"The moderate and independent voters who will decide the election aren’t paying attention yet, but they will. As the election nears and people start listening to Trump, Biden will sound better and better."
Ojala que, amigo. Ojala que. Because right now, Trump is leading in the polls by about 1.5% among likely voters (see page 6). And that's kind of scary because anyone who's paying a bit of attention or has a memory that includes J6 can see who and what Donald Trump really is, even if a handful of judges, politicians, and pundits publicly pretend not to.
That excerpt from "The Great War" is pretty moving to read just as poetry. I enjoyed reading the Musgrave excerpts in the OP too. It turns out to be possible that both Swift and Musgrave are good songwriters who can explore complex, ambiguous emotional territory.
It's not about making a difference or effecting a change. It's about signalling their moral purity. Some of them are too morally pure to vote at all, which is just fine by me. It's the ones who are so clever they think voting for Trump will somehow advance a left-wing agenda that are really bothersome.
Alsotoo, there are actual anarchists out there in lefty-social-media-world, and their thinking about how to achieve their goals is as inchoate as the polities they want to create. Sometimes they're interesting, though, though often slippery interlocutors.
Still working on Starfield. Finally completed the main quest and was deeply pleased with the reward for doing so. It felt like a much more beneficent, explicated end to a well-known early science fiction movie. Am now on NG+ and recalling how tedious it was to build up a treasury gathing and re-selling trash guns back in the first go-round. But that's a Bethesda game for you.
(I have to note that there is no supply-and-demand engine to the prices, which again is Bethesda for you -- in Skyrim, the total population is 2,201 NPCs, and I think the last time I played through that I sold something like ten times that many swords, maces, bows, and especially daggers captured off of bandits and thugs, and the prices remained as constant as though Nixon's wage and price controls were in place. So it's no surprise that the price of the Grendel in Starfield doesn't drop despite the fact that I'm taking out enough pirates, spacers, and mercs that the Census would notice my activities.)
Here I thought this piece was going to be about horseshoe leftists -- the ones so morally pure they see no difference between Biden and Trump (these days on the issue of "genocide") and intend to vote for Trump so that the Democrats respond to their incentives and nominate someone who is actually lefty enough for them.
Hey, Marco Rubio recovered from his SOTU response not being well-delivered due to insufficient pre-speech hydration... [Presses earpiece to hear better] Oh. Well, anyway, let's get an update on today's sports scores!
I got to see about 60% totality of the 2017 eclipse (I was still living in Southern California at the time). Eerie to experience, but one that I felt I understood and didn't experience, even as a light-hearted matter, the way an uneducated and superstitious pre-Copernican pagan would have. I could understand why such an event would be momentous to such a person, and I was moved by the grandness of the celestial event. But perhaps because of other things in my life, I didn't find it transformative, just novel. What was most interesting was seeing the shadows of things like leaves on the trees occluded from their usual shapes (as @fillyjonk describes above), and noticing the street lights activating.
I have failed to plan to attend this eclipse and when I fight thought about it about a month ago quickly found that my failure to plan has basically prevented me from traveling to see totality at all. So while I would certainly enjoy seeing it, I suspect the richness of my life's experiences will not really notice the absence of having been in the totality of a total eclipse of the sun.
Maybe I'll return to Iceland in 2026 and hope for clear skies. But it's too early to book that one.
"Reign" is a verb, meaning to rule over or to govern, as would a king or an emperor.
"Rein," when used as a verb, means to control or restrain, as in using the reins of a set of tackle on a horse.
Trump is not daring America to "reign him in," because he does not want to be ruled by America. He wants to RULE America; he wants to REIGN OVER America. Trump is daring us to REIN him in, to put some kind of a restraint on the outrageous, awful, destructive, terrible, very bad things that he keeps on doing.
I've seen this mistake in many posts over many months now.
Sort of. Unanimous in the result, which is good. But it's 5-4 on the "Only Congress can pronounce" part.
Note that per the per curiam majority, a state official can pronounce disqualification for an office created by that state. If Trump wants to run for a seat on Colorado's Board of Education, he's screwed. But he can run for President.
Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson -- and separately, Barrett -- all said that "We don't need to proclaim that only Congress can do what Colorado's Secretary of State tried to do. It's enough to say that Colorado's Secretary of State lacks the power to do this on her own, and that's all we should be saying." They'd leave for another day the question of whether some other figure capable of issuing a national judgment -- say, a court entering a criminal judgment of insurrection or something similar to it -- could also pronounce disqualification.
I saw a sneak preview too, possibly on or around the same time you did. This is a much more thorough vetting than I gave it in a note here, so let me underline agreement with your feelings about Timothée Chalamet occupying the role of Paul Atredies, gently diverge from your assessment of Rebecca Ferguson, and throw out an open-ended question I don't have a firm response to myself yet:
Are the great shots in Dune Part 2 actually earned? We earn the T-Rex roaring at the end of Jurassic Park, we earn the use of the James Bond theme at the end of Casino Royale, we earn the contemptuous "Get away from her, you bitch!" at the end of Aliens. Because the protagonists, and the audience along with them, go through conflicts before these signature moments get on screen, and because those memorable moments are related to the delivery of these deeply satisfying cinematic moments, they pack a great emotional punch. A criticism I have of the Marvel superhero movies is that they deliver these good-looking moments but a whole lot of them don't feel earned that way.
I intend to see the move again with some other friends who didn't make it to the sneak preview, so I may re-evaluate after next weekend. For now, I"ll let other fans go enjoy the movie and maybe sound off on my question here after they do.
Is there a book somewhere that compiles the profound weirdnesses, scandals, random chaos, and all-around self-parody that was the Trump Administration? If I wrote it, I'd call it "208 Infrastructure Weeks" but man I don't have the patience for something like that.
Ideally the party's leader has a secure seat, strong fundraising abilities, and a good eye for political and parliamentary strategy. Not sure about the inside baseball stuff, but someone like John Thune seems ideal: that seat is his as long as he wants it, he has good petrochemical industry contacts for $$$ to spread around, and has been in the Senate long enough and quietly enough to have figured out its inner workings.
Some people are like that, yes. I'm not a parent to know for sure.
But I do think the OP makes a powerful point that it's not doing your children a service to demonstrate that marriage is about unhappily fulfilling obligations. If you show your kids that thriving and joy are things that happen outside of the family, that's going to teach them that they ought not want to form families and have children of their own in the future.
So I don't know if they're going to make a Dune Part 3 but if they want to they certainly could. And if you didn't like what they did with the Harkonnen in Part 1 I bet you're going to find the deeper exploration of Harkonnen culture even more annoying.
Having just seen a screening of the original Jurassic Park (with live symphony play-along!) the night before, the idea of exposition was really on my mind: better if a moviemaker can show-not-tell, but sometimes you have to tell-not-show because a plot point is super subtle or super complicated.
Dune Part 1 MOSTLY showed, rather than told, but I'm not sure that Dune Part 2 had quite so easy a time of it. You may recall that the book gets pretty mystical. It's super hard to show, not tell, a mystical experience.
There are more significant liberties taken with the story than re-gendering Liet Kynes. I don't want to spoil what those are, and I think that those changes from the book probably were aimed at telling a tighter, slightly easier-to-show overall story of the Saga of Paul Muad'dib Atredies.
But one of those decisions results in a LOT of telling-not-showing, and another of these deviances left me unsatisfied with the climactic confrontation between Paul and the Emperor (I know I'm not spoiling anything by saying that confrontation happens; you've allr read the book).
It's a feast for the eyes, especially both the action-packed battles and worm riding scenes (Paul's first worm ride is super scary looking, just like you want it to be) and some really beautiful shots of the sandy desert. Some (but not all) of those shots even have enough emotional build-up to them that they feel like payoffs rather than stills.
You will have to decide for yourself if Zendaya and Chamelet have the kind of chemistry necessary to tell Chani and Paul's love story. They certainly try and are certainly beautiful. I am still uncertain. I am certain, though, that despite his notoriety someone other than Christopher Walken should have been cast as the Emperor. There isn't enough dialogue for him to step out of the shadow of his personal persona, so he took me out of the immersion of the experience of watching Paul Atredies' story in a way that Timothee Chalamet was able to draw me into it.
I'm left afterwards feeling a bit hollow. Which may be okay, it may be a part of the story's point.
I came here to drop a spot review from the sneak preview of Dune 2 that I saw last night. After reading the news about Aaron Bushnell I no longer feel like doing that.
Besides, you're going to go see it anyway no matter what I say.
I would think of manned missions to space the way I think of things like monuments: these are symbols of national greatness, achievements, things we do as a demonstration to ourselves of our abilities.
It's probably not the case that a future mission to, say, Mars, will result in the catalyst of technological innovation that the Apollo Program did. (Although it might!) But we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too. Also if we don't get a move on, the Russkies will get there first and then we'll NEVER hear the end of it.
We can all come up with our own lists of what makes a good leader. While everyone's list will of course be somewhat different than anyone else's, I suspect that if one undertakes the exercise with sobriety and good faith, whatever winds up on that person's list will be traits that Donald Trump mostly lacks. The man is nearly the opposite of a good leader.
To be fair, I'm including in my thought about being a "good judge of other people" an assessment of their character, but also their abilities and motivations. To me, this is the core skill of an executive, perhaps even more important than what GWHB called "the vision thing." That's because even if a leader lacks a direction towards which to motivate her people, at least she can be a good caretaker of the entity she's leading until a vision comes along from elsewhere. But she always is going to need to work through other people, so she's always going to need to know what they're made of.
On “Hail to the Champs”
"The moderate and independent voters who will decide the election aren’t paying attention yet, but they will. As the election nears and people start listening to Trump, Biden will sound better and better."
Ojala que, amigo. Ojala que. Because right now, Trump is leading in the polls by about 1.5% among likely voters (see page 6). And that's kind of scary because anyone who's paying a bit of attention or has a memory that includes J6 can see who and what Donald Trump really is, even if a handful of judges, politicians, and pundits publicly pretend not to.
On “Kacey Musgraves Does What Taylor Swift Hasn’t: Grow Up”
That excerpt from "The Great War" is pretty moving to read just as poetry. I enjoyed reading the Musgrave excerpts in the OP too. It turns out to be possible that both Swift and Musgrave are good songwriters who can explore complex, ambiguous emotional territory.
On “The New Right-Wing Leftists”
It's not about making a difference or effecting a change. It's about signalling their moral purity. Some of them are too morally pure to vote at all, which is just fine by me. It's the ones who are so clever they think voting for Trump will somehow advance a left-wing agenda that are really bothersome.
Alsotoo, there are actual anarchists out there in lefty-social-media-world, and their thinking about how to achieve their goals is as inchoate as the polities they want to create. Sometimes they're interesting, though, though often slippery interlocutors.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: More Helldiving (now with Mechs!)”
Still working on Starfield. Finally completed the main quest and was deeply pleased with the reward for doing so. It felt like a much more beneficent, explicated end to a well-known early science fiction movie. Am now on NG+ and recalling how tedious it was to build up a treasury gathing and re-selling trash guns back in the first go-round. But that's a Bethesda game for you.
(I have to note that there is no supply-and-demand engine to the prices, which again is Bethesda for you -- in Skyrim, the total population is 2,201 NPCs, and I think the last time I played through that I sold something like ten times that many swords, maces, bows, and especially daggers captured off of bandits and thugs, and the prices remained as constant as though Nixon's wage and price controls were in place. So it's no surprise that the price of the Grendel in Starfield doesn't drop despite the fact that I'm taking out enough pirates, spacers, and mercs that the Census would notice my activities.)
On “The New Right-Wing Leftists”
Here I thought this piece was going to be about horseshoe leftists -- the ones so morally pure they see no difference between Biden and Trump (these days on the issue of "genocide") and intend to vote for Trump so that the Democrats respond to their incentives and nominate someone who is actually lefty enough for them.
I call these people "idiots," but YMMV.
On “State of the Union Open Thread”
Hey, Marco Rubio recovered from his SOTU response not being well-delivered due to insufficient pre-speech hydration... [Presses earpiece to hear better] Oh. Well, anyway, let's get an update on today's sports scores!
On “Weekend Plans Post: Prep (Maybe) For The Eclipse”
I got to see about 60% totality of the 2017 eclipse (I was still living in Southern California at the time). Eerie to experience, but one that I felt I understood and didn't experience, even as a light-hearted matter, the way an uneducated and superstitious pre-Copernican pagan would have. I could understand why such an event would be momentous to such a person, and I was moved by the grandness of the celestial event. But perhaps because of other things in my life, I didn't find it transformative, just novel. What was most interesting was seeing the shadows of things like leaves on the trees occluded from their usual shapes (as @fillyjonk describes above), and noticing the street lights activating.
I have failed to plan to attend this eclipse and when I fight thought about it about a month ago quickly found that my failure to plan has basically prevented me from traveling to see totality at all. So while I would certainly enjoy seeing it, I suspect the richness of my life's experiences will not really notice the absence of having been in the totality of a total eclipse of the sun.
Maybe I'll return to Iceland in 2026 and hope for clear skies. But it's too early to book that one.
On “I Blame Gerald Ford”
Do not EVEN get me started on affect/effect.
"
All right. I've had it.
I cannot stand it any more.
The phrase is "REIN him in," not "REIGN" him in.
"Reign" is a verb, meaning to rule over or to govern, as would a king or an emperor.
"Rein," when used as a verb, means to control or restrain, as in using the reins of a set of tackle on a horse.
Trump is not daring America to "reign him in," because he does not want to be ruled by America. He wants to RULE America; he wants to REIGN OVER America. Trump is daring us to REIN him in, to put some kind of a restraint on the outrageous, awful, destructive, terrible, very bad things that he keeps on doing.
I've seen this mistake in many posts over many months now.
REIN.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/4/2024”
Sort of. Unanimous in the result, which is good. But it's 5-4 on the "Only Congress can pronounce" part.
Note that per the per curiam majority, a state official can pronounce disqualification for an office created by that state. If Trump wants to run for a seat on Colorado's Board of Education, he's screwed. But he can run for President.
Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson -- and separately, Barrett -- all said that "We don't need to proclaim that only Congress can do what Colorado's Secretary of State tried to do. It's enough to say that Colorado's Secretary of State lacks the power to do this on her own, and that's all we should be saying." They'd leave for another day the question of whether some other figure capable of issuing a national judgment -- say, a court entering a criminal judgment of insurrection or something similar to it -- could also pronounce disqualification.
A reporter has found metadata in the released opinion suggesting that the Sotomayor concurrence was once at least a partial dissent.
On ““Dune: Part Two” Movie Review”
I saw a sneak preview too, possibly on or around the same time you did. This is a much more thorough vetting than I gave it in a note here, so let me underline agreement with your feelings about Timothée Chalamet occupying the role of Paul Atredies, gently diverge from your assessment of Rebecca Ferguson, and throw out an open-ended question I don't have a firm response to myself yet:
Are the great shots in Dune Part 2 actually earned? We earn the T-Rex roaring at the end of Jurassic Park, we earn the use of the James Bond theme at the end of Casino Royale, we earn the contemptuous "Get away from her, you bitch!" at the end of Aliens. Because the protagonists, and the audience along with them, go through conflicts before these signature moments get on screen, and because those memorable moments are related to the delivery of these deeply satisfying cinematic moments, they pack a great emotional punch. A criticism I have of the Marvel superhero movies is that they deliver these good-looking moments but a whole lot of them don't feel earned that way.
I intend to see the move again with some other friends who didn't make it to the sneak preview, so I may re-evaluate after next weekend. For now, I"ll let other fans go enjoy the movie and maybe sound off on my question here after they do.
On “Presidential Standards and Fitness”
It may not always have been the mark the writers intended, but yes, professional actors do this.
"
Is there a book somewhere that compiles the profound weirdnesses, scandals, random chaos, and all-around self-parody that was the Trump Administration? If I wrote it, I'd call it "208 Infrastructure Weeks" but man I don't have the patience for something like that.
On “Mitch McConnell To Step Down As Leader, Retire After Current Term”
Ideally the party's leader has a secure seat, strong fundraising abilities, and a good eye for political and parliamentary strategy. Not sure about the inside baseball stuff, but someone like John Thune seems ideal: that seat is his as long as he wants it, he has good petrochemical industry contacts for $$$ to spread around, and has been in the Senate long enough and quietly enough to have figured out its inner workings.
On “On Parenting and Divorce”
Some people are like that, yes. I'm not a parent to know for sure.
But I do think the OP makes a powerful point that it's not doing your children a service to demonstrate that marriage is about unhappily fulfilling obligations. If you show your kids that thriving and joy are things that happen outside of the family, that's going to teach them that they ought not want to form families and have children of their own in the future.
This seems sub-optimal.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/26/2024”
The picture of Berlatsky makes him look like a slightly older Timothee Chalamet. Kind of freaky.
"
So I don't know if they're going to make a Dune Part 3 but if they want to they certainly could. And if you didn't like what they did with the Harkonnen in Part 1 I bet you're going to find the deeper exploration of Harkonnen culture even more annoying.
Having just seen a screening of the original Jurassic Park (with live symphony play-along!) the night before, the idea of exposition was really on my mind: better if a moviemaker can show-not-tell, but sometimes you have to tell-not-show because a plot point is super subtle or super complicated.
Dune Part 1 MOSTLY showed, rather than told, but I'm not sure that Dune Part 2 had quite so easy a time of it. You may recall that the book gets pretty mystical. It's super hard to show, not tell, a mystical experience.
There are more significant liberties taken with the story than re-gendering Liet Kynes. I don't want to spoil what those are, and I think that those changes from the book probably were aimed at telling a tighter, slightly easier-to-show overall story of the Saga of Paul Muad'dib Atredies.
But one of those decisions results in a LOT of telling-not-showing, and another of these deviances left me unsatisfied with the climactic confrontation between Paul and the Emperor (I know I'm not spoiling anything by saying that confrontation happens; you've allr read the book).
It's a feast for the eyes, especially both the action-packed battles and worm riding scenes (Paul's first worm ride is super scary looking, just like you want it to be) and some really beautiful shots of the sandy desert. Some (but not all) of those shots even have enough emotional build-up to them that they feel like payoffs rather than stills.
You will have to decide for yourself if Zendaya and Chamelet have the kind of chemistry necessary to tell Chani and Paul's love story. They certainly try and are certainly beautiful. I am still uncertain. I am certain, though, that despite his notoriety someone other than Christopher Walken should have been cast as the Emperor. There isn't enough dialogue for him to step out of the shadow of his personal persona, so he took me out of the immersion of the experience of watching Paul Atredies' story in a way that Timothee Chalamet was able to draw me into it.
I'm left afterwards feeling a bit hollow. Which may be okay, it may be a part of the story's point.
"
I came here to drop a spot review from the sneak preview of Dune 2 that I saw last night. After reading the news about Aaron Bushnell I no longer feel like doing that.
Besides, you're going to go see it anyway no matter what I say.
"
Well that's hardly the point, now, is it?
"
Good Gods in Asgard Above that's horrible and gruesome and it was totally unnecessary, even if we credit his moral argument about the Hamas War.
On “Throughput: Oydsseus Edition”
LOL yeah I'm pretty sure we'd want our astronaut back alive as opposed to with some alternative health status outcome.
On “On Parenting and Divorce”
I feel your pain. Oh man, do I feel your pain.
There is happiness again. For me, so far, it's a bit different than the happiness that I used to enjoy. But there is happiness again.
On “Throughput: Oydsseus Edition”
I would think of manned missions to space the way I think of things like monuments: these are symbols of national greatness, achievements, things we do as a demonstration to ourselves of our abilities.
It's probably not the case that a future mission to, say, Mars, will result in the catalyst of technological innovation that the Apollo Program did. (Although it might!) But we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too. Also if we don't get a move on, the Russkies will get there first and then we'll NEVER hear the end of it.
On “Presidential Standards and Fitness”
We can all come up with our own lists of what makes a good leader. While everyone's list will of course be somewhat different than anyone else's, I suspect that if one undertakes the exercise with sobriety and good faith, whatever winds up on that person's list will be traits that Donald Trump mostly lacks. The man is nearly the opposite of a good leader.
"
To be fair, I'm including in my thought about being a "good judge of other people" an assessment of their character, but also their abilities and motivations. To me, this is the core skill of an executive, perhaps even more important than what GWHB called "the vision thing." That's because even if a leader lacks a direction towards which to motivate her people, at least she can be a good caretaker of the entity she's leading until a vision comes along from elsewhere. But she always is going to need to work through other people, so she's always going to need to know what they're made of.