist, or some left wing propagandist that denies their violent and destructive existence, while supporting their thirst for child exploitation.

Sorry if some woke censoring employees got their work life balance interrupted. This seems bigger than them, and helped fuel the problem.

I have NO idea what “winning” this looks like. All I know is it is better for society if Musk ‘wins’.; 11/25/22, 6:26 PM
Jaq said...: News from 2015:

https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Ukrainian-Jews-shocked-after-city-elects-neo-Nazi-mayor-437975; 11/25/22, 6:37 PM
farmgirl said...: Lem: me too!!!
I fell in love w/him.

It was a really good documentary.; 11/25/22, 7:19 PM
farmgirl said...: The trees, though bare &still- seem very alive, to me.
Almost human-alive.

Weird.; 11/25/22, 7:27 PM
Gahrie said...: They are threatening to vandalize and burn Tesla dealerships and outlets. They can do anything they want in Portland. And you know Portland won’t do a thing if a Tesla dealership is targeted. Just like WI Gov Evers didn’t do a damn this for three days while Kenosha burned.

The difference is, Musk has the resources to create a well-armed and trained security force, and the will to do so. I bet there are more than a couple of SEALs who would be willing to organize such a force.; 11/25/22, 7:53 PM
BUMBLE BEE said...: Tucker Carlson Econ status of 11/25/22... max insight. Big trouble ahead.; 11/25/22, 7:56 PM
Dr Weevil said...: If 'tim in vermont' were following News from 2022, he would be ashamed to write the things he writes here. He would know that his buddy Putin is committing war crimes on a scale to rival the actual Nazis, not just cos-playing like some small-town assholes. (There's a Ku Klux Klan chapter 30 miles from me, but anyone who used it as an excuse for invading this area with tanks would be as big a fool and as big a swine as 'tim'.)

The fact is that the Russians are slaughtering Ukrainian civilians with missiles and drones every night, and trying to slaughter them on a larger scale by destroying their electricity, heat, gas, and water, to force the entire population to flee to western Europe as refugees. That counts as genocide under the Geneva Convention. They are kidnapping Ukrainian children by the tens of thousands and putting them up for 'adoption' thousands of miles away. Also genocide. Every time the Ukrainians recapture another region, they find dozens of torture chambers and hundreds of fresh graves of murdered civilians. Also genocide. Russian TV commentators openly admit that some of their units take no prisoners. That may or may not constitute genocide, but it's definitely a major war crime.

Anyone can easily find that the Russians admit all this and much more - or rather boast about it and demand even more extreme violence. All you have to do is follow @JuliaDavisNews and @wartranslated on Twitter. The first translates all the Putinite propagandists on the Russian talk shows, the second translates ordinary Russian soldiers and civilians on instagram and other such. But 'tim' will never read them, or any of the other sources I've recommended (@bayraktar_1love, @noclador, @tendar, @trenttelenko, @DefMon3), because he doesn't want to know.

One more example: the man who poisoned a Russian defector and his daughter with Polonium in London is now a member of the Russian parliament, and talking about how he needs to go abroad and 'take care of' more enemies of the regime. Putin's regime is utterly corrupt and spectacularly Nazistic. And 'tim' supports them.; 11/25/22, 8:20 PM
Political Junkie said...: Anyone concerned about federal debt and deficit? No one cares now, and the numbers are much worse than when Perot made a big deal of them back in 1992.

Since more wealthy people are moving to D, I don't understand why R's don't come out with plans to raise net tax collections. There is a smart, populist way to do it.

My choices, and I would be hit by some of these. Limit Schedule A home mortgage interest deduction just like Trump limited Schedule A real estate tax deductions. Eliminate Schedule A charitable contribution deductions also. Move the estate and gift tax rates back to 2000 levels. Tax colleges, college endowments, etc. Take the income cap off social security tax while cutting the rate from 6.2% to 6.0%. This cuts taxes for low and middle classes and raises taxes on upper middle and upper class income earners. Eliminate carried interest. Propose surtax on incomes above 1 million, and another at 5 million, and another at 10 million. Royalties for music, entertainments, etc., should be taxed at a higher rate, say 50%, since those are passive incomes and the original earning already occurred.

Mandate that IRS agents must produce a certain amount of tax collections or else they lose their job. Penalize harshly an agent that goes after taxpayers needlessly.

D's always love to propose windfall profit taxes on oil and gas. Why not a type of sin tax on media, as the average R believes much of the media populates and destroys a healthy culture the way environmentalists believe oil and gas destroys the earth.

Just sharing some musings. And yes, I do self identify as conservative, maybe even very conservative. Cheers.; 11/25/22, 10:18 PM
rhhardin said...: Derbyshire says NY schools can no longer name their teams The Thieving Cannibals without losing state funding.; 11/26/22, 4:40 AM
Jaq said...: The fact is that the Russians are slaughtering Ukrainian civilians with missiles and drones every night

You mean like the nazis in Ukraine have been doing to Donbas for eight years prior? We keep arming up the nazis, which increases the intensity of this war on Russia's border. The Ukrainians pay for that intensification.

Why not have a look at the "shock and awe" we visited on Baghdad before you get too high and mighty about the slaughter of civilians. and Iraq was thousands of miles away from our border, imagine what we would have done to drive Russia out of Quebec if Russia had been arming up and digging in for eight years? But at least you have gotten over the denial that they are nazis.

Shock and Awe - 2003

As for your war propaganda, you can also find plenty of sources of interviews with Ukrainian soldiers who believe that the killing of Russians, all Russians, is justified, but I don't generally link them because who knows what is true when reading propaganda, it's my opinion that the more inflammatory propaganda you read, the less you know, but if you really want to get into polemicists on the Russian side, why not then look at this call of genocide in the Donbas made on Ukrainian TV back in 2015.

Butkevich said "Donbass must be exploited as a resource". He did not claim to have a final solution ("quick solution recipe"), but said "the most important thing that must be done- no matter how cruel it may sound – there is a certain category of people that MUST BE EXTERMINATED"

https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/1501055215482687492

Why isn't the US pulled up on war crimes at The Hague after killing that guy who was going to get water for his family in Kabul after Biden's botched withdrawal? Or for "Shock and Awe"?

Oh yeah, and maybe you can explain why Kiev is shelling a nuclear power plant. If that thing goes up, it will create a huge and extremely difficult and expensive problem for Russia to manage, and will possibly render a good deal of land occupied by ethnic Russians in Ukraine unlivable, as well as sending the message "The Russians can't protect you," to the rest of Ukraine.

This war is about ethnic Ukrainians taking over land that is occupied by people who don't want them, who have been fighting them off for eight years, because of some borders drawn up by the Soviets and Hitler that created a fake country.; 11/26/22, 7:33 AM
Jaq said...: https://www.timesofisrael.com/hundreds-in-ukraine-attend-marches-celebrating-nazi-ss-soldiers/

These people celebrate Banderas, who sent a hundred thousand Jews to death camps, and exterminated large numbers of Poles. The Hitler-Stalin Pact had sliced off part of Poland and given it to The Ukraine, and well, borders are borders, and internationally recognized borders give the leaders the right to commit any atrocities they like, or so I keep being told by the pro-Kiev side.; 11/26/22, 7:36 AM
Saint Croix said...: Since more wealthy people are moving to D, I don't understand why R's don't come out with plans to raise net tax collections. There is a smart, populist way to do it.

Our massive deficits are not a tax problem. It's a spending problem.

Tax revenues are higher than they've ever been.

It's the spending that's out of hand.

I do self identify as conservative, maybe even very conservative.

You should know this already!; 11/26/22, 10:04 AM
Dr Weevil said...: Poor 'tim in vermont' doesn't even have the decency to admit or deny that the Russians are in fact committing massive war crimes and genocide in Ukraine. He just tries to change the subject to Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever utter irrelevancies he can. He also continues to claim that Kiev is bombing the nuclear plant at Enerhodar, when it is quite obviously the Russians doing that - another war crime.

He continues to harp on Bandera, who's been dead for 60 years, and thinks that 'hundreds' of Ukrainians celebrating him makes the entire country into Nazis. There are roughly 500 swastika-waving Nazis in the U.S. and 3,500 Klansmen, but that is an utterly trivial percentage of the population: only an idiot would think that would justify an invasion by a democracy, much less by a brutal totalitarian state that gladly employs worse.

The fact is that Zelenskyy is a democratically-elected non-Nazi president fighting for his country's independence, and Putin is a genocidal dictator with far more Nazis under his command, fighting to destroy Ukraine for making him look bad by showing that Slavs are capable of self-government and rapid economic development. Having useful idiots like 'tim' calling Ukraine a "fake country" helps his disgusting cause.

One more time, since 'tim' hasn't responded: the Polonium-using assassin is in the Russian parliament and threatening more international assassins!

The Donbass oblasts both voted to join Ukraine, so it is a lie to say that they are "occupied by people who don't want them". The war in Donbass started when Putin sent Russian soldiers and KGB-types across the border, who started the violence with the help of a minority of Donbass residents. It was not a spontaneous uprising: 'Siege of Sloviansk' on Wikipedia is a good place to start. The Russian agent who started the violence, Igor Girkin, has just been convicted in the Hague of shooting down a Malaysian airliner flying over Ukraine and murdering 298 people with weapons provided by Putin. He's now second-in-command of a Russian battalion in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are trying very hard to find him - not to kill him but to hand him over to The Hague.; 11/26/22, 10:29 AM
Saint Croix said...: Interesting to compare the dystopia in Brave New World with the one in 1984. I've got both audiobooks in my car and I've recently shifted from one to the other. Some things really jumped out at me.

The way the two novels treat sex is one of the more interesting distinctions. Huxley's dystopia is a promiscuous society where the family has been abolished. No parents, no brothers, no sisters, the entire family unit has been destroyed. And the creation of children has been entirely divorced from sex. Children are created in science labs -- you might even call them factories. And they are indoctrinated from the earliest age. You're not supposed to feel anything for a sexual partner.

This is the most powerful part of his book, for me, the introduction to his dystopian world. It's rather terrifying. And perhaps the scariest part of his vision is the idea that few people object to what is going on. They're all drugged up all the time. It's a freaky dystopia.

(I don't think Huxley is a strong plotter -- once I got used to his world, I got a little bored waiting around for the damn story to begin. That's when I switched over to 1984).

1984 is on the other side of the sex spectrum.
Everybody's paranoid, repressed and celibate. There are no feel-good drugs. Even the alcohol is horrible. And the whole economy is falling apart.

1984 seems like a wacky vision of what the world would be like if the Soviet Union had won the cold war. It's a scathing indictment of Communism, of course. But since Communism clearly has no future whatsoever (sorry, Cookie!), as a dystopian novel this pretty much seems like it could never happen.

In fact it made me wonder how the hell the shallow, decadent existence in Brave New World could happen. Centrally-planned economies are doomed, doomed, doomed, a truth that Orwell got but it seemed to fly over Huxley's head.

Also loved some of the ideas in Orwell's book, "down the memory hole" and "two-minute hate." There's a lot of fun stuff in both books. I think I'd rather live in Huxley's universe. I mean, it's appalling, but at least you get to fuck people. But as a reader I'm enjoying Orwell's novel more. He's got a flare for the paranoid thriller. Plus I've got a protagonist to root for. I'm hoping he's going to fall in love with that mean bitch who was 2-minute hating right behind him. We could definitely use some love and/or sex to spice this shit up.; 11/26/22, 10:44 AM
Dr Weevil said...: P.S. The only people who believe that leaders have "the right to commit any atrocities they like" in Ukraine are those, like 'tim in vermont', who support Putin. He and his supporters are openly and proudly committing 99% of the atrocities in this war, as 'tim' would know if he ever bothered to do the research instead of dismissing my recommended sources as "propaganda" without even looking at them.

And yes, I've looked at his sources when he bothers to provide them: Kim DotComm? Hahahahaha.; 11/26/22, 10:45 AM
Political Junkie said...: Saint Croix...What you say is correct, but R's and D's will not cut spending enough. And there is not enough discretionary spending to cut. And majority of voters do not want the spending cut. If R's run on spending cuts only they will lose. If they run on an approach of raising taxes and cutting spending, they have a stronger leg to stand on.

Also, what spending are you proposing to cut?

Lastly, are you concerned about the debt and deficit?

Thanks.; 11/26/22, 10:53 AM
Saint Croix said...: The other odd thing is that I feel like I know all about 1984, even though I've never read it. Maybe I was assigned this book in class at one point, and I read the Cliff's notes? Or I just picked up a lot of it from commentary about the book? Anyway, for me it's been one of those books (like the Bible or the Communist Manifesto) that people feel like they don't have to read, because they already know the upshot.

Anyway, when I was checking out Brave New World, a strange thought occurred to me -- holy shit, I've never read 1984!

Another thing is that I've never been a science fiction guy. I've tried reading Asimov and Dick and Herbert. None of them excited me. The only one that really excited me was Douglas Adams. Who, of course, doesn't count at all! Humor, spit!; 11/26/22, 11:22 AM
Saint Croix said...: One of the interesting aspects of science fiction is how you have to spend a huge amount of your time on world-creation, that sort of background stuff that doesn't even make it into your plot. That's what was so cool about the original Star Wars, this feeling that Lucas had created a new universe.

I guess the major difference is that 1984 and Brave New World are chock full of ideas and ideologies, which Star Wars is filled with aliens and robots.

Maybe before our dystopian futures come true we will come into contact with alien civilizations, and that will excite us and propel us into something new. I think that's what Lucas pulled off more than anybody (including Kubrick) -- the idea of a future that is full of possibilities and wonder and fun.; 11/26/22, 11:23 AM
Saint Croix said...: And there is not enough discretionary spending to cut.

I think it's beyond weird that a huge amount of our spending is labelled "mandatory" like we can't cut it, ever. That's a neat little propaganda trick.

Social security and medicare are the disaster areas. We're going to have to fix them, somehow.

If you want to talk about possible dystopian futures for a minute, one possibility is that the dollar fails as a currency. I hope it doesn't happen during my lifetime. But that's the fear with runaway deficits.

The other thing to remember is that our country has a huge amount of assets, which kind of puts our debts into perspective.; 11/26/22, 11:41 AM
Jaq said...: He also continues to claim that Kiev is bombing the nuclear plant at Enerhodar, when it is quite obviously the Russians doing that - another war crime.

The Russians are bombing their own nuclear power plant. Source: Ukrainian claims. I guess the Russians are trying to create a massive and costly problem for themselves. If you believe this, I just don't see the point arguing with you. But please, do go on. It is good for others to see the kinds of absurd things that Ukrainian supporters believe.

- You guys were saying that Russia blew up its own pipeline, source: They did it because they are so stupid! It is pretty clear that NATO or Ukraine did it. The investigations have been done, and nobody has blamed Russia.
- Ukraine still denies it was their SAM that killed those two people in Poland, even though the whole rest of the world acknowledges that it was a Ukrainian SAM, pointed in the opposite direction to that from which the missiles were incoming, and with the safeguard to keep the missiles from exploding on impact with the ground removed.

They did this to try to trigger Article 5. This is the same goal that they are trying to accomplish by blowing up the nuke plant, to trigger Article 5. I would like to hear the rationale for Russia shelling an NPP that is under their control, and which they intend to use to power territory that they consider Russia.

It's not irrelevant to the charge of "war crimes," which you keep ranting about, to note the massive civilian casualties the US created in Iraq, dropping trainloads of unguided bombs on major cities.

As for sources, do you have a search engine?; 11/26/22, 2:59 PM
Dr Weevil said...: Poor 'tim in vermont' is sick and tired of hearing me "ranting" about war crimes without mentioning Iraq. (You want to send Bush or Obama or Biden to The Hague to stand trial, go ahead. It doesn't have a damned thing to do with Ukraine. Two wrongs don't make a right - duh!)

And it's not just war crimes the Russians are committing with your approval, it's attempted genocide, both literal (killing) and cultural. Russian propagandists and men-on-the-street constantly rant about killing them all, claim (just like 'tim'!) that Ukraine is a fake nation, talk about driving them all into exile in western Europe (collateral advantage: we can wreck western Europe, too!), and more. They don't even bother to deny their genocidal war crimes.

Here's another I forgot to mention. Before they retreated from Kherson city 2 1/2 weeks ago, the Russians destroyed all the cell phone towers, heavily mined civilian areas, and stole all the buses, firetrucks, and police cars, along with all 14,000 exhibits in the formerly excellent Kherson art and archaeology museum, and all the animals, plus a toy train, from the small local zoo. Russian soldiers are bragging on-line about how they may have lost Kherson, but they have the stolen raccoon! Since leaving the city, they've been shelling civilian areas on the north bank of the Dnipro, and have reportedly killed 32 civilians in 17 days.

Of course, one reason to think it's the Russians shelling the Enerhodar nuclear power plant is that they've been playing chicken with safety in other ways: forcibly preventing Ukrainian employees and visiting international (IAEA) inspectors from doing their jobs, and randomly cutting off the electricity supply needed to avoid meltdowns. And the only evidence the Ukrainians are doing it is that the Russians say so. They lie so much about everything that that's actually further evidence that they're doing it themselves.

"You guys were saying"? What guys? You're arguing with me, no one else. I've never claimed to know who blew up the North Sea pipelines, or who killed Daria Dugina - as in a murder mystery, there are a lot of plausible suspects who might gain from the deed, and only the actual perpetrators know for sure. I'm not even absolutely sure that the Ukrainians blew up the Kerch bridge: a suicide truck bomb coming from the Russian side isn't exactly a likely Ukrainian modus operandi. Maybe some of the Chechens are getting ready to try again for independence. Who knows? Not I. Or you.

Finally, only a lying asshole would claim that the Ukrainians intentionally killed a couple of Polish farmers to bring NATO into the war. If it was a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile (not certain: Trent Telenko has made a highly technical case that it was Russian), it was an unfortunate accident, that would never have happened if the Russians weren't bombing electrical substations and transfer points (hey look! another war crime) way too close to the Polish border. The Poles agree that it's the Russians' fault even if it was a Ukrainian missile. And the Ukrainians don't want or need NATO troops to fight for them: all they want is the weapons and ammunition to do it themselves, as they have been doing quite successfully so far.

The fact is that 'tim in vermont' often sounds just like one of those Holocaust 'revisionists' who claim that Hitler didn't kill any Jews, that the gas chambers were actually just cleansing showers, that Zyklon-B was just a disinfectant, that the Nazis were kindly helping all the dirty Jews (and Gypsies, gays, and communists) kill their lice and bedbugs, and that the crematoria were only necessary because so many Jews and others died of natural causes or filth-related epidemics or were killed by Allied bombing.; 11/26/22, 4:15 PM
gpm said...: >>Plus I've got a protagonist to root for. I'm hoping he's going to fall in love with that mean bitch who was 2-minute hating right behind him.

St. Croix, you said you've never read it, but do you really not know how 1984 ends?

--gpm; 11/26/22, 6:17 PM
Mike of Snoqualmie said...: The Feds own about 200 million acres of forest and range land, badly managed by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM!). Auctioning off these lands could raise anywhere between $5T to $20T. That would convert money-losing land to taxable assets and eliminate two Federal bureaucracies. A net winner any way you look at. Plus the auction money would reduce the Federal debt.

Another benefit is it would get the Feds out of leasing land for oil and gas drilling. The new private owners would take over that responsibility and keep Slow Joe's paws off those auctions.; 11/26/22, 8:14 PM
Saint Croix said...: St. Croix, you said you've never read it, but do you really not know how 1984 ends?

I think I know the line, "he loves Big Brother" so I gather he's been tortured or whatever. I have a general idea but not specifics.

Don't ruin it!

I'm like a guy who taped the 1982 NCAA championship game and still hasn't gotten around to watching it. Something to do with Michael Jordan, right?; 11/27/22, 10:58 AM