Drip Drip Drip

On Trump There is no conservative or libertarian case for voting for Trump. There's no Republican case for it either. He's never been conservative and he represents a screw-you to the Republicans. A President Trump would represent the end of the Republican Party as we know it and he'll probably spend the next 4 years running against Republican Congressmen and Senators. He would not be comfortable with the party until it were re-branded as a channel for his twitters. But... although it might be bad for conservatives and Republicans, a President Trump might be good for America. You see, Trump will never have the full support of his party and will always have full opposition of the Democrats. He will always be one major scandal away from impeachment. This is good. A democracy is not well served by high-trust in the government or leaders. It is very possible that starting in February 2017 or earlier, the Republicans and Democrats will unify to lock away the considerable too...

If you aren't fairly familiar with the Bible (Torah, Writings, New Testament) you will be face-blind to the whole of Western history, philosophy, and literature before about 100 years ago. By the same token, if you aren't handy with the peaks and feel of Westerns, you will not understand cinema before the 1980s or cinema by people who came to love film during that time.  Westerns pre-80s were just a vehicle for all the other genres of the time. There were kitchen table dramas, romances, cultural-political examinations/commentaries, detective stories, revenge stories, bright lights big city stories. It would be more reasonable to lump Star Wars and Gattaca together as "two common examples of SciFi" than to willy-nilly lump any movies with a horse in them as a "Western". All Westerns share a similar stereotypical setting: They are set at a time  before the pre-eminence of the automobile (City Slickers isn't a "Western") and in a place west of t...

Sally Hemmings of course, was the slave and (candidly) baby-mama of six children by Thomas Jefferson, four of whom survived until adulthood. The two oldest, simply left Monticello when they became adults and moved to Washington DC where they disappeared from the historical record. The oldest, Harriet, passed as a white woman. The two youngest, who were not 21 when Jefferson died, were freed in his will. But since Jefferson's estate was heavily in debt, it took an actual act of the Virginia congress to ultimately pull it off. It turns out that being Jefferson's child wasn't all bad. (That's sarcasm.) That issue of  Harriet "passing as a white woman" is quite ironic and reveals how pernicious and corrupting was the system of racial slavery in the US. Harriet was legally a slave and "negro" because her great-grandmother was an African slave who had had at least one child (Harriet's grandmother) with a white sea captain. The captain allegedly tri...

A message to the Fighting in the War Room podcast . Maybe my last. It's a trilogy. Hmm #1 Why would your conservative listeners prefer you didn't inject politics into your discussions? Possibly because, at best, you end up talking about them like they belong in a zoo (you guys know that half the country voted for Romney, right?). I mean you've run across a conservative or two and it was nice, but not the *crazy* ones! (Given your attitude, do you think they'd tell you what they really think?) Because you laugh at how conservatives are blacklisted in Hollywood and Journalism because progressives are so intolerant - especially toward social conservatives. Ha ha! Lighten up, everyone! Have you considered that your conservatives listeners kinda like you and would prefer you didn't portray yourselves in that light? #2 Why is it painful for conservatives to listen to you guys mix politics and pop culture since Joanna has a token conservative friend with whom she e...

Fighting In The War Room , a podcast I like, has done it again.  Previously , I used them as a foil to rant against an irrational obsession with Girl Power when critiquing pop culture. Their consensus, at that time, was that we should cheer the work of female directors even when their work is not so great . Why? Because there aren’t enough female directors (by some weighted model) so any movie directed by someone identifying as female is a definitive Good based on that criteria alone. Ugh. This time, the topic was the Ghostbusters all-female cast and the offender was the onliest Joanna Robinson of Vanity Fair .  Joanna -- who didn't seem to like the movie at all -- expressed concern that the failure of this property would undermine support for genre movies with an all female cast. So, even though she says it’s not a good movie, she advised  audiences to “Go see it!” Now, before I say anything else, I haven’t seen the movie. For all I know, I’ll love it when I re...

Snow White and Aurora These orphan girls (Aurora thought she was an orphan) were forced to take their naps by baddie old ladies. Not dirt naps, but nice comfortable feather bed naps that came with handsome man alarm clocks. IF THEY WERE MY NEPHEWS They would be a gruff but lovable Middle School teacher and a scarlet haired hipster. And check out those beards. Watch out for chaffing, princes Belle, Jasmine, and Pocahontas These strong-minded young women were put in perplexing situations by their family meddling in their romantic choices. IF THEY WERE MY DAUGHTERS They would have left a trail of thousands of bodies behind them on Xbox. Disney offers lots of opportunities for kids to interact with princesses online. But if these princesses were my daughters, you would never want to meet them online. Online, they would be serial-murdering psychopaths. Rapunzel This coiffured lass was locked in a tower by an evil witch and had to turn her own hair into a stairwe...

You say corporations aren’t people. If corporations aren’t people then they don’t have Constitutional rights. Only people have Constitutional rights. In that case, the New York Times corporation doesn’t have First Amendment rights. The NAACP doesn’t have standing to file law suits for civil rights violations. In that case, the government doesn’t need a warrant to enter the property of the Sierra Club and peruse their membership files or bug their phones. If corporations are not people then they can’t own property. They can’t enter into contracts. English Common Law has always treated corporations as people for the purposes of the law. Boston and other colonies were founded by corporations. If corporations are not people, where did all the people in the Massachusetts Bay Colony come from? Typically, no one claims corporations don’t have *those* rights. They usually argue that they merely don’t have the rights (especially free speech rights) that they don’t want them to have. It’s ...