text:
Insomnia; thriller, USA, 2002; D: Christopher Nolan, S: Al Pacino, Hilary Swank, Robin Williams, Maura Tierney, Martin Donovan
Nightmute, Alaska. A murdered body is found so police officer Dormer is sent from Los Angeles for backup, even though he is under investigation for planting evidence. When the police surround a cottage, they are attacked by an unknown person. In the chaos that breaks loose, Dormer accidentally shoots his colleagues Eckhart in the fog, but decides to put the blame on the unknown perpetrator. With time, Dormer discovers that crime novel author Finch is behind the murder, but cannot do anything because he knows the truth about Eckhart. Together, they decide to plant the blame on the acquittance of the first corpse. When Finch captures police officer Ellie, Dormer kills him, but succumbs to wounds himself.
After his Batman films gained world attention, numerous critics started to search for Christopher Nolan's early films, among which is this one where the director surprised a lot when he crafted one of the few remakes that are actually better than the original: thriller "Insomnia" leads the story better and more even than the good, but slightly unexciting Norwegian film of the same title from '97., keeping its sharpness up until the last take. The opening act is rather shaky and at first deceives that the whole film might just be an ordinary crime flick, but with time it turns into its opposite. Police officer Dormer (again excellent Al Pacino) is an untypical protagonist who makes the story unusual when he decides to cooperate with murderer Finch who knows his dirty secret, by which the nature of corruption is skilfully displayed. Two excellent sequences stand out: in one, Dormer interrogates arrogant teenager Randy who smokes and swears, but then the police officer loses his patience, turns the kid's table towards himself, throws his cigarette and says him that his whole 'screw-the-world' attitude maybe works on others, but not on him. The second one is when he meets killer Finch, who cut of the fingernails of the corpse after the crime, and tells him he is as "mysterious" with that idea as a toilet bowl. The sole setting on the utmost north of Alaska, rarely used as a location in cinema, is exquisite and gives the whole story an eerie feeling, as if it is not from this world, whereas it was also one of only two or three notable movies in the later half of comedian Robin Williams' career, here deliciously cast against type in the untypical role of the unpredictable bad guy.
Monday, October 29, 2012
Friday, October 26, 2012
The Sacrifice
Alexander, a retired actor and art expert, lives with his family in a secluded house in the countryside. He plants a tree with a little boy. His family and friends congratulate him for his birthday. However, the idyll is disrupted by a TV broadcast about World War III and the information that the whole Europe might be annihilated. Alexander's wife Adelaide is so frightened that she must be sedated. In an act of despair, Alexander prays to God and promises to burn his house and kill his family if world peace is restored. After a dream, postman Otto tells him to go to Maria's house, who is a witch. There, Alexander sleeps with her. The next morning, his wish is fulfilled - his family does not even remember that there was a threat of a conflict. In order to keep his promise, Alexander sets his house on fire. He is sent to an asylum.
Andrei Tarkovsky's 8th and last film is also his rarest one and the most difficult to obtain, and in it he gave a worthy cinematic farewell after some of his previous abstract achievements started to show a tendency of occasional boredom prevailing over artistic poetry. The movie starts with a close up of Leonardo da Vinci's unfinished painting The Adoration of the Magi - the camera slowly rises to the upper top of the painting, revealing a drawn tree, which then dissolves to a scene of hero Alexander planting a dead tree on the beach, hoping it will survive and blossom nonetheless, mirroring the story's main theme of a need for (spiritual) rebirth from a dead (material) world. The first live action take, the one of Alexander, the child and postman Otto walking on the beach, is extremely long, running for over 10 minutes, but Tarkovsky managed to make it seem elegant and quality slow thanks to clever dialogues, ranging from the observation about the dwarf in Zarathustra up to common themes in life ("I have a feeling as if my whole life is just one huge prelude to something big - the real life."; "How can the human kind think that it can coin a universal truth, a truth that will apply to the whole Universe?").
Tarkovsky does indeed once again fall into the trap of Christian ideology and some of the monologues are monotone, yet they work because an inspired artist can polish it out ("I got tired of acting someone else, of feeling someone else's emotions. And I was uncomfortable of being honest.", says Alexander, an ex-actor). The main tangle is brilliant and helps strengthen the movie - the hero promises to kill his family and burn his house as a sacrifice if God will prevent an unidentified war that might lead to the end of the world (mirroring Tarkovsky's own gloomy feelings since he was dying from cancer in those years). And after he wakes up, and finds that the world is all right again - symbolized in a pleasant shift from a dark-grey to uplifting-illuminated cinematography - he is faced with a dilemma: will he keep his promise? Will he truly kill his family? Tarkovsky unfortunately avoids to articulate Alexander's drama, but he was always in favor of dreamy mood, de-dramatization. The director breaks the limits between dreams and reality, signalling a gap between the material and spiritual, adding poetic scenes (the boy, who does not speak throughout the story because of an operation on his throat, says the last line: "In the beginning, there was the word...", which is the first Bible verse of the first chapter in the Book of Genesis) whereas the critics particularly praised the virtuoso long take of the house burning, which is why despite some overlong moments, "Sacrifice" succeeds. It won a BAFTA for best foreign language film.
Posted by Marin Mandir at 6:55 PM No comments: Links to this post
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Little Women
Teenage girl Jo lives with her three sisters - Meg, Beth and Amy - and mother March in a small town during the American Civil War. She wants to be a writer, and even manages to publish a few short stories. Her neighbor, Laurie, proposes her, but she rejects him. When their father returns alive from the war, the family is happy, but Jo departs to study in New York. There, an older professor, Friedrich, inspires her to publish a more personal story, which she does with "Little Women", a best-selling book. Beth dies from a disease, while Jo marries Friedrich.
The 4th movie adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's eponymous and popular 1868 novel, Gillian Armstrong's "Little Women" is a standard and kitchy melodrama, yet manages to assure a higher dimension of quality thanks almost exclusively to the sweet Winona Ryder as the rebellious heroine Jo, for which she was nominated for an Oscar as best actress in a leading role. The movie is burdened the most in the lax first half, that does not manage to engage the viewers through sweet, but conventional-grey and sometimes boring everyday events, with practically no humor (except for the colorful "burnt hair" scene), though it manages to pick up some energy in the second half thanks to events viewers can identify with, like the trails and ordeal of Jo, who wasted her talent on writing cheap short stories that were expected from her just to later write something honest, from the bottom of her heart, which mirrors the experience of Alcott's history with her own novel, subtly aiming a few jabs at the position of women in those times. A stronger vision in where the movie should go or look like was not there, yet "Little Women" has just enough positive ingredients - great landscapes, costumes, set design - to offer an overall positive experience.
Posted by Marin Mandir at 5:36 PM No comments: Links to this post
Monday, October 22, 2012
The Wild West, a few days before Christmas. Moses is a bounty hunter who has ten children and a loving wife. Unwillingly, he teams up with his brother Travis, allegedly the fastest gun drawer around, after avoiding him for a decade, in order to catch notorious outlaw Stone, since the award is 4,000 $, a money he dearly needs for his family. They capture Stone, but Travis let's him go. In the end, their mother captures Stone in her home, so Moses and Travis join them for a Christmas dinner, with the entire family.
Terence Hill took over the directing position himself for "Troublemakers", his 17th and final movie collaboration with Bud Spencer, almost a decade after their previous film, "Miami Supercops", did not live up to their box office expectations. Even though Hill invested more care than any director who directed them during their weakest phase, the 80s - the cinematography is crystal clear, the shot composition is more ambitious, the set designs are very good - "Troublemakers", a loose 3rd part to their excellent western comedy that launched them into legends, "They Call Me Trinity", is only a good movie for the first 20 minutes, after which it starts to consolidate itself into a thin, standard and 'meager' farewell, when better could have been done. The opening letter of Travis' mother is wonderfully comical ("You never could read as good as you could shoot. So I presume that this letter will be read to you by a nice lady or a little kid...") and a few good jokes appear here and there, too (in one quietly hilarious scene, Travis "synchronizes" his swinging on the rocking chair with that of Moses' - but Moses cannot stand him to such an extent that he even stops his rocking chair and then starts swinging deliberately slower than Travis, refusing to be like him even in the slightest detail), yet the story quickly sinks to lower levels with the contest in eating beans and the bear scenes, as well as contrived moments (why would Travis simply release outlaw Stone after Moses caught him?). Still, the finale with the family re-uniting on Christmas is kind of nostalgic and emotional. The last Spencer-Hill film, but the last good one is still "I'm with the Hippopotamus".
Posted by Marin Mandir at 8:41 PM No comments: Links to this post
Friday, October 19, 2012
You Can't Take It With You
A rich banker, Anthony P. Kirby, wants to buy off a whole block in order to build a weapons factory, which will help him reach a monopoly on arms production in the US, but one old man, grandpa Vanderhoff, refuses to sell his house for any sum of money. Vanderhoff is an untypical individual, a man who founded a small sanctuary in his home in order to let almost a dozen people live there and do what they love, not what they are forced to do just to survive. Kirby's son, Tony, falls in love with secretary Alice, who is, coincidentally, Vanderhoff's granddaughter. Kirby is extremely against Tony's marriage proposal, but after he manages to buy Vanderhoff's home, Kirby realizes his life is empty. Kirby thus returns the house to Vanderhoff, accepts friendship over money and allows Tony and Alice to get engaged.
By winning two Oscars, for best picture and director, the movie adaptation of George S. Kaufman's and Moss Hart's play "You Can't Take it With You" managed to assure Frank Capra's final best director Academy Award, his third in only one decade, but it is somehow difficult to shake away the feeling that his first two wins, for "It Happened One Night" and "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town", were more justified than this one. Capra and his screenwriter Robert Riskin picked the play because it addressed some of their humanistic beliefs and motives, revolving around an individual, grandpa Vanderhoff (great Lionel Barrymore), who transformed his house into a sanctuary where a dozen people would do what they love, not what the society forces them to do, practically mirroring Capra's previous film, "Lost Horizon", just setting the 'safe area' for the good in the American city - Vanderhoff's family is unorthodox for its honesty, for being what they are, but they are more than just Addams Family in a pleasant-utopian way - yet the story rehashes too much of his frequent stereotypes, such as the optimistic end that shows how having a friend is more important than money, the meaning of the title, i.e. that you cannot take your money into the grave, whereas the scene where Ramsey storms Kirby's office to give him a lesson practically echoes the similar sequence where a poor farmer storms Mr. Deeds' house to scorn him for his wealth. The movie lacks humor - it needed more such moments as the great little scene where Vanderhoff asks an attorney to "do something about his twitch", upon which the latter gets a grimace on his face - and is slightly corny-sentimental at times, exhausting itself with spasmodic scenes of the family doing wacky things in the house, yet Capra and Riskin would already detect their more bitter, satirical side in the banker Kirby, who is a symbol for plutocracy and covert totalitarian tenedencies in business.
Wicked City
Japan. A 'Black World', a world of humans who can transform into demons, co-exists with the human world. In order to prolong the ceasefire, a new peace treaty is about to be signed, so agent Taki is sent to protect 'Black World' diplomat Mayart, an old man, together with agent Makie, a woman from the 'Black World' herself. Mayart is assaulted in a brothel, but Makie and Taki manage to save him and hide from the 'Black World' extremists who want to prevent the peace treaty. Taki saves Makie, too, and falls in love with her. In the end, it turns out that Mayart was actually sent to protect them because their love could reconcile the two races.
Hard anime horror "Wicked City" falls indeed in the trap of its genre, namely to build its suspense too much from disgust and slimy monsters, yet despite splatter violence and shock, the underlying theme of the story is surprisingly humanistic, even adding a love story that eventually covertly transforms into the main resolution of the tangle. Director Yoshiaki Kawajiri ("Ninja Scroll") manages to polish up some inconsistencies in the script - no reason is given why extremists are against signing a peace treaty between the human and the 'Black World', the 'plot twist' near the end is not plausible - mostly thanks to great lighting, meticulous animation - the flawed characters' designs excluding - and a few neat little aesthetic tricks that strengthen the mood, like setting the entire story during the night. The plot might be an allegory on the North-South Korea relations and on the intolerance between two races, which makes the love story between the human Taki and the 'Black World' woman Makie even more indicative, whereas it is interesting to note that their sex scene is the only emotional one, the only honest one, as opposed to the previous three where sex is just used for 'black widow' ploys to assault a protagonist, such as the opening with the woman-spider who turns out to have teeth in her vagina or the 'Black World' prostitute whose breasts turn into glue by capturing diplomat Mayart - who, as a footnote, seems off because he looks and acts too much like the buffoonish perverted grandpa from "Ranma 1/2". In the ultra-bizarre finale demon tentacles appear from a statue of the Holly Mary (!), which makes the story not for everyone's taste, though, overall, "Wicked City" is a suspenseful film.
Posted by Marin Mandir at 1:30 PM 2 comments: Links to this post
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Cobb and Arthur use a special device to transform themselves into someone's dream and steal an idea from him or her. Tycoon Saito hires them to do the opposite, implant an idea into Fischer, who inherited a large energy corporation, so that he will not continue with the policy of a monopoly. Cobb agrees and hires dream architect Ariadne, Eames and others. On a plane, they sedate Fischer, and implant a dream-within-a-dream, until they plant the idea and Cobb meets his deceased wife. In exchange, Saito stops an arrest warrant against Cobb, who returns to his kids.
Director Christopher Nolan used a great style to camouflage the basic, ludicrous plot, but overall, it is still ludicrous at its essence. A director can resort to the technique of transforming a story into a puzzle, but by cocooning one preposterous subplot into another, and then cocooning that preposterous subplot into yet another, and another, does not mean that those three ludicrous subplots equal a great story. However, one can forgive Nolan for "Inception" because time travelling and/or dreaming often proved to be a slippery rope for movies, who would often trip over their own feet due to huge inconsistencies resulting from thee. Some tried to find fault in character development or actors, but one has to be fair and say that the basic idea was simply bad: the hero, Cobb, steals ideas from people when they are sleeping? One just has to look at one dream report collected by scientist Calvin Hall, who wrote this about someone's dream: "I dreamt I was hungry and began to scratch my nose. All of a sudden a steak supper appeared in front of me. I ate this and after a while scrached my nose again. Suddenly I was dressed in the finest of clothes. I began to wonder if my nose were magic." This illustrates how pointless it is to steal someone's idea in a dream - because everything is distorted there. It would be as reliable as if Cobb and his team would go to get the guy's nose because it was magical in his dream. In one scene, Cobb also reads some documents in a dream. It is another misstep - because people cannot read in a dream.
The main plot, however, is even more insane than that: Cobb has to implant an idea into Mr. Fischer, so that he would not pursue the policy of monopoly from his deceased dad. In order to do that, Nolan resorted to a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream. Leaving aside the inconvenience that implanting an idea to someone who is dreaming is entirely unreliable (because people sometimes do not even remember their dream), "Inception" contradicted itself again by sending the six protagonists into an action adventure while in a dream. It is simple: if they can use their machine to create a dream, why not make themselves into Supermen and thus invincible to shot guns? And then again, if they cannot do that, how come Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character can press a button and activate a bomb in that dream? Why would a bomb get activated in a dream? Why would they have guns in a dream? Why would there be any danger in a dream if they can create it? This demonstrates that "Inception" fell into a catch 22 - it cannot apply logic to a dream and be illogical at the same time. If you fancy a van falling from a bridge for 30 minutes (!), Joseph Gordon-Levitt floating and tumbling around a hotel lobby collecting floating people for 30 minutes and the rest of the team attacking a snow fortress James Bond style because they forgot to create a pleasant and warm beach instead, you will probably find some sense in this, while the rest will perceive a huge plot gimmick and even predict the "plot twist" already somewhere near the start. If you want a real feeling of a lucid dream - because this is too neat to be a dream - watch Ruben's "Dreamscape", because despite its flaws and lack of a huge budget, it was plausible. If you want a philosophical movie about the nature of reality and possibility of an alternate world, watch "The Matrix", or even better "The Truman Show", that said so much about life in such a harmonius way.
Posted by Marin Mandir at 3:56 PM 4 comments: Links to this post
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Russian writer Andrei is in Italy in order to write an autobiography of the deceased Russian emigre Sosnovsky. Andrei and Eugenia, his interpretor, visit a church. He feels depressed and isolated, until a madman, Domenico, catches his attention. Domenico and his family spent seven years hidding in their home, waiting for the end of the society, and his idea that the world can be saved by transporting a lit candle across a poll captivates Andrei. Domenico commits suicide by setting himself on fire, while Andrei dies after carrying the lit candle across the empty pool.
Winner of the best director award at the Cannes film festival, Andrei Tarkovsky's sixth film, "Nostalgia", is thematically a blend between his previous - nostalgia and memory of his childhood in "The Mirror" - and last film - the possibility of the end of the society (world) in "Sacrifice" - yet it is overall just a pure art film, a hermetic cocoon with little universal elements people can identify with - and without an 'outburst' of author's creative unpredictability as it was the case with Pasolini, Fellini, Ashby or Hitchcock. As with most of his achievements, the viewers will search for a story, yet Tarkovsky's "Nostalgia" is more aligned towards creating a mood, turning into those 'advanced viewings' that demand a lot, yet the payback is not proportional since - despite a masterful shot composition - the movie is thin, overstretched and sometimes boring.
The main hero, Andrei (Oleg Yankovsky, with a strange blond patch on his black hair), is a symbol for the director himself who feels isolated in Italy (he cannot speak their language properly, his neighbors ask "what he is doing here"), longing for his homeland and childhood, presented with scenes filmmed in black and white, adding a few philosophical observations about differences between the Western and Russian mentality, culminating in the allegorical final scene (Russian landscapes "inside" Italian buildings) that advocates imigrants to merge those two worlds together. Too little happens in the film, both in content and style, to fully justify its hype, yet it has at least two virtuoso directed sequences: in one, Andrei has a childhood memory of a German Shepherd running through a puddle, and then goes to his room and lies down on the bed. While it is raining, the (imaginary?) dog suddenly enters his room and Andrei strokes him for comfort. In the other, Domenico gives a powerful speech about the wrong turn society has taken ("What kind of a world is this, when a madman has to tell you to be ashamed?") and lits himself on a statue in the city square, with Eugenia running towards him while every other passerby around her is "frozen" on the stairs, giving the impression as if she is walking inside a painting.
Posted by Marin Mandir at 3:23 PM No comments: Links to this post
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Outland; science-fiction crime, UK, 1981; D: Peter Hyams, S: Sean Connery, Frances Sternhagen, James Sikking, Peter Boyle
In the future, a space mining station specialized in excavating titanium was established on Io, the Jupiter's moon. A new marshal, O'Neil, starts investigating bizarre behavior of some workers who commit suicide in an act of madness. They can all be tracked down to an illegal drug that makes the workers more productive, yet often causes their brains to "burn out". The drugs are supplied by Sheppard, who runs the station, because it increases the profit. Since O'Neil refuses to turn a blind eye, killers are set loose on him, while nobody wants to help him, except a cynical woman, Dr. Lazarus. O'Neil kills the killers and arrests Sheppard.
"High Noon" in space—Peter Hyams science-fiction "western" "Outland" is a patchwork that unevenly blends gore, sometimes trashy violence with an actually more ambitious narrative revolving around the theme from Zinnemann's classic, i.e. that when a hero with integrity is in real trouble, everyone abandons him, and depending on each viewers' perception, the one or the other element will prevail during the viewing experience. If the viewers can tolerate the fact that a wonderful sequence is sometimes followed by heavy handed, cheap violence (head exploding when exposed to space) and that the final showdown isn't half as good as it could have been, "Outland" is actually a fairly suspenseful crime film and gains plus points thanks to amazing special effects, good lighting, a great little intro that uses subtitles to explain the purpose of the mining station on Io and the number of people on it, some good ideas (the inventive scene where Marshal O'Neil is attacked from behind by a thug who tries to strangle him with a rope: O'Neil pretends to be dead, upon which the thug releases him. O'Neil then proceeds to knock him out because he had a protective shield collar around his neck), whereas Sean Connery is charismatic as always but Frances Sternhagen almost steals the show as the surprisingly memorable, deliciously cynical Dr. Lazarus. After "Star Wars" and "Alien" paved the way for an explosion of science-fiction on film, numerous cheap imitators did not do that opportunity justice—yet "Outland" is arguably one of the few better done examples.
In the future, a space mining station specialized in excavating titanium was established on Io, the Jupiter's moon. A new marshal, O'Neil, starts investigating bizarre behavior of some workers who commit suicide in an act of madness. They can all be tracked down to an illegal drug that makes the workers more productive, yet often causes their brains to "burn out". The drugs are supplied by Sheppard, who runs the station, because it increases the profit. Since O'Neil refuses to turn a blind eye, killers are set loose on him, while nobody wants to help him, except a cynical woman, Dr. Lazarus. O'Neil kills the killers and arrests Sheppard.
"High Noon" in space—Peter Hyams science-fiction "western" "Outland" is a patchwork that unevenly blends gore, sometimes trashy violence with an actually more ambitious narrative revolving around the theme from Zinnemann's classic, i.e. that when a hero with integrity is in real trouble, everyone abandons him, and depending on each viewers' perception, the one or the other element will prevail during the viewing experience. If the viewers can tolerate the fact that a wonderful sequence is sometimes followed by heavy handed, cheap violence (head exploding when exposed to space) and that the final showdown isn't half as good as it could have been, "Outland" is actually a fairly suspenseful crime film and gains plus points thanks to amazing special effects, good lighting, a great little intro that uses subtitles to explain the purpose of the mining station on Io and the number of people on it, some good ideas (the inventive scene where Marshal O'Neil is attacked from behind by a thug who tries to strangle him with a rope: O'Neil pretends to be dead, upon which the thug releases him. O'Neil then proceeds to knock him out because he had a protective shield collar around his neck), whereas Sean Connery is charismatic as always but Frances Sternhagen almost steals the show as the surprisingly memorable, deliciously cynical Dr. Lazarus. After "Star Wars" and "Alien" paved the way for an explosion of science-fiction on film, numerous cheap imitators did not do that opportunity justice—yet "Outland" is arguably one of the few better done examples.
Posted by Marin Mandir at 12:40 PM No comments: Links to this post
Friday, October 12, 2012
Lost Horizon
English writer, soldier and diplomat Robert Conway is sent on a mission to save 90 westerners in the Chinese town of Baskul from the violent uprising. As Robert, his brother George, Gloria and two other men board a plane, an unknown Asian pilot breaks into the cockpit and flies them off towards the Himalayas, where they crash due to lack of fuel. They are found by a group of people and brought to Shangi-La, an idylic town on a warm climate, surrounded by the mountains. Their tutor, Chang, explains that Shangri-La is suppose to be a refuge from the civilization heading towards self-destruction, and that Robert was brought to replace the dying High Lama. George persuades Robert to leave, but the latter eventually returns to the place, having found his inner peace there.
Despite Oscar nominations for best picture and supporting actor (H.B. Warner), critical acclaim and noble efforts of the film institute to restore the movie to its original length (its current running time of 130 minutes indicates that over an hour of the film was lost), Frank Capra's adaptation of the novel "Lost Horizon" is one of his lesser efforts, a simplistic morality play where the director embraced his common themes of good people in an evil world via the story of a sanctuary (Shangri-La, situated and isolated between the Himalayas in the story, but still having impossibly warm climate and even moderate climate animals like deer) for the good, transparently implying how this is the way the whole world should be. The most was achieved in the finale, where the protagonists are walking through the snowy landscapes of Himalayas, stylistically as monochrome as dunes in Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia", whereas the set-design is truly extraordinary for those times, giving great landscapes where Shangri-La is placed, but some ideas are still naive or weird (attaching flutes to pigeons tales so that they would make a sound of music while flying). More care was dedicated to the themes than to the characters, yet hero Robert does give a few good lines here and there ("If life does not have a purpose, why strive towards living as long as possible?"). As the last line hints ("I hope he finds his Shangi-La. I hope we all find it."), the city is not just an utopia, but also a state of mind, and thus a valid attempt from Capra and his screenwriter Robert Riskin to present their philosophy, yet it is humorless, unexciting and thin, clashing with perspectives and notions, but is overall less a pure insight into the human spirit.
Posted by Marin Mandir at 4:17 PM No comments: Links to this post
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Born Yesterday
The primitive brute Harry Brock somehow managed to gain a fortune thanks to shady methods, so he travels to Washington to bribe a few politicians in order to alleviate his business even more. However, he thinks that his beautiful, but equally as dimwitted girlfriend Emma 'Billie' is embarrassing him whenever she says something, so he hires the intelligent reporter Paul to educate her a little bit. That backfires: Billie turns smarter than expected and sees through Harry's plan for a corrupt cartel, based on her name, so she and Paul stop him and fall in love.
A charming adaptation of Garson Kanin's Broadway play, George Cukor's "Born Yesterday" is a simple yet very satisfying comedy that ultimately turns into an essay about the clash between the intelligent and the dumb, the educated and the uneducated, and even between the corrupted and uncorrupted, thereby even adding a few (idealized) celebrations of American political life (Harry's intentions are quite similar to the main antagonist in the classic "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"), whereas Judy Holliday delivered a fabulous performance in both versions. With that charmingly annoying accent, that reveals a "backward", wild, but also untouched nature, Holliday practically steals the show as the naive Billie who blossoms into a smart woman thanks to her tutor, whereas some of the best jokes come swiftly, extracting their power from the quietly hilarious clash between the two equally dimwitted Billie and her boyfriend Harry.
For instance, after a session where Paul taught her about Thomas Paine, her boyfriend Harry shows up and calls her shallow. She replies with: "Who is Tom Paine?" Harry does not know, and is unsettled by the fact that she does know. What follows is a comical attempt of "getting even" from him, when he every 15 seconds suddenly disrupts her further tutorial and tries to find someone she does not know about, which would prove he is smarter (he asks who is Rabbit Maranville, but Paul answers instead of her, etc.), until he finally asks: "What is a peninsula?", and before she can anwser says triumphantly: "A piece of land that is bordered by water on three sides but connected to mainland!" The electrifying finale, where Billie and Paul outsmart him, is the highlight of the story, especially Paul's reply to Harry's attempt of strangling him ("That's the only thing you know, right? A kick is the answer to everything. The bigger the problem, the bigger the kicks. Well, not this time.") However, as sweet as Holliday is, she did not deserve an Oscar over Davis in "All About Eve" or Swanson in "Sunset Blvd." - at best, she was equally as good as them.
Posted by Marin Mandir at 1:39 PM No comments: Links to this post
Sunday, October 7, 2012
The Lover
French Indochina between the World Wars. A 15-year old girl lives with her family, one of those French colonialists; her widowed mother, a sensible younger and an arrogant, aggressive older brother. On a ferry, she meets a Chinaman in his 30s who takes her to her school in Saigon in his car. She spots him again several times, waiting in front of the school. After a while, he brings her to his apartment and they have sex. With his wealth, he is able to charm her mother and brothers. However, when the girl starts asking money from him in exchange for sex, he starts losing interest in her. She moves away with her family to France. Decades later, he phones her and tells her he still loves her.
An adaptation of Marguerite Duras' autobiographical novel, Jean Jacques-Annaud's "The Lover" is a somber and even slightly nostalgic erotic drama that, despite the daring story revolving around a teenage girl having an affair with a man in his 30s, manages to avoid any controversial and/or questionable connotations, instead displaying 'neutral compassion' for the unusual couple in order to understand the two characters. The four sex sequences are good, yet overall the movie relies more on the sadness, tragedy and loss due to the fate of the relationship: the girl (her name is never revealed, but it is obvious she represents Duras) at first gets intimate with the Chinaman (his name is never revealed, either) because she likes him, finds him genuinely attractive - love - but then, because of his wealth, starts demanding money from him, which reduces her status to just the one of any prostitute, and makes him lose interest in her, ultimately marking the end of their bond. The movie is simplistic and low-key, with little happening during the running time of two hours, yet thanks to the sharp, meticulous cinematography, even ordinary scenes of Vietnamese landscapes seem more aesthetic than usual, whereas the director allows for the elegant story to be slow in a good way, i.e. it enables the viewers to dwell on it. Jane March is well cast as the main heroine, but Tony Leung does not lapse behind either, in the effective role as the wealthy Chinese playboy who is always the gentleman.
Vampire's Kiss
New York. Peter is a burned out businessman who often goes for a psychotherapy. During a one night stand, a woman, Rachel, bites him on his neck while they are in bed. From there on, Peter starts acting even weirder than before, often harassing his secretary Alva for failing to find a precious contract in his office. Finally, Peter concludes that he is turning into a vampire: he buys fake fangs, eats a pigeon and drinks blood from a woman's neck. Alva's brother stabs him in his apartment for harassing his sister.
Some have attributed the resentment of the audience and the critics towards Robert Bierman's black comedy "Vampire's Kiss" to be a result of not understanding the twist ending that unusually twists the horror rules - unlike some horrors where it is not clear if the hero is crazy or just a misunderstood individual who is faced with a terrible monster/threat but nobody believes him, until the ending reveals that he was actually right, much to the viewers "relief", here it is vice-versa, since the viewers believed into the hero's POV, Peter's persuasion that he is slowly turning into a vampire, but in the end became "suckers" because he truly turns out to be just a demented madman and nothing else - yet there are many more problems with it, since the movie simply has too little laughs. Nicolas Cage gives a dedicated performance as the increasingly insane Peter, but hardly any actor can save an underdeveloped, overlong mess of a story, including such bizarre scenes as the one where Cage eats a living cockroach (!), all adding up to a huge lack of cohesive sense, though a few unusual jokes do ignite here and there, like when Peter is chasing a pigeon or the increasingly hilarious subplot where the secretary, Alva, fails to find an important file in the register while he gives her insults which are getting more and more over-the-top with each passing day, until culminating in an insane duel.
Posted by Marin Mandir at 1:38 PM No comments: Links to this post
Friday, October 5, 2012
Toy Story 3
Toy Story 3; CGI animated fantasy comedy, USA, 2010; D: Lee Unkrich, S: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Ned Beatty, Michael Keaton, Don Rickles, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Whoopi Goldberg
Andy grew into a teenager who is about to leave for college, which means that he is not playing with his toys anymore. Due to a misunderstanding, his mother accidentally throws the toys into garbage, but they land into a day care centre. At first, they are overwhelmed when a teddy-bear, Lotso, gives them a special place with the kids - but it turns out the kids are pre-school, i.e. wild and heavy handed when playing with toys. The toys want out, but Lotso doesn't want to let them so that he and the "elite toys" will be spared from them. Woody, Buzz, Jesse and others manage to escape and return to Andy, who donates them to a little girl.
"Toy Story 3", the 3rd movie, is the best and only truly great one of the "Toy Story" franchise ("Toy Story I" had the annoying character Sid and truly exploited its full potentials only in the 10-minute finale; "Toy Story II" had too many lukewarm jokes) that avoided the sugary overkill of some previous Pixar movies and cleverly turned the tables by transforming the story's main problem - Andy growing up - into a virtue: here the growing protagonist is more concerned with college and only has nostalgia value for his toys, who feel neglected, thereby paving the way for some themes about transience, the end of childhood and even mortality. Director Unkrich and screenwriter Michael Arndt never leave room for empty walks since almost every sequence is creative and highly inventive, but surprisingly always simple and thus universal at the same time, whether they are crafting clever humor (the jokes revolving around Barbie and Ken; Lots shutting up Mrs. Potato Head by taking her "lips" away; instead of cute kids, aggressive ones show up in the day care centre, like a stampede, upon which Buzz keeps his smile - but shuts his glass helmet for protection), clever references (a toy of Totoro) or just plain clever action sequences (Woody saved from the fall thanks to his string). Lots, a deceivingly cute teddy-bear, voiced by Ned Beatty, is a brilliant bad guy, who is not only showed as a dictator, but also *why* he became one. A few complaints could be raised towards the rather standard finale, where Lots unfortunately just remained a typical black and white bad guy, as well as the fact that the whole second half just seems like a giant prison escape plot, yet luckily a clearly happy ending was avoided and replaced with a very melancholic and bittersweet one: rarely did a CGI animated film reach such an emotional level as this one, matching the intensity of classic animation.
Andy grew into a teenager who is about to leave for college, which means that he is not playing with his toys anymore. Due to a misunderstanding, his mother accidentally throws the toys into garbage, but they land into a day care centre. At first, they are overwhelmed when a teddy-bear, Lotso, gives them a special place with the kids - but it turns out the kids are pre-school, i.e. wild and heavy handed when playing with toys. The toys want out, but Lotso doesn't want to let them so that he and the "elite toys" will be spared from them. Woody, Buzz, Jesse and others manage to escape and return to Andy, who donates them to a little girl.
"Toy Story 3", the 3rd movie, is the best and only truly great one of the "Toy Story" franchise ("Toy Story I" had the annoying character Sid and truly exploited its full potentials only in the 10-minute finale; "Toy Story II" had too many lukewarm jokes) that avoided the sugary overkill of some previous Pixar movies and cleverly turned the tables by transforming the story's main problem - Andy growing up - into a virtue: here the growing protagonist is more concerned with college and only has nostalgia value for his toys, who feel neglected, thereby paving the way for some themes about transience, the end of childhood and even mortality. Director Unkrich and screenwriter Michael Arndt never leave room for empty walks since almost every sequence is creative and highly inventive, but surprisingly always simple and thus universal at the same time, whether they are crafting clever humor (the jokes revolving around Barbie and Ken; Lots shutting up Mrs. Potato Head by taking her "lips" away; instead of cute kids, aggressive ones show up in the day care centre, like a stampede, upon which Buzz keeps his smile - but shuts his glass helmet for protection), clever references (a toy of Totoro) or just plain clever action sequences (Woody saved from the fall thanks to his string). Lots, a deceivingly cute teddy-bear, voiced by Ned Beatty, is a brilliant bad guy, who is not only showed as a dictator, but also *why* he became one. A few complaints could be raised towards the rather standard finale, where Lots unfortunately just remained a typical black and white bad guy, as well as the fact that the whole second half just seems like a giant prison escape plot, yet luckily a clearly happy ending was avoided and replaced with a very melancholic and bittersweet one: rarely did a CGI animated film reach such an emotional level as this one, matching the intensity of classic animation.
Posted by Marin Mandir at 4:44 PM No comments: Links to this post
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
A simple and honest man in small town, Longfellow Deeds, is informed that he inherited 20 million $ from his deceased uncle. The attorney, Cedar, brings him to New York hoping he will trick the naive man into giving him the power of attorney authorization, which will enable him to handle his money, but Deeds turns out smarter than he thinks and refuses. A reporter, Babe, goes out with Deeds in order to write gossip articles about him, but she falls in love with him and admits her trechery, which leaves him heartbroken. Trying to help people during the Great Depression, Deeds gives a huge amount of his fortune to broke farmers, and wins in court when Cedar tries to accuse him of insanity to take the money away from him.
The movie that won Frank Capra his second Oscar as best director (the only win out of five nominations), "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" is an excellent example of the 'golden age' of Hollywood when good 'old school' narrative, straight forward style, calmness and wisdom were more important than flashy effects that just seize the attention, encompassing the director's often theme of an honest, innocent man coming in contact with rotten, corrupt people who run a system but tries to keep his humanity by showing them the right way, whereas the fabulous screenplay by Robert Riskin this time gave a more satirical touch in the form of a clear critique of society (everyone wants to exploit people with money) which would be used in numerous later Capra films, some even more pessimistic, like the very similar "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and "Meet John Doe".
Gary Cooper is great as the leading protagonist who at first seems naive, but actually shows to be more clever than the attorneys expected ("Lamb bites wolf!", says one when Deeds clearly sees through a fraud who wants a million $ from him) as is Jean Arthur in a very grateful role of a strong female character, whereas some of the hero's quotes say a lot about of some two-faced habits and human nature ("People here are funny. They work so hard at living they forget how to live."; "They created a lot of palaces here - but they forgot to create the noblemen to put in them.") and even a lesson to rich people how to use their fortune with a purpose ("From what I can see, no matter what system of government we have, there will always be leaders and always be followers. It's like the road out in front of my house. It's on a steep hill. Every day I watch the cars climbing up. Some go lickety-split up that hill on high, some have to shift into second, and some sputter and shake and slip back to the bottom again. Same cars, same gasoline, yet some make it and some don't. And I say the fellas who can make the hill on high should stop once in a while and help those who can't."). A classic with a reason.
Posted by Marin Mandir at 9:34 AM No comments: Links to this post
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Texas. Sally, her wheelchair bound brother Franklin, Pam, Kirk and Jerry travel through Texas in a van, the place where their grandfather once lived. They pick up a hitchhiker, a former butcher in a cattle slaughterhouse, but throw him out when he attacks Franklin with a razor. The five friends are low on fuel, so they stop at an isolated house. One by one, they are slaughtered by a butcher with a mask, 'Leatherface', until only Sally is left. She is suppose to be killed, too, by a meat obsessed grandfather, but manages to escape and flee in a car that stopped on the road.
Despite its cult reputation as one of the first slasher horror films that broke some taboo elements, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is garbage. Its suspense is based too much on cheap scares, banal sadistic violence and trash, failing to become one of those rare sophisticated horrors. It is pure gore, and little more, but that little more is actually the most interesting feature of it: namely, the most fascinating ingredient is the vegetarian subtext since the killer and his assistant are former butchers in a cattle slaughterhouse, implying how their routine of killing thousands of cows somehow spread into their normal life, i. e. they cannot imagine living any other way than killing, even humans. In one scene Sally is even observing sausages made presumably out of human meat, whereas during the (infamous - and overstretched!) dinner sequence she is begging the family who wants to eat her to spare her life, but they are entirely numb, parallelling the often ignored horror of an animal sensing its death in slaughterhouses, and the consumers entirely numb to their plight. Such a disruption of natural human order gave the film shock, even though its satirical and subversive potentials were not exploited enough. Despite limited budget, this independent film is surprisingly well crafted from a technical point-of-view, with two visually pleasant scenes some 31 minutes into the film, whereas a couple of scary scenes are at least slightly more imaginative than the rest, like the long night sequence where Sally is running from 'Leatherface' through the bushes, while he is using the chainsaw to remove branches in his way.
Posted by Marin Mandir at 1:08 PM No comments: Links to this post
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Here are photos of our CNC milled test. Still a work in progress!
Month: April 2016
3d Printed Napkin Rings are Here!
Parametric Screen
Weekly Post
My vessels are here!
Grasshopper for design studio…
Museum of Sound – Interior Design Studio
Louvres – curve attractor to manipulate the angle of the louvres and point attractor attractor to manipulate the opening rotations.
Resonating ceiling – Delauney triangulation and the edges that hold them are "pipe"-d. Simple but effective
Wall – Cull pattern!
Divide curve -> Orient (shape) -> Rotate (about the central axis)

subset: commoncrawl


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By Angela Noel
June 15, 2017
My father isn't a "guy's guy." He's not a hunter, sports-fanatic, beer-drinker, or back-slapper. But, he can grill things and fix other things. He can build decks, waterfalls, and walls. When my dad wanted to go price a boat or a washing machine, he let me tag along. He called me his "lucky charm" because we always seemed to find a good deal whenever we went shopping together. He told me he was 99.4% perfect. I believed him.
One of the most creative people I know, he invents games. He dreamed up a card game for us one family vacation in Hawaii when I was in the third-grade. We used decks of cards to create a path through the rented condo, even up and down the stairs. Math was involved. He'd draw a card and we'd advance whatever number of steps he showed on the card. I don't remember the rest of the rules or how to win. But I remember how fun it was, and how much we wanted to play again. Vacations always did bring out my dad's best ideas.
For example, he also devised a scheme to teach us how to manage money. On vacations to Seattle or New England, he'd allot my sister, Dawn, and I a certain amount of money for food each day. If we didn't spend it all, we got to keep it. This worked until he realized the two of us hoarded our money instead of buying food. He'd raised two savers.
But, he didn't reserve his inventiveness for family trips alone.
He used to give us "think-ups" at the dinner table. He'd think of a question and we would have to think up the answer. I loved the game. I looked forward to
dinner–even if I knew I'd have to choke down lima beans–because I wondered what my dad had up his sleeve.
He's retired now, but the creative schemes continue. We'll be traveling together soon on a family cruise to Alaska. Nine months ago, my dad devised the "Fun Facts About Alaska Game" (FFAA for short) intended to improve our knowledge and capitalize on the best part of vacations: the anticipation. The game required we pick prospector names and complete a series of challenges to earn "Prospector Bucks." Every night, while we eat multi-course meals in the cruise ship dining room, we'll bet our "grubstakes" on nightly quizzes. This game ups the ante on the think-ups of my youth. Fabulous prizes await the winners of FFAA–even one I hear that may be difficult to get through security at the airport. (Which makes me both curious and a little nervous.)
When my husband's family heard about the Alaska game, many of them said some version of, "Aha! Now we know where you get it!" If I had to guess, I'd say two things are immediately obvious about me: I'm insatiably curious and I'm always trying to figure out and experience the world in new ways.
I am my father's daughter.
And what a lucky girl I am.
Your turn: What do you love about your dad (stepdad, father-figure fellow)?


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Home >> Uk + Ireland >> England >> Lincolnshire >>
Primary tabs
- The parish was in the Grimsby sub-district of the Caistor Registration District.
- In an 1890 re-organisation, the Grimsby sub-district became its own Registration District.
- Check our Census Resource page for county-wide resources.
- The table below gives census piece numbers, where known:
|Piece No.
You can also perform a more selective search for churches in the Stallingborough area or see them printed on a map.
Church History
- The present Anglican parish church is dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul.
- The church was built in 1780 at the west end of the village. It replaced an earlier structure.
- The church seats 200.
- There is a photograph of Saints Peter and Paul church on the Wendy PARKINSON Church Photos web site.
- Paul GLAZZARD has a photograph of St Peter & St Paul Church on Geo-graph, taken in May, 2008.
- Here is a photo of Saints Peter and Paul Church, taken by Ron COLE (who retains the copyright):
Church Records
- The Anglican parish registers date from 1588 (another source gives 1562).
- The LFHS has published several indexes for the Haverstoe Deanery to make your search easier.
- Check our Church Records page for county-wide resources.
- The Primitive Methodists built a chapel here in 1871.
- The Wesleyan Methodists had chapel here by 1872. For more information on researching these chapels, see our non-conformist religions page.
Civil Registration
- The parish was in the Grimsby sub-district of the Caistor Registration District.
- In an 1890 re-organisation, the Grimsby sub-district became its own Registration District.
- Check our Civil Registration page for sources and background on Civil Registration which began in July, 1837.
Description and Travel
Stallingborough is a village and a parish on the south bank of the Humber River just above Grimsby and 159 miles north of London. Immingham parish lies to the north and Healing parish to the south. The parish covers just over 4,500 acres and includes the hamlet of Little London.
If you are planning a visit:
- Tour the Stallingborough.com website first.
- The web page author is unsure if passenger service is still available, but David WRIGHT has a photograph of Stallingborough Station on Geo-graph, taken in October, 2005.
- See our touring page for visitor services.
You can see pictures of Stallingborough which are provided by:
Ask for a calculation of the distance from Stallingborough to another place.
Click here for a list of nearby places.
Historical Geography
You can see the administrative areas in which Stallingborough has been placed at times in the past. Select one to see a link to a map of that particular area.
- The parish was prime grazing land for many centuries.
- In 1900, Stallingborough had a lighthouse and a Coast Guard station on the shore.
- The AYSCOUGH family were long seated here, but by 1840 only the ruin of the west wing of their mansion still remained. The name is also spelled as AYSCUGH, AYSCOUGE and ASKEW.
- See our Maps page for additional resources.
You can see maps centred on OS grid reference TA202116 (Lat/Lon: 53.587003, -0.185308), Stallingborough which are provided by:
- This place shown on an OpenStreetMap map.
- Google Streetview
- StreetMap (Current Ordnance Survey maps)
- OpenStreetMap
- Bing (was Multimap)
- OldMaps (Old Ordnance Survey maps.)
- Old Maps Online (Other old maps.)
- National Library of Scotland (Best site for old maps)
- Vision of Britain (Click "Historical units & statistics" for administrative areas.)
- English Jurisdictions in 1851 (Unfortunately the LDS have removed the facility to enable us to specify a starting location, you will need to search yourself on their map.)
- Magic (Geographic information) (Click + on map if it doesn't show)
- Elgin Road Works
- GeoHack (Links to on-line maps and location specific services.)
- All places within the same township/parish shown on an Openstreetmap map.
- Nearby townships/parishes shown on an Openstreetmap map.
- Nearby places shown on an Openstreetmap map.
Military History
- David WRIGHT has a photograph of a Commonwealth War Grave from World War I on Geo-graph, taken in October, 2005.
Politics and Government
- This place was an ancient parish in Lincoln county and became a modern Civil Parish when those were established.
- The parish was in the east division of the ancient Yarborough Wapentake in the Central Lindsey district in the parts of Lindsey.
- Kelly's 1900 Directory of Lincolnshire places the parish, perhaps erroneously, in the North Lindsey district.
- You can contact the Stallingborough Parish Council regarding civic or political issues, but they are NOT funded to assist you with family history searches.
- For today's district governance, visit the North East Lincolnshire District Council site.
Poor Houses, Poor Law etc.
- After the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act reforms, the parish became part of the Caistor Poor Law Union.
- In 1890, the parish was transfered to the newly established Grimsby Poor Law Union, which built a new Workhouse on 9th October 1894.
- Bastardy cases would be heard in the Grimsby petty session hearings.
Year Inhabitants 1801 274 1831 366 1851 516 1871 461 1881 483 1891 449 1911 469


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April 21, 2015
Department alum, Jason Reynolds, recently participated in the Creative Arts Teen Summit at the University of Arizona.
Reynolds is featured in a video-story shot at the Creative Arts Teen Summit by Mitch Riley, a Producer at the PBS/NPR Affiliate, Arizona Public Media in Tuscon. At the Summit, 300 teenagers from Southern Arizona high schools joined authors, including Reynolds, and illustrators for panel discussions and workshops on the "creative life." Riley noted that Reynolds plays a significant role in the video-story and is a powerful speaker and storyteller. He also noted that the "young audience was clearly impacted by his words."


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Tuesday, January 28, 2014
When Gun Laws Don't Work, the Left Thinks We Need More Gun Laws
If you think it'll be a month of Sundays before this country gets serious about gun violence, you're probably underestimating.
It's already been nearly three months of Mondays — 77, to be exact — and we're not making progress.
No progress, huh? The shooting took place in Maryland.
Maryland was already a state that heavily infringed on gun ownership. After the tragedy in Newtown, the Democrats in the state legislature passed several new bills which were called America's toughest new gun control laws. The bills banned the sale of 45 named, semi-automatic firearms which have sufficient cosmetic design features to meet the bill's arbitrary and historically inaccurate definition of 'assault weapon', banned the sale of box magazines with a capacity greater than ten rounds, required that handgun purchasers be fingerprinted and pass a training class in order to obtain a handgun license, (and they were already registering all handguns sold) and required much more invasive-to-privacy forms to be used to purchase firearms, which forms barred persons who had been involuntarily committed to a mental health institution from possessing firearms (which prohibition was already a federal law). Democrat Governor O'Malley, who was all smiles that day, bragged about the expected efficacy of these laws against mass shootings when he signed them last May. He said, inter alia,
"We've chosen to take action by advancing the strategies that work to save lives."
Perhaps not as efficacious as hoped. The new laws didn't work and no lives were saved.
We already have laws against mass shootings. They're called criminal statutes, specifically the murder and aggravated assault statutes. If the shooters are not going to obey those statutes, which can carry severe prison sentences, the little ones about how mean your gun can look and how many bullets can you fire before reloading (in a few seconds) are not going to do a thing to stop them. However the worthless laws will punish the law abiding shooting enthusiasts, which I guess is the real but unstated point of the new legislation.
Labels: Unconstitutional Gun Legislation That Does Not Work; Maryland
Let Me Fix That Headline for You
How about: Let's Do Away with Freedom?
Labels: Fixing Misleading Headlines
Monday, January 27, 2014
Thought of the Day
Alex Epstein
Labels: Alex Epstein quote
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Feminist Hero Wendy Davis
The left is rallying to her defense but missing the point. Some play the "men do it all the time" defense from Adam's Rib (still wrong to do) while others blame the criticism on other forms of sexism, such as right wing knuckle-draggers can't stand strong, independent women (yeah, we RWKD really hate us some Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Mia Love, Nikki Haley, Jan Brewer, Susana Martinez, Mary Fallin and Cathy McMorris Rogers, among others) . But let's look at the short bio Ms. Davis first put forward but has since erased.
Like any true Texan, Wendy Davis has taken on her share of tough fights.
Raised by a single mother with a sixth grade education, Wendy began working after school at age 14 to help support her mom and three siblings. By 19, she was on her way to becoming a single mother, working two jobs just to make ends meet.
Knowing that education was the only path to creating a better life for her young daughter, Wendy enrolled at Tarrant County Community College. After two years, she transferred to Texas Christian University. With the help of academic scholarships, student loans, and state and federal grants, Wendy became the first person in her family to earn a bachelor's degree, graduated first in her class, and went on to Harvard Law School.I won't bother with the little details wrong, but I will point out the major flaw in the narrative: Ms. Davis was not single at the crucial times, and in the end, not much of a mother. And don't start with if a man left his wife no one would bat an eye. A man would not trumpet his leaving his wife as an important biographical feature but would rightly think of it as a failure and a shame. Two prominent Republicans, Gingrich and McCain, received a ton of criticism for abandoning wives, and a lot of it came from fellow Republicans.
What's really bad about the unraveling of the single mother bio is Ms. Davis' reaction to the article that pointed out her lies. She lies again, first generally and the specifically. Her campaign lied too, saying that the reporter was doing his work at the direction of her opponent's campaign. Her campaign said they had proof of that. I'll skip over the common liberal whine of "they're attacking me with the truth" and say that the reporter who first showed the fibs and omissions had nothing to do with the campaign of her opposition, Attorney General Greg Abbott. I'll also skip over the pathetic attempt of Ms. Davis to compare her middle class married and supported "struggle" with the real struggle of Mr. Abbott, paralyzed by a falling tree as he jogged by 30 years ago. Not good on Ms. Davis' part.
I had seen an old picture of her showing a frizzy haired brunette, with not that attractive a face and a modest bosom. Now she's pretty hot and stacked. I was going to ask if plastic surgery to make oneself more attractive to the opposite sex was a modern feminist value and show the before and after photos. I've decided not to do this as it's not a very nice thing to do, it's not a very important issue in this story (although the irony of the successful physical makeover versus the failed makeover of the bio is kinda sweet) and I can't find that old photo on the web anymore.
(h/t John Hinderaker)
Labels: Wendy Davis; Fake Feminist Hero
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Thought of the Day
Jonah Goldberg, on Wendy Davis and a new German word, for me, Fremdschämen, embarrassment for another who should be embarrassed for him or herself but isn't. German words can be long, but they pack in a lot sometimes.
My new German word is Schämenfürschadenfreude, feeling guilty for your brimming over with malicious joy in another's suffering. It may not be a real German word, but it should be. I'm beginning to have that for my pleasure in seeing Ms. Davis revealed to be an anti-feminist fraud.
Labels: Jonah Goldberg quote
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Well Titled Piece
The authors don't like a proposed gas liquefaction plant planned for a private property in Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay. Americans plan to liquefy (cool) some of the overabundance of natural gas we have in America and send it to places far away where the citizens are now paying 3 to 5 times the price we pay for natural gas in America. We help out the other countries with less expensive gas and help out America with jobs finding, producing and selling the gas for a better price than the local price. Sounds win/win to me but I'm apparently too dim to see that it would be better all around if, as the author's propose, such a plan never happens. "...this gas needs to stay in the ground." Fat lot of good it does anyone when it's deep in the ground.
On the economic side, a study commissioned by the DOE last spring found that exporting U.S. gas would raise the fuel's price here at home. It's basic supply and demand. More buyers overseas will drive up our domestic price by as much as 27 percent, according to the DOE. And that increase will reduce incomes for virtually every sector of the U.S. economy, from agriculture to manufacturing to services to transportation.
Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Bill McKibben; Fairy Dust Energy
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Thought of the Day
Think about that.
Think about the twisted logic and outright malice behind that: a state, based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law, that was founded so Jews can flourish, as Jews, and seek shelter from the shadow of the worst racist experiment in history, that is condemned, and that condemnation is masked in the language of anti-racism.
It is nothing short of sickening.
But this is the face of the new anti-Semitism.
Stephen Harper, in Jerusalem yesterday
Labels: Stephen Harper quote
Monday, January 20, 2014
Drinking Deep From the Flavor Aid Cauldron
But first, consensus is to science what a bicycle is to a fish--not quite anathema but not a necessary or valid part of the whole.
OK. Kristof writes, approvingly, that global warming is like an asteroid heading for Earth, is a disruptor of "weather, food, land" and is related to the California drought. It's always alarming with these guys. It's not so, however, fortunately, and particularly with the California drought.
Here is the December 2012 Palmer Drought Severity Index for the United States.
Here it is for December 2013.
What a difference a year makes, huh? So the months long California Drought is alarming and related to Global Warming how? Looks to me like the permanent Southwestern Drought is over. The longest recent droughts in California began in 892 AD and 1209 AD and lasted 220 and 140 years respectively. Anthropogenic CO2 was effectively zero back then. My source for these inconvenient facts was the New York Times. Back to Kristof, king of the Chicken Little science dabblers.
For all the uncertainty, Nordhaus cites several areas of strong agreement among experts: Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere exceed those observed for at least the last 650,000 years; hurricanes will grow more intense; the Arctic will become ice free in summer; oceans will rise up to 23 inches by 2100 (more if there were major melting of ice sheets); and the global temperature will likely be 3.5 degrees to 7.5 degrees Fahrenheit higher in 2100 than in 1900.
I'm willing to concede that the atmospheric CO2 for the past 650 Millennia has been below 398 ppmv, although there are scientists (Salby at The Hockey Schtick, for example) who say the ice core figures greatly under-measures atmospheric CO2. But the rest are bunk.
If the gradient of temperature differences between the poles and the tropics is less (and the official undeniable theory of the alarmist is that global warming will be amplified at both poles), then cyclones should be smaller, less powerful and less frequent, which prediction has the added advantage of syncing with observed phenomena.
I need the alarmist to name a date for the year they believe that the Northern Ocean will become ice free in Summer. Otherwise, it is not a prediction but a myth. And the alarmists, who jumped on the 2007 melting bandwagon and predicted 2013 as the year, were stupidly, spectacularly wrong; the sea ice area in late September 2012 was about the size of India, but the sea ice in late September 2013 was the size of Greenland and Mexico combined. When is this sea ice supposed to melt all away, Mr. Kristof?
Thanks for the specifics on the ocean rise. First, the oceans always rise, on average, during an interglacial although the rate slows way down the longer the interglacial lasts. If the ocean levels start to fall we're no longer in an interglacial but in the new ice age. But something's wrong here--21 inches is 533.4 mm. There are nearly 86 years to 2100. So for the rate of yearly sea rise to get us to the predicted 21 inches, the seas would have to rise 6.20 mm per year. That's about twice what they are supposedly rising now according to other acolytes, who are, unfortunately, undercut by the IPCC here. And the old standards, tidal gauges, show a yearly rate on average for the last 140 years of 1.78 mm. It don't add up.
The prediction about temperature are not much better. Here is the alarmists' 2000 temperature predictions on a graph.
And because he and his ilk are so deluded is part of the reason most people think there is nothing alarming about the slight, beneficial change in the climate in the past century and a half.
Labels: Global Warming Hoax: Nicholas Kristof
Friday, January 17, 2014
Thought of the Day
Michael Chabon
Labels: Michael Chabon quote
I'm So Out of Shape...
Labels: Personal History: Out of Shape
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Thought of the Day
Wow, the longest heatwave since 2006? A whole seven years? That is so unusual. Will we see a spate of usual weather ever again? Just last year we had the blusteriest Thursday in late June since records of blustering began in 2004, and December 2011 saw the seventh fluffiest snowflake to fall on Croydon since the Pleistocene. Something is up.
Sean Thomas, making fun of the ever increasing nonsense from true believers in alarming global warming, this time from Corinne Le Quere at East Anglia U. aka Warmie Central.
Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Corinne Le Quere, Sean Thomas quote
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Disagreeable Old Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer
With things going poorly for the alarmist global warming true believers in the past few years, I would think that they would at least stop calling people with whom they disagree stupid at every turn. If things continue to go against them, they'll be wrong, duped, mistaken of course, but if things continue go south for them and they're still being disagreeable and calling the people who are right stupid, they'll be assholes as well as wrong. I've dialed my rhetoric way back down (I no longer call them Warmies) and I'm on the winning team. Just a thought, alarmists. Back to the Plait article.
Again, I won't go through the whole thing but just the key claim from Dr. Plait:
And nothing the deniers say about the polar vortex and frigid temps does anything to change the overwhelming evidence that the world is, on average, warming up, and we're the cause.Plait is complaining that a cold snap in Winter is too short a period of time to be evidence of anything about long term weather, the climate. You have to look at a longer period, a statement with which I completely agree. I can't let his other statement go unchallenged, however. The world, on average, is not warming up. Even the HadCRUt4 temperature data set, the latest from the Hadley Center at the Met Office and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK, shows that there has been no warming for 14 years, and in fact, from 2002, the average global temperature has started to fall.
The alarmist generally chose a starting point for their graphs in the early to late 18th C. Such a graph shows a .8 degrees C temperature rise in 131 years or .06 degrees C rise per decade. That rate's not very alarming.
Let's look a little wider than that. Let's go back 1,000 years.
This reconstruction was from the International Panel on Climate Change just over a decade ago. The Medieval Warm Period was clearly hotter than the latest turn of the century and the .6 degree C rise we experienced in the 20th C. Although 140 to 180 years is clearly long enough for the true believers, perhaps a thousand years is not long enough to discern the truth about climate change.
OK. Let's look back 10,000 years, pretty much the whole of our the interglacial, the Holocene.
This is a temperature reconstruction based on ice cores from Greenland, which shows known historical warm periods (the ones that have names) as well as the well known Little Ice Age, from whose frozen depths we began to climb about 180 years ago. But this reconstruction of temperatures shows most of the Holocene was much warmer than today or at least much warmer than 1908. Still not long enough?
OK. Let's look back 400,000 with ice cores from the opposite side of the globe from Greenland.
2 in the air then; in fact, we know that there was much less CO2 in the air then than there is now, yet it was still hotter. What made the prior interglacials hotter than now without any additional CO2 in the air? Natural cycles of heating and cooling? If so, how do we know that the natural cycles aren't still working and CO2 has no real heating effect above 300 ppmv in the atmosphere (.03% of the atmosphere)? The short answer is that we don't and neither do the alarmist global warming true believers. They claim they know. It is a false claim. The models they use are not evidence, nor are they reliable.
Maybe 400 millennia makes too short a period for Mr. Plait and his ilk. Let's go back 600 Million years.
2 concentration in the atmosphere in the past, most of the history of the World with multi-cellular plants and animals has had an average world temperature at the 22 degrees C range (We're around 14 degrees C now). So with temperatures here nearly 8 degrees C less than the normal temperature of 22 degrees C for the World for the overwhelming majority of the time, how is the .8 degrees C warming we've seen since 1880 something to cause us to wail and gnash our teeth and scream: "It's the end of the World?"
Obviously it's nothing to be alarmed at. And for a scientific consensus that relies on cherry-picking a starting point at the end of the Little Ice Age, in the19th Century, so that temperatures have risen from the lowest temperatures in the past 1000 years, it seems a little disingenuous for the alarmist to accuse the deniers of cherry-picking too short a period of data. The current average world temperature is lower the normal for the Holocene or for that matter much lower the average for last 600 Million years.
So even though the alarmist have time and time again predicted milder winters, if a very cold Winter in North America is not evidence that refutes the alarmist Global Warming theory, what evidence could ever refute it?
Labels: Global Warming Hoax: Phil Plait
Thought of the Day
Lisa Montgomery aka Kennedy (of MTV now at FNC)
Labels: Lisa Montgomery quote
Advice A Little Late
So my strategy is to put in LEDs where needed and hope they get better over time. They have gotten better than when first introduced. There is no reason to think they can't get better still. I have hoarded up on incandescent light bulbs. They can't be sold by manufacturers any more. So much for freedom in America.
I hope to get through the pointless ban on incandescents with my stash of bulbs and when they run out I hope and reasonably believe that LEDs will be a very acceptable substitute then.
This advice is a little late because last time I was in the grocery store, there were no more incandescent bulbs for sale. Maybe in your town it's different.
Sorry.Might have talked about this earlier.
LEDs here. LED light fixtures here and here. I like this George Kovacs model at Lamps Plus, but perhaps that's just my bumpkin-like taste.
Oh, and the reason we peasants can't have incandescent bulbs anymore is so the government can pretend to battle the non-existent problem of Global Warming. Just so you know.
Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Incandescent Light Bulbs
Friday, January 10, 2014
L-Shaped Recovery Graphs
This is the only reason the friendly-to-the-government unemployment rate (see below) has gone down. People who have left the work force don't count as unemployed.
Some of this increase is the Baby Boom retiring, but mostly it's laid off workers failing to find a job, giving up and leaving the labor force.
Labels: L-Shaped Recovery
Thursday, January 09, 2014
But, Darling, It's Cold Outside
The evidence of global warming in the fragile ecosystem of the Arctic is overwhelming, and frightening to anyone who reads about it, much less sees it first hand. As I enumerate in "Winter," the tree line behind which winter has always hidden moves farther and farther north each year, so that it seems likely there will be spruce trees on Arctic islands in the next twenty years. First Nations people are already being evacuated from old coastal settlements; the expectation now is that the Arctic will be seasonally free of ice not in fifty years, as people once feared, but in something more like ten years. Even polar bears have turned to cannibalism as their natural prey disappears. It's really happening. (And in some parts of the world, as we're often reminded, climate change means more extreme weather and disruption, not just simple warming. It might even make very cold days in New York City.)The evidence of global warming in the robust ecosystem of the Arctic is underwhelming. Very few of the long term weather stations show any warming. There were not a lot of long term weather stations to begin with, and many of them dropped out when the USSR went belly up in 1989 and very few have been replaced. Many of the remaining stations in the huge area of Siberia, for example, are located in towns most of which heat the whole town with steam from a central boiler station and the steam pipes run through the streets above ground. Weather stations near steam pipes show warming since the steam pipes were installed. Isolated stations do not.
The tree line is not "always" advancing. In some places it is retreating south and climate is only one of a number of things which affect the boundary of the tree line.
Some Yup'ik who built a town on a sand bar on the Chukchi Sea coast and others who built a town on the bank of the Ninglick River, which changed channels, have blamed things other than normal barrier island or changing river bank erosion. The relationship of the erosion to the slight temperature changes in the area has never been established.
No rational person expects the Arctic Ocean to be free of sea ice in the Summer in the next 10 years or ever for that matter. It's really, really cold there, even in the Summer. The predictions of an ice free Arctic Ocean by 2013 made by Al Gore, Jay Zwally, Mark Serreze and Wieslaw Maslowski certainly have not panned out. Probably Alan's 10 year prediction is good as gold though.
Large male polar bears have always killed and eaten smaller bears when food is scarce. That's why the Coke ads (and movie) with a father and cubs 'family' is such a joke. The preying on cubs and yearlings is not something that has recently turned up and it is not the result of less seals but of MORE polar bears. There are in places more bears than the intact ecosystem can support. The numbers went from just 5000 bears in the 50s to 25,000 to 35,000 bears now. Alarmists ought to abandon the polar bear as proof of global warming because the bears are not in danger and are in fact thriving in the Arctic. The increasing number of them tells the complete story.
There is no increase of any extreme weather on any of the graphs counting extreme weather events. In fact, on most such charts, such extreme weather is getting rarer. Alan needs to keep up with current events.
His easily refutable parade of horribles is really ironic juxtaposed to the start of his next paragraph.
There is a larger issue, though, which all sane liberals should recognize, and it is that, in the past, many a planet-devouring wolf has indeed been called out, only to never actually appear: the population bomb never went off; peak oil has not been reached—or, at least, the energy crisis seems to have abated.
He cuts the list of failed predictions of green alarmists very short. It is actually very long. Alan is sure, however, this one is different, this one is real; this wolf will show up this time and eat us.
Yeah, sure.
It's not a wolf, but rather a field mouse, a single field mouse measure of proper alarm.
Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Alan Gopnik
Jobs Created or Saved Metric
Recently there was the 50 year anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty (which has gone about as well as the war on drugs). We on the right think that it has been a total waste of money, some $15 Trillion over the five decades at least, while others say it's $20 Trillion; yet the percentage of Americans in poverty is about the same, 15% to 16%, as it was when the 'war' started. That's not a successful war by any sane measurement.
Not to be deterred, Nicholas No Middle Initial Kristof of the NYT is sure that the $15 to $20 Trillion has achieved some progress and he touts that 'progress' here.
I won't go over the whole article but I will note and comment on his main metric for success. He writes:
The most accurate measures, using Census Bureau figures that take account of benefits, suggest that poverty rates have fallen by more than one-third since 1968. There's a consensus that without the war on poverty, other forces (such as mass incarceration, a rise in single mothers and the decline in trade unions) would have lifted poverty much higher.
This is either magical thinking or just plain lies. He does not link to the Census Bureau figures but here is what they say. The poverty rate in 2012 was 15%. The poverty rate in 1968 was 12.69%. Math might not be my strongest scholarly ability but that sure doesn't look like a 1/3 decline to me. It looks more like an 18.2% increase.
He then writes:
A Columbia University study suggests that without government benefits, the poverty rate would have soared to 31 percent in 2012.
Notice that there is no link, again, and the weasel word "suggests." This measurement, however, is just like 'jobs created or saved' metric. There is no way to know what people would have done without the government benefits.
Based just on the rates of poverty from the census bureau, I think the money spent on the war on poverty was wasted and if we hadn't wasted it, we could have avoided going into $17 Trillion debt. That debt is a time bomb for the American government when interest rates rise and paying the interest on the debt (debt service) eats up all the income tax revenue. That's trouble, my friends. Right here in River City.
Labels: Imaginary Measurements: Poverty Prevented
Sunday, January 05, 2014
Not Much of a Study
Let's get back to the coverage. Big headline--Billion Dollar Climate Denial Network Exposed.
Money quote from a Guardian article linked above:
Conservative groups may have spent up to $1bn a year on the effort to deny science and oppose action on climate change, according to the first extensive study into the anatomy of the anti-climate effort.But the reporter, Suzanne Goldenberg, contradict this claim in a later paragraph. As you can see from quotes below there seems to have been some "corrections" since the article was first published.
I'll quote the entire abstract of this "first extensive study."
This paper conducts an analysis of the financial resource mobilization of the organizations that make up the climate change counter-movement (CCCM) in the United States. Utilizing IRS data, total annual income is compiled for a sample of CCCM organizations (including advocacy organizations, think tanks, and trade associations). These data are coupled with IRS data on philanthropic foundation funding of these CCCM organizations contained in the Foundation Center's data base. This results in a data sample that contains financial information for the time period 2003 to 2010 on the annual income of 91 CCCM organizations funded by 140 different foundations. An examination of these data shows that these 91 CCCM organizations have an annual income of just overI don't know why the font changes and there is no spacing when actual money is mentioned. Is this a last minute correction?
900million,withanannualaverageof64 million in identifiable foundation support. The overwhelming majority of the philanthropic support comes from conservative foundations. Additionally, there is evidence of a trend toward concealing the sources of CCCM funding through the use of donor directed philanthropies.
So first, $900 million is not a billion dollars. Close enough for lefty propaganda, I guess. Second, only $64 million each year, on average, is identifiable foundation support. That's a lot less than a billion dollars. Also Dr. Brulle is counting the total income of the 91 organizations he doesn't like, not the dollar amount the organizations put solely into investigating and writing about global warming. Many of the foundations and think tanks he talks about (like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Heritage Foundation) cover a wide range of topics. Here is a refutation from Forbes which is much more interesting than my small effort here.
Money quotes from Forbes reporter James Taylor (not that one):
As an initial matter, despite what Suzanne Goldenberg and the UK Guardian claim, it is palpably untrue that "Conservative groups have spent $1 bn a year on the effort to deny science and oppose action on climate change." Without even addressing the mathematical fact that $900 million is $100 million short of the $1 billion claimed by Goldenberg, Brulle's paper merely tabulates the total money raised by the 91 conservative think tanks for their total operations regarding all issues they address and does not break down how much of each think tank's resources are devoted to issues such as economic policy, health care policy, foreign policy, climate policy, etc. Goldenberg tells the lie that all money raised by all conservative and libertarian think tanks is devoted to global warming skepticism.[...]
Between AEI and Heritage – representing fully 30 percent of the money raised by the 91 conservative think tanks – the global warming issue comprises substantially less than 10 percent of their cumulative time, money and efforts. Even if we generously assign to the global warming issue a full 10 percent of the money raised by the 91 foremost conservative think tanks, this means the 91 conservative think tanks are devoting a mere $90 million per year – rather than the asserted $900 million per year (or Goldenberg's exaggerated $1 billion per year) – to the global warming debate.
This brings us to another whopper told by Brulle, Goldenberg and their media allies – the assertion that all the think tanks identified in Brulle's paper actively fight against global warming activism. To the contrary, two of the three top-funded groups (AEI and the Hoover Institution) support a carbon tax. Other groups identified in Brulle's paper have similarly expressed support for a carbon tax and global warming activism. At least 25 percent of the funding that Brulle claims goes to skeptical think tanks actually goes to think tanks supporting global warming restrictions.[...]
Two environmental activist groups – Greenpeace and The Nature Conservancy – raise more than $1 billion cumulatively per year. These two groups raise more money than the combined funding of the 91 conservative think tanks identified in Brulle's paper. Just as importantly, these two groups raise money solely for environmental causes and frequently advocate for global warming restrictions. Their $1 billion is not diluted addressing issues such as economic policy, health care policy, foreign policy, etc.
The long and short of it is think tanks and activist groups supporting global warming restrictions raise and spend far more money than think tanks and activist groups opposing global warming restrictions. Global warming activists may think they are scoring short-term political points by lying and misleading the public about such funding, but their lies will certainly come back to haunt them. They always do.
And the support of Greenpeace and the dozens of other pro-alarmist AGW groups is nothing compared with the governmental support for alarmist AGW research, which is, properly measured around the world, in the billions of dollars. In reality, the divide between pro and con fiscal support is just the opposite of the Brulle "study."
UPDATE: Diomedes pointed out that I added a c to Climactic (having to do with climaxes) when I should have left it out to make the word Climatic (having to do with climate) which is indeed the spelling Climatic Change magazine, or whatever it is, uses. All fixed now. Thanks, D.
Labels: Global Warming Hoax: Lying About the Size of Anti-Alarmism Fiscal Support
Friday, January 03, 2014
Chris Hayes--Climate Genius
So super genius of the barely watched MSNBC show All In, Chris Hayes, pens here a defense of the recently rescued. I am applying the word genius to Mr. Hayes in a non-serious way, but I would never call him stupid. He has a BA in philosophy from Brown, for Pete's sake. He, unfortunately, does not return the respect I give him and titles his minor treatise: The Right's Willful Stupidity on Climate Change. I doubt Mr. Hayes knows anything about global warming and climatology and the incredibly complexity of and the myriad, major questions associated with the theory of alarmist AGW, but he's not stupid. Unfortunately, he provides not a single scientific fact to support his name calling. Let's take a look.
The right wing had a field day, pointing and laughing at the global warming believers who, just to be clear, are only a group of scientists risking their lives for no monetary gain and little glory in order to help save the planet.
What scientists? Who there on the boat was a leading climatologist or paleoclimatologist? And how are they helping to save the planet by sailing to the Antarctic when hardly any sea ice at the coast had melted? I am an auto-didact in climatology and paleoclimatology since 1978. I believe the Earth has warmed slightly in the past 140 years in part because of CO2, and the man made CO2 added by burning fossil fuel has added a tiny amount to the slight warming. I deny (and I can spend 45 minutes of a Powerpoint slide show on the subject), categorically, that there is anything alarming about the recent warming. I am supported by many of the World's top scientists in this belief, not the least of whom is Richard Lindzen at MIT who said basically what I believe here. Back to Hayes' attempt at argument.
Of course, no one ever said that climate change meant it wouldn't ever be cold.
Sure they did.
Hanson, et al., recently predicted a 30 degree C rise of temperature at the poles and a 20 degree C rise everywhere else, making the World uninhabitable for humans.
Senior research scientist at the CRU at East Anglia U., David Viner is infamous for saying in 2000 "Children just aren't going to know what snow is."
I won't bore you with the parade of worthless predictions based not on evidence but on hopelessly inadequate climate models. Let's jump back to super genius Mr. Hayes.
And yet, here we are. Because this willful stupidity is backed by a lot of money. A new report found that conservative groups spend up to $1 billion a year to fight action on climate change. $1 billion to cultivate a group of people who delight in being on the wrong side of history.
Wrong side of history? I'll post on the "new report" and its self contradictions and general worthlessness shortly. Back to boy genius Hayes
In 2006, 59% of Republicans believed that there is solid evidence the Earth is warming. A decade later, that number has dropped to just 50%. There is an entire industry that exists to feed its viewers and readers with contempt and ridicule for not only the basic science of climate change, but even for the people who toil in obscurity, risking their lives to avert genuine misery and disaster for millions of people, and that industry controls one of our two parties.
Part of the reason fewer people believe that there has been actual warming is because there hasn't been any actual warming since 1998. Others are learning about the many reasons to doubt the accuracy of the World's average temperature.
I've gone through the reasons climate change is anything but alarming ad nauseum; so let's end this with comments on the tone of the Hayes essay. It is entirely argumentum ad hominem. He does not seek to convince anyone of the rightness of his beliefs with facts in support. He does not credit the counterarguments of the alarmism deniers. He simply calls anyone who does not toe the "settled" line stupid and says they choose to be stupid. This is not argument at all but mere name calling. Genius Hayes, like many on the left, just can't help himself.
Labels: Global Warming Hoax: Chris Hayes ad hominem
Wednesday, January 01, 2014
Thought of the First Day of the New Year
Doug Ross
Labels: Doug Ross quote; NYT Lies


text:
Hi friends,
I have been amassing a collection of Nikon film cameras and lenses for the last 2 years. The cameras are mostly SLRs that I found to be good value and I hope to be able to flip them for a small profit. The lenses, however, are for my own use. So far I have distilled down to the following primes: 24mm F2.8, 50mm F1.4/1.8/2, 85mm F2, 135mm F2.8, 200mm F4, and 300mm F4.5. I've shot extensively with the 50mm F1.4 and 1.8, but typically don't do daily carry with the other lenses. I think I would really benefit from giving myself some special assignments where I test each lens and put them to use. Who knows, maybe I will learn something!
Let's see where this takes me. I will be spending some time shooting with each lens and sharing with you the results as well as what I learn. I will call these assignments "Point of View". Stay tuned.


text:
The wait is finally over. There is a brand new Firefly vaporizer on the market and it is actually 33% smaller than the original one. This Firefly 2 vaporizer uses convection technology is great if you want to vape with dry material and it is also suitable for use with concentrates as well so you know that you won't have any issues at all there. It comes with a very efficient battery model and it even has a fast level of charging ability as well. It is one of the most advanced vaporizers on the market and it has a very sophisticated software as well.
The Firefly features the most advanced vaporization technology available. The Firefly 2's dynamic convection heating technology utilizes sophisticated software that allows you to choose between a variety of heating profiles ranging from 340 °F to 420 °F for dry material and up to 500 °F for concentrates. The Firefly 2 activates as soon as you pick it up, using touch sensor technology and heats to 400 °F after only 3 seconds! Draw for a short time for light vapor, or take longer draws if you prefer a richer vapor. Your Firefly 2 also has it's own APP to help you easily choose from heating profiles. You are in complete control.
Firefly 2 comes pre-set at a default heat setting of medium high. For experienced users who wish to tailor their experience further, you'll need a tablet or smartphone (iOS or Android) to use our free Firefly 2 companion app. This will allow you to select from six preset temperatures (340, 360, 380, 400, 420° F, and concentrates). For more information, visit the iTunes App Store or the Google Play Store.


text:
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text:
I watch a lot of technical blogs to get different perspectives on interesting news and for the occasional gems I find there. I don't have time, however, to read or even scan them all every day and sometimes won't browse through some of them for weeks. They're just handy to have around.
The downside is that they clog up my newsreader and slow things down while waiting for refreshes. I don't want to unsubscribe and lose them, so what do I do?
Enter TechWire, a free app that collects many of the most popular technical blogs in one place!