Yeah, that song definitely has a 'vibey' feeling that would open the scene at the new (non-starbucks) cafe, then fade into the background.
And, the opening scene of GoTG 2 with Baby Groot Dancing to Mr. Blue Sky is among the best opening credit scenes ever. But there, Mr. Blue Sky is the lead and the charcters are in support. Mr. Blue Sky being a song I HATED in the 70s but now like it as the Baby Groot song.
Sure, call it an ironic coming of age soundtrack in the era of Mumford & Sons?
But that's another thought here, the John Hughes movies were snapshots of HS and early adulthood and the soundtracks reflected that. Sixteen candles has a similar Alt soundtrack, but it's just not as good as Pretty in Pink. Thompson Twins, Spandau Ballet, Paul Young, Madness, and hey... Danny Elfman, er, Oingo Boingo.
How many coming of age movies are coming out right now with Taylor Swift and her genre as musical narrators? Or maybe Swift is too generic... who's the Alt Swift?
And... can these movies afford the rights to, say, Mr. Brightside -- which I'll note is conspicuously absent from Peter Quill's zune songlist.
As for soundtracks with Pop songs I'm of two minds.
1. Very few soundtracks make for a good Album
but
2. I'm often impressed by creative directors who pull 'just the right song' for a scene or a moment.
Guardians of the Galaxy comes to mind as a collection of songs I really never liked... but somehow I now like (many of them) them in association with the movie.
[Cliff Clavin voice] Actually, when it comes to orchestral scores in the 80s - 90s - 00s - 10s Danny Elfman probably wrote the score running through your head.
MiB, Mission Impossible, Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Batman Returns, etc. etc.
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls027374723/
Or, as I like to say, the soundtrack of the Milennial generation was written by the guy from Oingo Boingo.
Right... but that's Damon's original point. Lots of things we call Vaccines prevent the thing being Vaxxed against. That's a good thing.
JB's point about overpromise/underdeliver is that Coronavirus -- as we were all told by the science teams -- is a cold/flu virus and we 'inoculate' against fast mutating seasonal ubiquitous viruses (e.g. endemic) to reduce personal exposure.
The scientific expectation, therefore, was for inoculation for harm reduction, not eradication. There's a bank-shot argument to be made for mandates was that if no one got vaccinated, then hospitals might get overrun... but vaccine uptake was very good (especially in the beginning) and hospitals were fine... the bank-shot wasn't warranted.
And yet we don't mandate Tetanus or Yellow Fever vaccines.
These are very good vaccines that you should take if you're potentially at risk for Tetanus (I am) or Yellow Fever (I am not). They protect *you* and we don't mandate them to stop the spread of Tetanus or Yellow Fever.
This sub-thread is missing the main driver, which were the mandates. The mandates were not necessary and, I don't know why exactly, they became a sort of scissors or wedge issue where both sides were wrong.
Team Blue doubled and tripled down on mandates and Team Red veered into weird anti-vaccine (un-)rationalizations. We still had excellent uptake on the vaccines, especially among the folks who really benefit from them 65+.
Mandating covid vaccines for people under 40 rather than making them available for everyone took on a weird political power-play that was bad public policy, and IMO was in fact actually driven to punish 'the other team.' Masks and Vax became tokenized well beyond their 'scientific' value for public policy -- especially with regards children. Whom to blame? Blame the dynamics of power... those who had it used it to make the others submit, at least symbolically. And reversing that, the others recklessly rebelled... beyond even what was good for them.
As for my priors, my family was vaccinated in 2020 (including my grade school kids) but only I and my wife (50+) have had boosters in 2021, and only I have had the most recent booster in 2023.
I'm sure R's will circle the wagons... the question is how many will fade away and just vote down-ballot like we saw in 2022. None of the R folks out this way would ever actually vote for Biden, but some will just not vote for Trump.
Which is why I'm expecting campaigning on Negative Partisanship to go to 11 this cycle (or are we at 12 now?).
I'd like to say that Biden is just normal enough to give some R's enough cover to give Trump a pass, but this isn't 2020 and I'm not confident Biden has it in him any more.
My contrarian take is this: if somehow Trump inconceivably wins, it will be the Left's 'excite the base' strategy that does it. If ever there was an election to *not* excite the base, this is it. Let Trump campaign on getting out the Base, that will suppress enough votes for him to lose.
Congressional hearing: Mr. Rufo, is it your opinion that Jews, in general, have and I quote, "high cognitive abilities?"
Rufo: Well, I have no particular statistics on that; but we welcome all Jewish students at New College; in fact, in light of the anti-semitism rampant at Harvard and other Ivies, all of the public colleges in Florida including, I'm happy to say, New College has an expedited process to welcome Jewish transfers from any college -- not just Ivies -- where they may no longer feel safe. This was sponsored by Governor DeSantis.
Will Gay be a more competent President if Rufo or Oxman pay a price?
If I didn't know better, I'd say you're trying to make room for folks at Harvard to make calls for Genocide of the Jews. Is that what you're working to protect? Seems sketchy to me. Or maybe I'm not reading your conspiracy board correctly?
Gay wasn't fired for Plagiarism; she was fired because she fumbled a simple question on genocide and then her administration fumbled a simple question on Plagiarism... the first fumble alienated many of her donor stakeholders, the second many of her faculty stakeholders.
Answering simple questions in Public is the sine qua non skill required of chief executives.
Along the way the fumbles exposed interesting side stories that came to light about how she climbed the greasy pole... but mostly that was because she fumbled the easy questions and lost her stakeholder support.
But again, ultimately she was fired because she couldn't effectively say that you can't call for genocide at Harvard.
Remember, no-one is stripping her PhD and she's still going to teach at Harvard (temporarily, I'd expect).
On the main point of the original post [professional] plagiarism is a 'bigger' deal in the word-smithing disciplines whereas replication is a bigger issue in the [soft] sciences. I think the taxonomy of Students who plagiarize is solid; the erosion of trust in both cases, though is similar... credentialling through college and credentialling through publications are driving a lot of sub-optimal behaviors throughout.
Sometimes FdB reminds me of a left wing KDW... a freight train coming down the rails that you could easily avoid if you just stepped off the tracks, but you're so mesmerized by the sound and thunder of the experience that you just can't.
"The very reason Ghost was created was to make the kind of moderation Broderick wants impossible, and yet Broderick has jerry-rigged a moral schema that indicts Substack and excuses Ghost.
[here she comes 'round the bend]
This is, speaking generously, an argument of convenience built on a foundation of idiocy."
Right, and Chase contemporaneously found the Self-Enforcing theory not to hold specifically with regards Jeff Davis. Congress passed the Amnesty law and specifically wrote it so that Davis couldn't obtain amnesty; then congress wrote new Insurrection law into the code. So we have an enforceable insurrection law in the code already.
If judges are finding for insurrection on the bench, then it should be easy for the AG to charge Trump with Insurrection and obtain a simple and obvious conviction via trial. No?
I won't pretend to know how SCOTUS will approach this; so I guess we'll have to wait until Feb to see how the orals are received.
It will depend upon school district and track. We had Algebra in grade school too; just that HS Algebra was more complex variables... then a 'weird' hiatus to do Geometry proofs. I'm told that some districts have put Geometry in year 1, or tried anyway.
(Gen.) John B. Gordon and (VP) Alexander Stephens *both* served in Congress after the Civil War. That's just a quick survey of the list of the 43rd congress (1873).
As an aside, ChatGPT stonewalled attempts to have it cross reference the 43nd congress and former confederates... which I thought was interesting.
Having read more of the 'self-enforcing' debate in the late 60s over Jeff Davis and seeing the many congressional acts that congress specifically passed regarding Section 3, ultimately culminating in the Amnesty of 1872 (which was written in such a way that it settled the Davis matter by eliminating him as a Senator of the 36th congress) ... I'm even less impressed by this angle than when I'd read nothing about it.
Still seems clear to me that after 1872, congress settles in to plain definitions of insurrection that are tweaked periodically, but require/imply trial/conviction under the US Code.
Still you may be right... I'm just a guy on the internet and not arguing legal theory in front of SCOTUS.
*I* think it does, yes. Section 3 and Section 5 are both the 14th Amendment; and Congress *has* passed a law in the US code which defines Insurrection and specifically calls out that a conviction under that section of the US code would render that person "incapable of holding any office under the United States"
The 'finding of fact' would require that particular fact be found.
Regarding Age/Citizenship ... if we take the position that any state judiciary can appropriate an opinion on, say, a Short Form birth Certificate, or maybe wax eloquent on Babies born in Panama then we're setting ourselves up for really interesting interpretations on aid and comfort to enemies or any such thing that requires interpreting 'aid' or 'comfort' or 'enemies'.
Plus, I think there's a reasonable question about whether a State Court in, say, Michigan can have or render an opinion about actions in, say, Portland, OR that would disqualify some up and coming politician 20-years hence.
So the thing about Section 3 & 5 is that Congress 'did' pass laws governing Insurrection and the courts can prosecute Trump under those laws and if found guilty would be explicitly 'incapable' of holding office.
Finally, regarding electors... I said in my original comment that my plain reading of the NEW ECRA is *No*, this particular issue is not one of the two issues that Congress can object to...
That said, congress is made up of Lawyers who, I'm rather confident, would attempt to torture the ECRA definition that vote of one or more Electors "has not been regularly given" to attempt to cover this 'irregular' situation.
But you know, there's no accounting for lawyers stretching the plain meaning of the language.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/15/2024 (belated)”
While we're waiting for the SCOTUS oral arguments in Feb(?) on DJT 14th amendment disqualification, two measured arguments pro / con
1. DISQUALIFIED
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/01/92349/
2. NOT DISQUALFIED
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/01/92428/
Still think #2 is better reasoned, and I'd wager that he get's the SCOTUS prediction more right than wrong.
On “Can Nikki Haley win New Hampshire? (And Does It Matter?)”
Looking at the advanced polling, I'd say this Trump fellow has a pretty decent shot at the Republican nomination.
On “On Movie Soundtracks that Don’t Suck”
Yeah, before my time, but Saturday Night Fever movie and soundtrack are almost one in the same.
If only to remind us that a song called, 'Night on Disco Mountain' exists.
"
Yeah, that song definitely has a 'vibey' feeling that would open the scene at the new (non-starbucks) cafe, then fade into the background.
And, the opening scene of GoTG 2 with Baby Groot Dancing to Mr. Blue Sky is among the best opening credit scenes ever. But there, Mr. Blue Sky is the lead and the charcters are in support. Mr. Blue Sky being a song I HATED in the 70s but now like it as the Baby Groot song.
"
Good point... there are definitely movies that are more Music Video with an arc than Movie with a soundtrack.
I mean, who's going to overlook the Pitch Perfect cinematic universe?
"
Sure, call it an ironic coming of age soundtrack in the era of Mumford & Sons?
But that's another thought here, the John Hughes movies were snapshots of HS and early adulthood and the soundtracks reflected that. Sixteen candles has a similar Alt soundtrack, but it's just not as good as Pretty in Pink. Thompson Twins, Spandau Ballet, Paul Young, Madness, and hey... Danny Elfman, er, Oingo Boingo.
How many coming of age movies are coming out right now with Taylor Swift and her genre as musical narrators? Or maybe Swift is too generic... who's the Alt Swift?
And... can these movies afford the rights to, say, Mr. Brightside -- which I'll note is conspicuously absent from Peter Quill's zune songlist.
"
As for soundtracks with Pop songs I'm of two minds.
1. Very few soundtracks make for a good Album
but
2. I'm often impressed by creative directors who pull 'just the right song' for a scene or a moment.
Guardians of the Galaxy comes to mind as a collection of songs I really never liked... but somehow I now like (many of them) them in association with the movie.
"
[Cliff Clavin voice] Actually, when it comes to orchestral scores in the 80s - 90s - 00s - 10s Danny Elfman probably wrote the score running through your head.
MiB, Mission Impossible, Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Batman Returns, etc. etc.
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls027374723/
Or, as I like to say, the soundtrack of the Milennial generation was written by the guy from Oingo Boingo.
On “It Was Always Going To Be Trump”
"can’t read what’s in front of him on a teleprompter"
Can't or Won't?
Biden not knowing what he's saying is Declining.
Trump not knowing what he's saying is Ascending.
On “Vaccines Are A Billion Miracles”
Right... but that's Damon's original point. Lots of things we call Vaccines prevent the thing being Vaxxed against. That's a good thing.
JB's point about overpromise/underdeliver is that Coronavirus -- as we were all told by the science teams -- is a cold/flu virus and we 'inoculate' against fast mutating seasonal ubiquitous viruses (e.g. endemic) to reduce personal exposure.
The scientific expectation, therefore, was for inoculation for harm reduction, not eradication. There's a bank-shot argument to be made for mandates was that if no one got vaccinated, then hospitals might get overrun... but vaccine uptake was very good (especially in the beginning) and hospitals were fine... the bank-shot wasn't warranted.
"
True... it's further complicated by the fact that the Bureaucracy itself has its own agendas -- and that remains in place between both presidencies.
Masks/Lockdowns/Vax Dev are Trump/FDA/CDC/Fauci etc.
Masks/Lockdowns/Vax Deploy are Biden/CDC/FDA/Fauci etc.
"
And yet we don't mandate Tetanus or Yellow Fever vaccines.
These are very good vaccines that you should take if you're potentially at risk for Tetanus (I am) or Yellow Fever (I am not). They protect *you* and we don't mandate them to stop the spread of Tetanus or Yellow Fever.
This sub-thread is missing the main driver, which were the mandates. The mandates were not necessary and, I don't know why exactly, they became a sort of scissors or wedge issue where both sides were wrong.
Team Blue doubled and tripled down on mandates and Team Red veered into weird anti-vaccine (un-)rationalizations. We still had excellent uptake on the vaccines, especially among the folks who really benefit from them 65+.
Mandating covid vaccines for people under 40 rather than making them available for everyone took on a weird political power-play that was bad public policy, and IMO was in fact actually driven to punish 'the other team.' Masks and Vax became tokenized well beyond their 'scientific' value for public policy -- especially with regards children. Whom to blame? Blame the dynamics of power... those who had it used it to make the others submit, at least symbolically. And reversing that, the others recklessly rebelled... beyond even what was good for them.
As for my priors, my family was vaccinated in 2020 (including my grade school kids) but only I and my wife (50+) have had boosters in 2021, and only I have had the most recent booster in 2023.
On “About Last Night: Trump Wins Iowa”
I'm sure R's will circle the wagons... the question is how many will fade away and just vote down-ballot like we saw in 2022. None of the R folks out this way would ever actually vote for Biden, but some will just not vote for Trump.
Which is why I'm expecting campaigning on Negative Partisanship to go to 11 this cycle (or are we at 12 now?).
I'd like to say that Biden is just normal enough to give some R's enough cover to give Trump a pass, but this isn't 2020 and I'm not confident Biden has it in him any more.
My contrarian take is this: if somehow Trump inconceivably wins, it will be the Left's 'excite the base' strategy that does it. If ever there was an election to *not* excite the base, this is it. Let Trump campaign on getting out the Base, that will suppress enough votes for him to lose.
On “It Was Always Going To Be Trump”
No one ever get's mad at Samuel's sons.
On “The Social Danger in Allowing Academic Dishonesty to Fester”
Congressional hearing: Mr. Rufo, is it your opinion that Jews, in general, have and I quote, "high cognitive abilities?"
Rufo: Well, I have no particular statistics on that; but we welcome all Jewish students at New College; in fact, in light of the anti-semitism rampant at Harvard and other Ivies, all of the public colleges in Florida including, I'm happy to say, New College has an expedited process to welcome Jewish transfers from any college -- not just Ivies -- where they may no longer feel safe. This was sponsored by Governor DeSantis.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/floridas-public-colleges-are-told-to-ease-transfer-for-jewish-students
"
Will Gay be a more competent President if Rufo or Oxman pay a price?
If I didn't know better, I'd say you're trying to make room for folks at Harvard to make calls for Genocide of the Jews. Is that what you're working to protect? Seems sketchy to me. Or maybe I'm not reading your conspiracy board correctly?
"
Gay wasn't fired for Plagiarism; she was fired because she fumbled a simple question on genocide and then her administration fumbled a simple question on Plagiarism... the first fumble alienated many of her donor stakeholders, the second many of her faculty stakeholders.
Answering simple questions in Public is the sine qua non skill required of chief executives.
Along the way the fumbles exposed interesting side stories that came to light about how she climbed the greasy pole... but mostly that was because she fumbled the easy questions and lost her stakeholder support.
But again, ultimately she was fired because she couldn't effectively say that you can't call for genocide at Harvard.
Remember, no-one is stripping her PhD and she's still going to teach at Harvard (temporarily, I'd expect).
On the main point of the original post [professional] plagiarism is a 'bigger' deal in the word-smithing disciplines whereas replication is a bigger issue in the [soft] sciences. I think the taxonomy of Students who plagiarize is solid; the erosion of trust in both cases, though is similar... credentialling through college and credentialling through publications are driving a lot of sub-optimal behaviors throughout.
On “The Atlantic Comes For SubStack, Freddie deBoer Reciprocates”
Sometimes FdB reminds me of a left wing KDW... a freight train coming down the rails that you could easily avoid if you just stepped off the tracks, but you're so mesmerized by the sound and thunder of the experience that you just can't.
"The very reason Ghost was created was to make the kind of moderation Broderick wants impossible, and yet Broderick has jerry-rigged a moral schema that indicts Substack and excuses Ghost.
[here she comes 'round the bend]
This is, speaking generously, an argument of convenience built on a foundation of idiocy."
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Backpack Hero”
Finally, the inventory management game devs always knew we wanted.
On “Supreme Court To Hear Trump Primary Ballot Challenges”
Right, and Chase contemporaneously found the Self-Enforcing theory not to hold specifically with regards Jeff Davis. Congress passed the Amnesty law and specifically wrote it so that Davis couldn't obtain amnesty; then congress wrote new Insurrection law into the code. So we have an enforceable insurrection law in the code already.
If judges are finding for insurrection on the bench, then it should be easy for the AG to charge Trump with Insurrection and obtain a simple and obvious conviction via trial. No?
I won't pretend to know how SCOTUS will approach this; so I guess we'll have to wait until Feb to see how the orals are received.
On “Conservatives Should Know What They’re Conserving”
It will depend upon school district and track. We had Algebra in grade school too; just that HS Algebra was more complex variables... then a 'weird' hiatus to do Geometry proofs. I'm told that some districts have put Geometry in year 1, or tried anyway.
On “Supreme Court To Hear Trump Primary Ballot Challenges”
(Gen.) John B. Gordon and (VP) Alexander Stephens *both* served in Congress after the Civil War. That's just a quick survey of the list of the 43rd congress (1873).
As an aside, ChatGPT stonewalled attempts to have it cross reference the 43nd congress and former confederates... which I thought was interesting.
"
Having read more of the 'self-enforcing' debate in the late 60s over Jeff Davis and seeing the many congressional acts that congress specifically passed regarding Section 3, ultimately culminating in the Amnesty of 1872 (which was written in such a way that it settled the Davis matter by eliminating him as a Senator of the 36th congress) ... I'm even less impressed by this angle than when I'd read nothing about it.
Still seems clear to me that after 1872, congress settles in to plain definitions of insurrection that are tweaked periodically, but require/imply trial/conviction under the US Code.
Still you may be right... I'm just a guy on the internet and not arguing legal theory in front of SCOTUS.
On “Conservatives Should Know What They’re Conserving”
No Geometry? That was Grade 10 for us. Algebra, Geometry, Trig, Pre-Calc.
On “Supreme Court To Hear Trump Primary Ballot Challenges”
*I* think it does, yes. Section 3 and Section 5 are both the 14th Amendment; and Congress *has* passed a law in the US code which defines Insurrection and specifically calls out that a conviction under that section of the US code would render that person "incapable of holding any office under the United States"
The 'finding of fact' would require that particular fact be found.
Regarding Age/Citizenship ... if we take the position that any state judiciary can appropriate an opinion on, say, a Short Form birth Certificate, or maybe wax eloquent on Babies born in Panama then we're setting ourselves up for really interesting interpretations on aid and comfort to enemies or any such thing that requires interpreting 'aid' or 'comfort' or 'enemies'.
Plus, I think there's a reasonable question about whether a State Court in, say, Michigan can have or render an opinion about actions in, say, Portland, OR that would disqualify some up and coming politician 20-years hence.
So the thing about Section 3 & 5 is that Congress 'did' pass laws governing Insurrection and the courts can prosecute Trump under those laws and if found guilty would be explicitly 'incapable' of holding office.
Finally, regarding electors... I said in my original comment that my plain reading of the NEW ECRA is *No*, this particular issue is not one of the two issues that Congress can object to...
That said, congress is made up of Lawyers who, I'm rather confident, would attempt to torture the ECRA definition that vote of one or more Electors "has not been regularly given" to attempt to cover this 'irregular' situation.
But you know, there's no accounting for lawyers stretching the plain meaning of the language.