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Oil prices plunge on bizarre realization that Eric Swalwell may actually be straight. A rapey molester, allegedly, but a straight one.
Classic Rock Mystery Click
This is super-obscure and I only barely remember it. Given that, I'll give you the hint that it's by the Red Rocker.
And I guess you think you've got it made
Oh, but then, you never were afraid
Of anything that you've left behind
Oh, but it's alright with me now
'Cause I'll get back up somehow
And with a little luck, yes, I'm bound to win

Now twenty people will tell me it's not obscure, it was huge in their hometown and played at their prom. That's how it usually goes. When I linked Donnie Iris's "Love is Like a Rock," everyone said they knew that one and that his other song (which I didn't know at all) Ah Leah! was huge in their area.
You know we "joke" about the GOPe just "conserving" leftist things?
David French just posted:

Populists ask what conservativism has ever conserved?
Well its about to conserve birthright citizenship!
Posted by: 18-1

I couldn't hate this queen of the cuck-chair more if it paid seven figures and came with a corner office.
CJN podcast 1400 copy.jpg
Podcast: CBD and Sefton talk birthright citizenship, the 14th Amendment and SCOTUS, no boots in Iran, Artemis II and refocusing NASA, the NBA's hatred of everything non-woke, and more!
In more marketing for Project Hail Mary, scientists say they've found the biosigns indicating life growing on an alien planet. It's not proof, just signatures of chemicals that are produced by biological metabolism, and it could be nothing, but scientists think it's a strong sign that this planet is inhabited by something.
In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of scientists announced the detection of dimethyl sulfide (along with a similar detection of dimethyl disulfide) in the atmosphere of an exoplanet called K2-18b. This is actually the second detection of dimethyl sulfide made on this planet, following a tentative detection in 2023.
Tons of chemicals are detected in the atmospheres of celestial objects every day. But dimethyl sulfide is different, because on Earth, it's only produced by living organisms.
"It is a shock to the system," Nikku Madhusudhan, first author on the paper, told the New York Times. "We spent an enormous amount of time just trying to get rid of the signal."

He means they tried to prove the signal was caused by things other than dimethyl sulfide but they could not.
Artemis moon shot a go, scheduled for 6:24 Eastern time tonight
Great marketing arranged by Amazon to promote Project Hail Mary. Okay not really but it does work out that way.
What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*
Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV.
Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.
A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
LOTR is a very long story. Fifteen hundred pages or so. The Hobbit is relatively short and very punchy and easy to read. If you don't like The Hobbit, you can skip out on LOTR. If you do like it, you'll be primed to read LOTR.
Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too.
LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.
The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.
Finish the job, Mr. President!
Melanie Phillips lays out the case for the total destruction of the Iranian government and armed forces. [CBD]
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« Nick Denton's New Blog: The Sassy, Jew-Hatin' Jihadette | Main | The Passion of the Oliver Stone »
July 01, 2004

Hollywood Finally Starts Cranking Out the Morale-Boosting Propaganda Pics... On Behalf of the Islamist Terrorists

This makes me physically angry. I don't know what other response could possibly be appropriate.

Can there be any doubt at this point whose side the left is on?:

Buried inside a July 1 New York Times story about Hollywood's boyish new sex symbols (Toby Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, et al.) is the revelation of something much more interesting. Hollywood is suddenly making big-budget epics about the subjugation of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf by the white-skinned peoples of the West. Is this, um, really a good idea?

...

A new Hollywood genre struggles to be born: the 9/11 Apology Flick.

Prerelease buzz has it that the Crusader movie (whose original title, The Crusades, has now been changed to Kingdom of Heaven) casts Bloom not as a Crusader but as a plucky young peasant who fights to repel the Christian infidels from Jerusalem.

[details on the other pictures omitted, but worth reading]

...

It's quite possible that one or all of these movies will portray the West more favorably than Chatterbox presumes, or (in the case of Alexander's homosexuality) in a way that Egyptian and Iranian moviegoers might conceivably accept sympathetically. But that would only make these projects more provocative to Islamist terrorists, and therefore even less advisable. Why make these movies at all? ...

Where's Hollywood's customary timidity on the rare occasion when we need it? Can't it take a rain check?

"But wait," stout defenders of liberty may say. "If Hollywood stops making big-budget movies about the Crusades and Alexander the Great, the terrorists will have won." The obvious logical flaw here is that Hollywood had no interest in making such movies before the World Trade Center fell. The urge to make them now seems not only reckless, but perverse.

Tim Noah is generally a useless hyperpartisan dickweed, but he strikes gold here. I deleted big sections of his piece to comply with fair use, but seriously, read the whole damn thing.

This is absolutely disgusting. I can only repeat Noah's conclusion: Hollywood had no interest in these subjects before 9-11. But after 9-11, it suddenly has three major films in production giving succor to the terrorist cause.

Michelle Malkin previously castigated Hollywood for its perverse "Let's take a wait and see attitude" regarding making patriotic, pro-American films in a time of war.

But it seems that wasn't perverse nor transgressive enough for our brave artists.

They're now manufacturing pro-Islamist entertainments. They not only refuse to show the America/Western Civilization in a favorable light, they are determined to actively inflame anti-American/anti-Western passions.

Major Hat-Tip to Ken J for pointing this article out to me. Lord knows that I wouldn't have read Tim Noah without his link.

Does Anyone Remember... the plot and villains of numerous films being changed in order to spare Muslims' sensitivities?

The Sum of All Fears had its villains changed from Muslim extremists to conveniently-white-and-Western neo-Nazis.

The Arnold Schwarzenegger film Collateral Damage was changed in the pre-production-phase, due to Muslim complaints, so that the villains weren't Islamic terrorists but were, rather, Columbian drug-dealers. (Don't fucking Columbian drug-dealers or Neo-Nazis have any lobbyists in LA???!!!)

If Hollywood can manage to deftly avoid inflaming American passions against Muslim extremists, why do they seem incapable -- or unwilling -- to similarly avoid inflaming the passions of Muslim extremists against Americans?

Seems they can't have it both ways. They can't freely change the plots and characters in some films in order to avoid taking a position on the current war while simultaneously claiming "We must follow our artistic muses with no thought of outside considerations whatsoever" when they're making films which will almost certainly incite Muslim extremists' passions against America.

Hey, Hollywood: An Irish-descended friend of mine tells me he feels like punching Britons in the face whenever he watches In the Name of the Father or Braveheart. And he's not kidding. He may be half-kidding, but he means it just the same.

What do you think the response will be in Islamabad to your Crusader film, praytell?


posted by Ace at 04:48 PM