Where Mickey Mouse is such a demon, where Mickey Mouse is as big as a house

Interesting testament here from an anonymous "Imagineer" (choke, sputter) at Disney. The megacorp has recently done a turn in relation to Florida's Parental Rights in Education bill, known to some sections of the public as the Don't Say Gay Bill. Initially, Disney kept its own counsel on the bill, seeming to realize that slogans and side-taking wouldn't improve the situation. Well of course that couldn't last, and the company subsequently seemed to be attempting to out-protest the protesters.

"Clay" is very vivid and articulate in describing how an atmosphere of woke paranoia has taken hold at Disney. But I'm not so sure I 100% agree with his policework. Yes, their recent moves on social issues are divisive. But the corporate culture he describes is...a corporate culture and always has been. Mission statements are a point of vulnerability. If your employees have to use arcane protocol and made-up language to begin with, of course they're sitting ducks for something like woke. In a sense, one cult has been taken over by another. One may be worse in terms of disrespecting people's freedom of thought, but facts are facts.

In any case, Disney is now at war with―among others―Ron DeSantis. For DeSantis this is great news. Now more than ever the key to politics lies in having the right enemies, and they're one of the rightest.

Fighting City Hall

At Aldi's this evening I happened to be at the cash register where the manager was working. The lady in front of me seemed nice and reasonable, initially. She'd brought a receipt and was very determined that a certain brand of chocolate should have been 99¢ and soon descended into a Thunbergesque series of "How dare you!" She didn't really have a leg to stand on, but I can't blame her too much. It's not the last exemplar of inflation angst that I expect to see.

Unfortunately I wound up missing the bus I was hoping to catch. Which meant a long wait in sub-freezing wind. So it was a special relief to get home tonight.

There's a bad moon on the rise.

Looked up a list of overlooked horror movies from the seventies and decided to watch one of them. The film I went with was Messiah of Evil. This turned out to be an interesting choice, in a few different senses.

Messiah Evil was made by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, a married writing/directing/producing pair. They had the mixed luck to be friends and associates with George Lucas. That meant that they got credit for helping Lucas flesh out his American Graffiti idea to a full script. It also meant that they got the Howard the Duck assignment, which turns out to be their last time directing a movie.

Focusing on this movie, though. Arletty goes to the small California beach town of Point Dume (dun-DUN) in search of her missing father. An artist, his letters to her had grown increasingly dark and erratic in recent months. Arriving in town she meets Thom, a bohemian dilettante with an interest in her father's artwork. When they first meet, Thom is listening to a crazed prophecy from the town drunk Charlie (Elisha Cook Jr.) Blood moon, dark messiah, people going mad and eating raw meat. The standard stuff.

Arletty moves into her father's extended art exhibit beach house. Thom breaks in with his two "traveling companions" and stays with her, because it turns out small town hotels won't rent to you when you're openly in a three-way. 

There are indeed strange goings-on about town. The townspeople aren't talkative, and they have indeed taken to eating raw meat. Uncooked steak, live rats, and yes, people. Both of Tom's girlfriends go into town and get ambushed in some rather effective Grand Guignol scenes. Things get even worse when Arletty's dad returns.

Dark Messiah came out around the halfway point between George Romero's first two "Living Dead" movies. It's been mentioned as a forerunner to Dawn of the Dead's critique of consumerism. There is something to that. The ghoulish flesh-eaters are conservative townies, and two of the big horror scenes take place in a supermarket and a movie theatre, respectively.

The attempt to put the heroes in the counterculture has some downsides, though. Take Thom, for example. He boasts of being born in a castle his family owned in Portugal. His relationship with the two women he travels with has an aristocratic air. And while he has long hair, what really stands out in terms of his appearance are his bespoke plantations suits. The unintended(?) message is that the great exurban unwashed are depraved and predatory, but that you can count on the enlightenment of people with lots of money and prestige. Almost half a century later that idea is still very much in circulation, and may get even more credence. So watching Messiah of Evil is like seeing a combination of grindhouse flick, art film, and psyop.

Green cheese

H. G. Wells was an extraordinarily clever writer. For much of his career science fiction wasn't so much in its infancy as still in the process of being born. He had predecessors, certainly: Verne, some stories by Poe, various philosophical authors. But the pulps hadn't started. There was no accrued genre lore.

So it's notable that he, even in a brand new field, was writing on more than one level. You could take his books at face value, but there's always an invitation to read them otherwise.

The novel I'm reading now, The First Men in the Moon, is a case in point. Struggling businessman Bedford and eccentric scientist Cavor float into space in a vessel made out of a new metal that Cavor has forged. On/in the moon they meet the insectoid Selenites and their giant mooncalves. But Wells bears no illusions that this is what the moon is like in any literal sense. And he knows the reader probably knows that as well. So the setup is more of a comment on the changing ways the universe has been seen. And there's a certain parodic intent to the two main characters, who are basically the only characters in the first half of the book.

This edition, from Penguin in 2005, looks great. Silkscreen artist Kate Gibb does the cover, and her illustration is as evocative as it is anachronistic.

Is that a fact?

We're at a point, I think, where being cynical about what you see in the media is just a survival skill. The idea that any of the big players are just there to help you make informed decisions―as opposed to a particular decision, regardless of whether it's informed or not―doesn't pass the laugh test.

Fact-checkers are a case in point. When the first (technically) independent fact-checking organizations first appeared, they seemed harmless, maybe even benevolent. Someone was out there investigating claims and making dispassionate verdicts as to their legitimacy. But it turned out that wasn't their purpose at all. The fact-checkers were amassing power they could later use, abuse, and auction off.

The story that Siegel tells about BMJ and their Ventavia/Pfizer exposé is darkly hilarious, showing how these people never neglect to have someone else to blame. And the Hunter Biden picture in Jen Psaki's tweet is pure Uncanny Valley. If you've seen unfiltered photos of him you know his teeth would be considered dodgy even if he lived in England.

Whatchu talkin' bout?

Reading Tom Wolfe's Kingdom of Speech got me thinking about what language is and why it is. I'm still poking the question in my head, but here's what I've come up with so far.

Animals definitely communicate. A bird will emit a mating call when in the grips of some sexual compulsion. Bees fly/dance over a flower in a certain pattern when there's a rich trove of pollen.

But these are binary communications. If the stimulus is there then you make the sound or gesture. If it isn't, you don't. 

Human language isn't binary. It's very flexible. A word can mean more than one thing. There are levels of meaning. You can marshal statements to a common purpose.

So what happens to us if language loses its flexibility? What if speech is so restricted that there are only a few subjects you can address, and then you can only certain pre-approved thing? What separates us from the animals then?

Simple. In animal communication the limits are set by nature, and are meant to help the creature survive. Restricted human speech does none of that.

U?

A concept that's gained increasing recognition in the past 10-20 years is horseshoe theory or the Horseshoe Effect. The basic idea is that on some matters the left and right extremes will have more in common with each other than with the center.  It's true in as far as you'll often see elements of the right and left agreeing with each other, whether or not they can see the resemblance themselves. But in practice people using the term tend to put their thumb on the scales. The implication is that the extremes are truly, well, extremist, and that the consensus in the center has been arrived at through reasoned debate. But I think that if we're being honest, we've all seen consensus at one time or another formed through deception and coercion.

This article looks at Ukraine through the lens of horseshoe theory and what can I say? Thank God deception and coercion never come into play during times of war.

Squeezed

Won't go into too much detail about this article but it's very good. Tabarovsky takes a look inside Russia, and the picture is grim. On the one hand the Western powers are imposing painful sanctions, fiscal and otherwise. But Putin himself is cracking down on them as well, because it's war, baby. It's the very definition of getting it from both ends.

One passage:

Barbashin challenged the West’s apparent desire to freeze the Russians out completely. “Right now it looks like this: ‘We’ll separate ourselves from you, you depose Putin, and we’ll talk to you then.’ But you can’t just introduce a thousand sanctions, step aside, and wait for the problem to solve itself.”

No one I talked to among new Russian political emigrants is complaining about their situation. They are the first to say that their troubles can’t compare to the catastrophe in Ukraine. They insist that whatever help is available must go to Ukrainian refugees and the people inside Ukraine first. Yet even during World War II, the world knew the difference between Marlene Dietrich, Albert Einstein, and Hannah Arendt, and the Nazi regime—just as in Soviet times, the West understood the difference between Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky and the KGB.

Question: Do our leaders wantus to see our fellow human beings as individuals? Or is our potential do just that considered part of the problem?

Day for night

Today was the first weekday of Daylight Savings Time. And of course my first thought was, "This has to be a joke. There's no way you can expect me to get up when it's still this dark."

Will I get used to it? Well, that's not what will happen. What will happen is that sunrise will start getting earlier again. Hallelujah.

I know you are but what am I?

I don't know the work of Karl Popper all that well. I do understand that he formulated the idea of falsifiability being an integral part of science, and that does seem like a positive contribution. But another concept of his has been popularized―yea and verily, it is even memetic. And not necessarily for the better.

The above graphic tends to be shared by the same general group of people who have made a fetish of Randall Munroe's "Free Speech" comic, and for similar reasons. To take whatever edge they have in debate and make it permanent, regardless of events. Illustrated thought terminating cliches, in essence.

So to examine the argument fairly, are there times when intolerant ideas must be excluded in order for civilized debate to continue? Potentially, conceivably, maybe. The problem is, who defines? How do you distinguish an intolerant idea from one you just find disagreeable? The truth is that an in-group can very easily define any serious opposition as intolerant, and thus justify themselves in destroying all those who disagree with them. Means less time debating and more time ruling. And I think a lot of that has been happening.

Then, too, how does oppression begin? A lot of us associate it with hateful men targeting the objects of their hatred and persecuting them. Certainly there have been times in history (Jawohl!) when one has accompanied the other. But a more common factor has been a group acquiring large amounts of power and then abusing it. If they are motivated by evil ideas, those often don't make themselves known until afterward.

0 what a relief it is

For a few years I built up a sizable debt with Discover. Kind of crushing, actually. Family helped me with it. With that help I paid it down little by little, then stopped for a bit when other stuff came up, then finally just paid the whole thing off. They talked me out of closing the account entirely, but only because there's no service fee.

So the balance stays at zero, a nice round number. Although sometimes I'll open another bill or statement and think it's the Discover bill, which freaks me out for a few seconds.

Don't ask me I just work here

Leaving work today, something struck me about the neighboring neighborhood. Namely that a lot of the houses have signage somewhere on them that declares them to be businesses. Data industry, massage therapists, at least one pharmacy. They look like residential houses, but they aren't. Unless someone is also sleeping above whatever business they've set up or are managing. It's a fairly tony neighborhood, so maybe the owners―assuming they own―can better afford to set up a business and take in money than to just live there.

Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl

The last couple of hours I've been hearing high winds outside. I mean, there's a loud, eerie keening in the air and the windows will shake now and then. Didn't get anything like this during the day. The temperature hasn't dropped enough for the heat to kick on. But I'm guessing that there's a sizable difference out there between mercury temperature and "feels like" temperature.

An odd couple

 Mikey and Nicky, man. Just watched it.

When terrified Nicky (John Cassavetes) first calls his friend Mikey (Peter Falk) to his seedy hotel room and Mikey goes to him, the relationship between the two is almost like parent and child. Mikey has to soothe Nicky's fears, get him to eat, keep him from doing anything stupid, and good luck with that last part.

Both of these men are junior figures in the Jewish mob, and Nicky has stolen money from them. So whatever else you say about him, his fears aren't groundless. He gradually reveals himself to be the kind of walking timebomb who is so dead and digging himself deeper with every passing minute. Something like Bernie Birnbaum in <i>Miller's Crossing</i> except prettier and not gay. Mikey has himself to worry about, and a family as well, even if his wife doesn't seem to know him very well. He plays both sides as much as he can, going along with the hit on the surface while trying ot keep his most pain-in-the-ass friend out of harm's way.

Ned Beatty is in this as well. He's the hitman looking for Nicky. Shorn of his usual quasi-Southern accent and wearing a long bouffant hairstyle that doesn't suit him at all, he's the picture of the bored and frustrated employee. Make no mistake, though. His arrival on the scene means bad news.

дурість

Where do my sympathies lie? I'm for families and neighborhoods left intact. For churches, libraries, and museums to remain standing. That's my rooting interest.

That said, Russia is invading and bombing, which doesn't help with the things I support. And the claim that Putin is waging some kind of altruistic denazification campaign sounds suspiciously self-ennobling.

But that's Putin. Where's the logic in punishing Russian commoners? Especially those who live abroad and may be quite out of sync with the current regime. If Russian expatriates are going to be stigmatized for being Russian, it seems like an effort to bind them and return them to him.

Then there's been at least one attempt to clear out Dostoevski,, which are just moronic in the extreme. The people who were keyed up for a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West 20 years ago haven't gone anywhere, just switched targets for now.