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Alfred Hitchcock learns to talk with TJM

Ryan Long goes to the No Kings rally to pick up young liberal hotties and is greatly disappointed in the quality of the mish
thanks to stevey

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.

TJM definitively ranks the films of John Boorman.

Kid punks CNN chump by speaking truth to retard

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.

TJM talks John Boorman, director of Excalibur

Good rickroll

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]

TJM acts like he knows anything about John Wick and screenwriting. It's embarrassing, really.

Podcast: Sefton and CBD talk about how would a peace treaty with Iran work, Democrats defending murderers and rapists, The GOP vs. Dem bench for 2028, composting bodies? And more!

Oh, I forgot to mention this quote from Pete Hegseth, reported by Roger Kimball: "We are sharing the ocean with the Iranian Navy. We're giving them the bottom half."

Batman fires The Batman
Batman is disgusted by the Joachim Phoenix version of Joker
Batman tries to fire Superman
Batman is still workshopping his Bat-Voice

Forgotten 80s Mystery Click: Red Leather Suit and Sweatband Edition
And I was here to please
I'm even on knees
Makin' love to whoever I please
I gotta do it my way
Or no way at all

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The 8-year average under Clinton was 260,000 jobs a month added, most well-paying. About 2/3rds of the jobs Bush has added with his government borrowed money given to the richest strategy - are low paying service sector or parasitic Gov't jobs as Dubya expands Gov't at LBJ record levels.

And he is still the first President to lose jobs since Hoover.

It is good that the media is ignoring the disappointing new job numbers and concentrating on the horserace. Before we outsourced much of what we made, we would see the 4% GNP growth reflected in augmented domestic production vs. a few owners and distributers adding cost on to imports and calling it "GNP growth". Historically, GNP 4% growth results in 2.5-3% job creation growth. At least 290,000 jobs a month.

The trickledown Bush promised would create 7.0 million jobs if his foreign - funded 2002 tax cuts were adopted have only created 1.8 million. Bush is 1.3 million in the hole.

Trickledown has failed. Will Bush admit it? Fuck no! He will go with more "tax cuts" for his cronies if re-elected.

His hope is the fact that the declining middle class still doesn't want a Mass liberal doing SCOTUS appontments, and this Mass Senator is a bunch less likable than the real JFK.

Cedarford:

The fact is the Clinton left behind these huge economic messes

1. A recession that started in the Fall of 99.
2. An Internet Bubble that burst and took 2 trillion dollars out of the economy.
3. 9/11 which stopped all economic activity for 3 months and ruined the travel industry for 18 months.

If Gore had been president he would have done the same thing that Kerry would have-nothing.
And today’s unemployment rate would be 14%.

Clinton created an economic disaster in 1999 and only Bush’s tax cut saved the nation.

As I've seen commented on before, so many of those jobs created during the tech bubble didn't really deserve to exist. For example, there was an web design company here in town that had over a hundred employees and 3 layers of management. Wanna know how many sites they actually built and managed...maybe 2 dozen. They just smoke and mirrored for 3 years receiving and blowing all sorts of millions of dollars of VC (Herman Miller chairs galore, a slurpee machine, the over a hundred employees to handle nothing) and in the end there was a endless supply of resumes flooding the 6 person shop I worked at looking for work. Now this is one example in a relatively non-tech area of the country of 75 useless jobs at one company being lost. I can only imagine that multiplied over the whole country.

Jake - The fact is that FDR inherited the Great Depression. He also had trade tariffs that prevented our exporting goods and services to create jobs. Then Hirohito and Hitler came along.

He still created jobs every year.

And Dubya has done WHAT with the 2 trillion he borrowed from the Saudis, Chinese, Japanese, and the Swiss Gnomes? Palace building for America's Tikriti Clan a la Saddam??

Cedarford,

FDR created alot of make-work jobs during the "alphabet-soup" agency days. Is this what you are prescribing? You aren't a fan of "trickle-down," a.k.a capitalism. Do you or Kerry have another idea?

Paul B. nails it. Many of those "high-paying" jobs were in the tech sector. The internet companies like pets.com, toys.com, nobusinessplan.com, never had a chance- but they paid well until they croaked. There was also a boom in tech manufacturing (which I was in) that was directly related to massive corporate buying prior to y2k. Both of these were artificial events- there had to be a correction. Add on the impact of 9/11, and I'm surprised the economy is as good as it is.

Jack,

You nailed it regarding Y2K. I saw the massive infrastructure upgrades and tech worker employment influx first-hand in the late 90's. Come early 2000, the artificial boom came crashing down. You can see the actual numbers charted here.

Hiring Picks Up in October