Did Epstein write that "suicide note"?

You can read the text at the NYT article, "Purported Epstein Suicide Note Is Released/A federal judge released the note, which Jeffrey Epstein’s former cellmate said he found in a graphic novel. The New York Times has not authenticated that Mr. Epstein wrote it."

"They investigated me for month — FOUND NOTHING!!!” the note begins, adding that the result was charges going back many years.

“It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye,” the note continued.

“Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!” the note reads.

“NO FUN," it concludes, with those words underlined. “NOT WORTH IT!!”

My initial take, on that text alone, was that doesn't sound like what he would write, but then what do I know about the writing style of Jeffrey Epstein? I haven't been reading his emails, and the NYT points to a 2016 email of his that says "whtchoo want me todo -- bust out cryin" — and what can I say? Do you want to talk about the "Watcha"/"whtchoo" discrepancy? Are you struck by the word-for-word repetition of a 7 or 8 word phrase? But which way are you struck? Are you thinking, yes, that's Jeffrey or somebody swiped a phrase to make it look like Jeffrey? But who?

ADDED: Why can't we be told which graphic novel Jeffrey Epstein had there in his cell to read? I invited Grok to guess — remember, it was the summer of 2019 — and this is what I got:

"There's a line from the first 'Batman,' Joker, he's like 'I’ve already been dead once already. It's very liberating.'"

"That's not reckless, that's just freeing. It's just freeing in a way. And I just think after beating all of that, I just really want to be able to say the things that I have to really believe in and not be afraid of if there's any kind of blowback."

Said John Fetterman, responding to Bill Maher's question whether there was a connection between his "physical and mental health issues" and his political courage, quoted in  "Sen. Fetterman Explains Political Independence: 'I've Been Dead Once Already, It's Very Liberating'" (Real Clear Politics).

"Meet Dark Brandon. Over the past few weeks, Democrats have attempted to co-opt... the 'Let’s go, Brandon' meme...."

"Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital strategy... tweeted an image of Biden smiling with red eyes, his hair haloed against a dark background.... 'Dark Brandon said "here’s the deal" and then there was a deal,' wrote Megan Apper, a senior adviser in the Bureau of Global Public Affairs at the State Department.... Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) posted an image of Dark Brandon after the Senate approved the sweeping Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which includes a number of key Biden priorities.... [Deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates] tweeted a meme that placed Biden — with facial hair and an eye patch — on the movie poster for 'The Dark Knight.' ... Conservative commentators pointed to the background of the poster, saying it included an image of an eagle that was used as a Nazi symbol.... But Tobin Stone, who says he created the meme, said... 'The eagle is not, and was never intended to be the Reichsadler'... White House officials said they wanted to tap into the zeitgeist and saw an opportunity to draw attention to the successes they had last week...."

 
Writes Matt Viser, in "Brandon returns, darkly: Democrats turn an insult into a pro-Biden meme With “Let’s go, Brandon,” Biden’s critics found a way to curse him. His supporters are seizing on the “Dark Brandon” meme to vaunt his superpowers" (WaPo).

Sure, why not? Tap into the zeitgeist! The zeitgeist is fascism, right? Look at all those comic book movies, that's what people want, you're saying — I get it! — fight crime with superpowers. The Dark Knight, the Dark Brandon... the kids'll love it. 

Dark Brandon strikes again https://t.co/zmhhO6V81M pic.twitter.com/FiQdB6NB7q

— Dan (@DaytimeDan) August 1, 2022

At the Closet-Cleaning Café...

... what have you found today?

"While I am not prepared to defend bouts of 'She-Ra doesn’t give me boners anymore' extremism..."

"... I can see the kernels of the argument that sexuality shouldn’t be in diametric opposition to capability. There’s no reason female characters can’t be glamorous and sexy and also battle-ready, smart, and compassionate. It’s not unlike the ongoing debate about Wonder Woman’s appearance and whether her revealing uniform ultimately undermines her feminism. I’d argue that the most important thing about women superheroes in skimpy clothes is agency — what matters is that their costumes aren’t designed primarily for the sake of someone else’s erotic thrill."

From "The Fight Over She-Ra's Netflix Redesign, Explained/Some men are mad she isn’t sexier," by Alex Abad-Santos.

Cartoons are complicated!

Here's the old and the new She-Ra to help you understand:

The new She-Ra looks like Tom Holland. 🤔 #SheRa pic.twitter.com/DTN4phQJHN

— Liam (@TribalSpaceman) July 14, 2018

I had to look up Tom Holland:



Apparently, he's Spider-Man these days. I think of Spider-Man as being that other guy, what's-his-name. Anyway, is Spider-Man's costume not in "diametric opposition to capability"? There's so much suspension of disbelief in the watching of superheroes, something I've just about never done — I've seen a few of the "Batman" movies — but a huge proportion of the world's population seems to love to do. What is the role of the costumes? It's nothing like If that was my work, that's what I'd wear to get my work done. I'm not even sure the extent to which the costume itself is magic. Does Superman fly because of the cape or is the cape kind of like those ribbons people attach to house fans to add drama to the wind flow?

But I do love this scene in "Batman Returns" where we see Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) putting together her costume for the first time:

"Oh! Oh! Oh, no!" gasps a young woman on State Street this morning in Madison, Wisconsin.

She's wearing a tight black dress that's heavily embroidered in metallic gold in the 80° heat, and she looking at her iPhone and pausing to give her girlfriends time to strain to see what has happened.

She relieves their anxiety: "Batman's dead!"

(The actor, Adam West, TV's Batman, has died at the age of 88.)

Does anyone want to see a biopic about Dick Cheney? And can you picture Christian Bale in the role?

Apparently, this is something Hollywood is attempting to do.

Mr. Bale, 43, is a three-time Oscar nominee and a one-time winner (for his crack-addled boxer in “The Fighter”), but he is best known for playing Batman in Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy.

And Dick Cheney has been called "The Dark Knight":

1. "Cheney is the Dark Knight." ("I loved The Dark Knight.... And Christian Bale plays an excellent Batman.... But its message was deeply statist, and the movie really reflects the sort of fear that scares Americans most, post-9/11.... This fantasy is precisely the Cheney/Bush approach to fighting the war on terror. The Bush administration couldn't find better cultural-ideological support for this approach than The Dark Knight and its chaos-driven bad guy and its omnipotent hero.")

2. "Dick Cheney is the Dark Knight." ("The Dark Knight, however, is conservative fantasy – someone who cuts through the red tape and throws bad guys off of balconies.")

3. "The Dark Knight: An Allegory of America in the Age of Bush?" ("Batman is a vigilante who works outside the law in order to combat crime; operating in the dark policy corridors to which Vice-President Dick Cheney alluded in speeches following 9/11.")

4. "Dark Knight: Former Vice President Cheney in the Global War on Terror." ("In a world of suicide bombers, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), covert financial sponsors, and enemies unconstrained by the laws of armed conflict, Cheney emerged as the man in the shadows who would do whatever he deemed necessary to address these threats. The power he acquired, however, and its implications for the future of a democratic society, caused many Americans to fear a greater potential threat from within.")

5. "The Dark Knight Turns Out to Be a Dick Cheney Fantasy." ("But as the film reached its climactic denouement, I found myself getting more and more perturbed at its underlying message, which seemed straight from the office of the Vice President.")

Quite aside from the specific connection to Batman/The Dark Knight, Cheney has been relentlessly characterized as "dark":

1. A NYRB review of 3 books about Cheney is titled "In the Darkness of Dick Cheney." ("[S]ecret power. Untrammeled power. Hard power. The power behind POTUS. The Dark Side.")

2. Just last November, Steve Bannon said: "Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power. It only helps us when they (liberals) get it wrong. When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing."

And I don't know what Dick Cheney thinks of the comparison to The Dark Knight, but "Dick Cheney embraces the Darth Vader meme":

While attending his granddaughter’s high school rodeo in Casper, Wyoming, Cheney showed reporters a trailer-hitch cover in the shape of the infamous “Star Wars” villain. “I’m rather proud of that,” he told them with a smile....

President George W. Bush also cracked a joke about it during Halloween season in 2007 while he was still in office. ”This morning I was with the vice president... I was asking him what costume he was planning. He said, ‘Well, I’m already wearing it.’ Then he mumbled something about the dark side of the force.” That same year Cheney said, “I’ve been asked if that nickname bothers me, and the answer is, no. After all, Darth Vader is one of the nicer things I’ve been called recently.”

"Tired of Small Talk? Try Medium Talk."

"Everyone has an intuitive sense of what 'medium talk' might mean...."

Most people seem to interpret the question the way you’d expect — how do you lift a fleeting and likely unimportant-in-the-grand-scheme conversation up out of dulls-ville so that you’ll at least remember or learn something from it?

Reddit being Reddit, many of the answers are jokey and stupid, consisting of intellectually stimulating fare like “Would you rather have a vagina on your forehead or a row of penises down your back like a stegosaurus?” But there’s some good stuff, too. The top-rated response is “What's something you like that most people don't?”...

Actually, the top-rated response now is "If Batman died, would the Joker be happy?"

"This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist."

That's the title of an interesting essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic.

The idea is, roughly, that Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling are so crudely racist that we look at them, easily see that they are quite awful, deserving condemnation, and — this is the bad part — not at all like me and everyone I know. If those two are to be America's stereotypical "racists," it's going to get even harder to see the subtle, below-board, pervasive forms of racism that Coates and others have been urging us to perceive. We will self-indulgently feel smug that: 1. We've ostracized the racists, and 2. We are nothing like the racists.

If you're wondering what "Town" needs a "Better Class of Racist," I assume the town is Gotham, that is, that Coates means to evoke The Joker:



But it's this whole country Coates thinks needs a "better class of racist." He wants us to have to confront and mentally anguish over individuals who: 1. Are nice and normal enough that we identify with and cannot distance ourselves from, and 2. We're somehow compelled to perceive as racist.

I wonder what Coates would be willing to do to smoke out some high-class racists like that? And what would it take — especially after the harsh treatment of Bundy and Sterling — for Americans to respond to invitations to see nice-enough fellow citizens as racists?

He's "stale, hairy and vanilla."

The reasons — according to the NY Post — why 100s of 1000s of people think Ben Affleck should not play the role of Batman.

"The Dark Knight Rises" "is a bold apologia for free-market capitalism..."

"... a graphic depiction of the tyranny and violence inherent in every radical leftist movement from the French Revolution to Occupy Wall Street; and a tribute to those who find redemption in the harsh circumstances of their lives rather than allow those circumstances to mire them in resentment."

Says Andrew Klavan (in the WSJ).

Let me restate an old theme of mine: Art is right wing, even when the artists will only consciously voice political opinions of the left-wing kind.

"Both as Wayne and as super-Wayne he seems indifferent, as the films themselves are, to the activities of little people..."

"... and to the claims of the everyday, preferring to semi-purse his lips, as if preparing to whistle for an errant dog, and stare pensively into the distance. Caped or uncaped, the guy is a bore. He should have kids; that would pull him out of himself. Or else he should hang out with Iron Man and get wasted. He should have fun."

"Batman's Bane," by Anthony Lane. (No Aurora massacre content.)

That link is worth clicking on just to get to the cartoon — a guy in a bar looking into his highball glass says: "I don't know anything about global warming, but these ice cubes are melting like crazy."

By the way, I read a plot summary of "The Dark Knight Rises," because I'm not going to see it — I rarely go to the movies anymore and I experienced the last Batman movie an unpleasant chore (not out of fear of massacre) — and because I wanted to understand the connection to "Occupy Wall Street" politics. Anthony Lane pooh-poohs the connection:

True, we see a handful of rich white men being ejected from fancy apartments, but then the film coughs politely and moves on, as if recalling that nobody is richer or whiter than Bruce Wayne, and that his apartment is, in fact, a castle. Also, the outcome is positively Victorian, in that its dread of disorder far outweighs its relish of liberty uncaged; the throng is faced down and tamed by ranks of growling police officers.

Lane fails to contemplate the possibility that the movie is against the Occupy side. Here's Rush Limbaugh working that theme — Batman is Romney! Batman/Romney is "the rich guy, milquetoast, boring, dull," but if he "puts the uniform back on," he "saves the day."

In fact, the producer -- or the creator, Chuck Dixon -- says that the villain in this movie is almost... I forget his exact words, but he links the villain in this movie to Occupy Wall Street. And yet the Democrats are out there trying to say Bane is Bain. I think this exposes the frailty of their position.

So, as I said, I read the plot summary. It looks incredibly dull and over-complicated when distilled into forthright sentences, but it was all quite meaningless to me. If the film says anything about politics, I'm not going to be the one to figure out what.

***

That's not meant to say anything about the murders, which I don't think should be inflated with political imagination. Let's resist the temptation to say things that might entice delusional people to make the decision to act out. You could suddenly one day be the most famous person on earth, whose face everyone will gaze upon, whose mind everyone will contemplate. You could make the presidential candidates suspend their campaigns and command everyone to pray and pray over the dramatic changes you have made in their puny little world. Let's resist the temptation to create that temptation.

"Colorado theater shooting suspect was neuroscience Ph.D student."

At the University of Colorado-Denver.

[James] Holmes is suspected of walking into an Aurora theater's midnight showing of "Dark Knight Rises" wearing a gas mask and bullet proof vest and shooting at least 54 people. Twelve are reported dead.

There's a photo of the 24-year-old man at the link. He looks ordinary. Smirking... but it's the kind of smirk I associate with the character Jim on "The Office."

ADDED: Breitbart reports:

According to New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, James Holmes, 24, the alleged perpetrator of the mass murder at the Aurora, Colorado theater showing of The Dark Knight Rises, claimed he was “The Joker” during the shooting. “We have some information, most of it is public,” said Kelly. “It clearly looks like a deranged individual. He had his hair painted red, he said he was ‘The Joker,’ obviously the ‘enemy’ of Batman.”...

Health Ledger’s portrayal of Batman arch-nemesis The Joker in the last installment of the Batman saga, The Dark Knight, won him a posthumous Oscar. The Joker was focused in that film on destroying Gotham City through chaos and mass murder; he also rigged buildings with booby traps in order to achieve that end.

"A gunman wearing a gas mask set off an unknown gas and fired into a crowded movie theater... a midnight opening of... 'The Dark Knight Rises'..."

"... killing 14 people and injuring at least 50 others...."

Moviegoers didn't know what was happening and some thought the attack was part of the show. Then they saw a silhouette of a person in the smoke at the front of the theater near the screen, pointing a gun at the crowd....

[An audience member said] it sounded like firecrackers until someone ran into Theater 8 yelling "they're shooting out here!"...

"Like little explosions going on and shortly after that we heard people screaming," [said another, noting that] at first he thought it was part of a louder movie next door. But then he saw "people hunched over leaving theater."

Horrible. I'm not surprised people imagined it was part of the show, since I've seen theme-park shows that begin as a movie and become stage shows with actors in a plot about how something is terribly wrong in the the theater. (I'm remembering the old "Ghostbusters Spooktacular Show" at Universal Studios).

ADDED: When things like this happen, decent people refrain from spinning out theories about why the killer — who presumably has deranged thought patterns — did what he did. Appropriating this event for political purposes is shameful, but it is happening. I'm not even going to link to the places where this is happening. I have some ideas of my own, but I'm choosing not to put them on the internet. For one thing, it's disrespectful to the individuals who died, but also, the likelihood of getting it wrong is high, as we saw after the Oklahoma City bombing and the Tucson massacre.

Batman!

(Via Boing Boing.)

Remember when Lesley Gore was Pussycat, one of Catwoman's minions?

I didn't remember that either. I was just reading about Lesley Gore because I happened to hear an old song of hers — "Maybe I Know" — on the radio.

"Then Lee's beautiful voice attempts not to be incredibly dorky singing the incredibly dorky song about Chris O'Donnell's plastic nipples."

"This song, have you heard it?... It is one of the most mystifying songs in the history of words."

Yeah, the original "Kiss From a Rose" is from "Batman Forever." I'd forgotten that. Last night, on "American Idol," the theme was songs from movies, and with one exception — "Mrs. Robinson" — I had no feeling for what the movie supposedly was. I'd completely lost track of "Kiss From a Rose" being Batman-related. Anyway, Lee Dewyze did that song last night and it seemed pretty bad to me.

Now, there will be 10 nominees for the Best Picture Oscar.

It's pretty obviously a bid for TV ratings:

In a question-and-answer session that followed the announcement [Sidney Ganis, the academy’s president] said, "I would not be telling you the truth if I said the words ‘Dark Knight’ did not come up.

IN THE EMAIL: Christopher Althouse Cohen writes:

The most obvious pros and cons for either decision is that 5 slots are probably not enough to nominate every great movie in a given year, but on the other hand 10 slots is almost certain to lead to some pretty crappy movies getting nominated. Also, having 10 best picture nominees sort of lowers the value of a given nomination. A movie getting nominated at all right now seems like a really big deal for that movie, but it might not if there were 10. But you will be a lot more likely to see your favorite movies nominated with 10 slots.

Here were the nominees in 1943, the last time they had more than 5 nominees:

Casablanca
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Heaven Can Wait
In Which We Serve
Madame Curie
The Human Comedy
The More the Merrier
The Ox-Bow Incident
The Song of Bernadette
Watch on the Rhine

I don't know enough of those movies to know if they deserved it (I think I've only seen two), but the fact that they were nominated doesn't make me want to run out and see all of them. Kind of looks like one really major classic, and then a long list of pretty good movies.

Now, here are last year's five nominees, which apparently will be the last time, at least for a while, that there are only five (along with their box office grosses before getting nominated):

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ($104 million)
Frost/Nixon ($8.8 million)
Milk ($20 million)
The Reader ($8 million)
Slumdog Millionaire ($44 million)

Only one had a significant gross pre-nominations, and that one wasn't even a box office success given its $150 million budget. And here is an overview of the ratings for the Oscars since 1990 from Wikipedia. The ratings peaked with 57 million viewers the year Titanic came out, and has had somewhere in the 30's each of the last four years, so it's in a low streak.

And, coincidentally, the two best-reviewed movies of the year in 2008, based on Top Ten lists, were also the 1st and 5th highest grossing movies of the year: WALL-E and The Dark Knight. Both had some Oscar hype but failed to get nominated, and both would likely have been nominated if there were 10 slots. They were also big budget, ambitious movies that had fans who were really excited about those movies.

It seems pretty clear that this is a response to the decline in ratings and the possibility that its ratings decline has something to do with the fact that the small prestige movies have been getting all the nominations.

I do think the bigger movies are also more likely to win the award with 10. People push for their favorite little movie and put it in the #1 slot on their list when they vote for the nominations, because they want to help it and the big movies already have plenty of attention. Maybe a lot of those people who voted for The Reader and Frost/Nixon for nominations would have voted for The Dark Knight for the actual award if there were more nominees. So, I could see a movie in 6th-10th place for the nominations actually winning for this reason.

You'd also probably have some really unworthy prestige movies sneaking in without living up to their hype: movies like Rachel Getting Married, Doubt, or Che. But then you might have some little movies that deserved it but normally wouldn't have a chance, like Frozen River or Vicky Cristina Barcelona. That would be nice. It could go either way.

"One guy that was home at night was Batman."

"He was introduced in Detective Comics number #27 by Bob Kane. I always loved Batman. The way I looked at it, you had to come from another planet to be Superman, but I could be Batman… and you know I tried."

Just one item from a list of the best of Theme Time Radio With Bob Dylan. I love that radio show. I love satellite radio. And Bob Dylan. And now, I guess, Batman. Are you staying home tonight? I am. But I don’t think I could be Batman. Or even Bob Dylan. Do you?

(Posted at Instapundit too. Just felt like cross posting. Because I'm staying home tonight and I got the notion.)

"Santa, baby...."

Eartha Kitt, died on Christmas... in 2008, at the age of 81. She was famous for singing that song about Santa Claus. But she was also famous as Cat Woman on TV's "Batman" ...



... "She may be evil, but she is attractive"....

... and for telling Lyndon Johnson that he should end the Vietnam War. And, as I've said before, I'll never forget the monkey fur dress she wore in the 60s.