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| That hurts. |
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| mef mouf? |
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| Use an em dash, not a hyphen. And an ellipsis is at least three periods. |
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| Simple. Direct. And there are only two. |
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| I saw a lot of "Yup, that's right" reactions to this. |
One hour to go for 2024! I'm off to watch the Lotte World Tower have its yearly orgasm soon.
All you have to do is get rid of the commie Left in every country to fix everything fast. https://t.co/jzJkUkfCJs
— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) December 11, 2024
Thanks to Andy in Japan for this link to a post visualizing the H-1B problem. As I've watched this debate grow and develop over the past few days, I've tried to keep an open mind because I simply didn't know much about the issues, about why so many MAGA people were upset, and why so many parties think that Elon and Vivek are betraying the country.
What's the problem?
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are to head up the DOGE organization, i.e., the Department of Government Efficiency, recently made a series of remarks, in interviews and tweets, about H-1B visas and American culture that have gotten elements in the conservative base riled up and feeling betrayed. Vivek had tweeted (slightly edited):
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the Math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.
(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates.)
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”
Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.
[ ... ]
“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China. This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.
A lot of Americans didn't take this too well, but I personally see nothing wrong with what Vivek said. Follow the money: Americans prioritize sports, porn, video games, social media, movies, and junk food—not necessarily in that order. Vivek is right that we've become a mediocrity factory at the national level. Elon Musk, meanwhile, got in trouble for comparing America to a sports team where you hire outside talent if you want to win. Calling America a corporation or a sports team didn't sit well with a certain sector of the American right. Meanwhile, the left has stood back and gloated while these internal ructions have been happening. But the discussion gets a lot more complicated than just this.
What are H-1B visas?
Wikipedia: "The H-1B is a visa in the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act, section 101(a)(15)(H), that allows United States employers to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations. It is the largest visa category in the United States in terms of guest worker numbers."
Berkeley International Office: "H-1B status is available to a person who has been offered a temporary professional position by a U.S. employer. A bachelor's degree or higher in a related area is the minimum educational level required for a position to qualify for H-1B status, and the H-1B employee must have this degree (or higher)."
Elon Musk recently tweeted, in an attempt to clarify his stance and mollify the rightie public:
Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning.
This is like bringing in the Jokics or Wembys of the world to help your whole team (which is mostly Americans!) win the NBA.
Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct.
This is apparently what H-1B visas are supposed to be. Musk isn't totally wrong to think this way, but it's possible he's out of touch with the reality of H-1Bs.
So what's the reality?
If you click on that very first link above, in the first sentence of this post, you will get an eyeful of data about what's really happening. H-1Bs are a gateway to allowing in a much wider variety of overseas "talent" than just 0.1 percent. One of the first shockers, on that page, is the fact that the government approves ten times the allotted number of employees every year. (In 2024, for example, the limit was 85,000 H-1B employees, but the government approved 868,000 applications, utterly ignoring the "statutory limit" placed on the visa program.) And the folks coming in from overseas are far from elite talent: these are not "Jokics and Wembys." The reality is also that America, in fact, has plenty of home-grown talent, something that Vince Dao discusses in a recent video. Dao also notes that, despite the left's sneering that the right seems to be falling apart over this issue, what's really happening is a spirited discussion the like of which cannot ever happen on the ideologically rigid left as it's currently constituted. The right will, if anything, come out stronger because of this discussion.
What's the state of the discussion, then?
As alluded to above, the right isn't falling apart. To paraphrase one Instapundit commenter, "Mommy and Daddy aren't fighting; we're just talking." A discussion is a healthy thing, and it's good that this issue got caught before Trump assumed office (Trump himself seems to have wavered on the issue, starting out thoroughly against the H-1B visa program at first, then softening his stance later).
At this point, and this is merely my impression after reading and listening to a lot of commentary, it seems that everyone agrees the H-1B system is broken. The idea might be sound in principle, but the system needs radical reform. As angry MAGA folks are rightly pointing out, it is another point of hemorrhage allowing foreign talent into the US and deprioritizing American workers, many of whom graduate with STEM and IT degrees and certificates, yet are unable to get jobs in their fields because the system is already clogged with H-1B workers, most of whom seem willing to work for relatively cheap. This is little different from the globalist-neocon idea of farming labor out to cheap, foreign sources as a way to save money. It is the antithesis of MAGA's agenda.
At the same time, Vivek's point about American culture having become a hotbed of mediocrity still stands. While it's true that the US still produces top-flight talent, it's also true that our universities (along with our military and other sectors of the society and the economy) have become ideology factories more concerned with stupidities like DEI than with actually producing hardworking people of merit. This is not an either-or, black-and-white issue. The principle behind H-1B visas is a good one, but the actual implementation has been botched for years, and this needs to change. If anything, the system needs to be reformed first, before we can move any further in the discussion. And as many have suggested, there should be, in consonance with the America First agenda, more of a focus on giving good jobs to homegrown talent. The "Jokics and Wembys" are already here, already among us.
If anything, I come away heartened that the country is having this spirited discussion. As one commenter wryly noted, imagine if Kamala had won: we'd all be begging her not to let in trillions more illegals instead of concentrating on things like STEM jobs and intellectual capital. Let's see the left try for this level of introspection.
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| They will never learn. That's commitment. |
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| Such determined focus on bullshit! |
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| What the hell happened, Steve? I used to love your writing. |
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| What's your theory on this? |
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| He will never see the inside of a cell. He really should. |
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| There are ways around anything. |
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| Indeed. |
I guess that's it: time to pack things up. The boss told me, when I got in to work today, that he'd be giving me a portable drive onto which to copy the contents of my office desktop computer, so it's official: we're moving out. The boss has been unable to contact the CEO, who's been actively avoiding us. The whole thing is rather childish, but this is what you get when you have a CEO who is spineless, conflict-averse, and in the thrall of certain other parties in the company. At least, that's been the boss's take all this time.
The boss also entertained some sort of fantasy that I would definitely be moving down to Suwon. Given the neighborhood of the place we looked at, I'd have to give that prospect a no. True: the apartment itself seemed nice, if a bit of a fixer-upper, and the boss argues that rent, cost of living, etc., would be cheaper in Suwon, but I'd have to go through the rigamarole of changing my address right as I'm trying to renew my passport, F4 visa, etc., and I'd also be far away from Samsung Hospital, which I still have to visit every few months. Losing this current job now is extremely poor timing. And the apartment in Suwon is, let's face it, very old.
But it's also an opportunity to acquire new skills, start up a new website where I can monetize my own content, and maybe even become my own boss, which would mean, of course, never coming back to my old team.
So I need to visit my building's real-estate office tomorrow to negotiate a rental contract directly with it. It's going to hurt to hand over a W10 million deposit, but at least I'll get it back when I move out. I'm actually going to see about handing over W20 million for the deposit to cheapen my monthly rent. One way or another, I won't be leaving my building or changing my address, at least not until after I've renewed all of my crucial documents.
More soon on how all of that goes.
UPDATE: the boss has sent off one last, desperate email to the CEO describing our progress on the book project and the profits he can expect if he should sell X number of textbooks per month (none of them has been printed yet), enough to justify keeping us on another few months to at least finish the book series. I personally have no hope that the CEO will bother responding, but practically, this means the boss is asking me to wait a few days before talking to my building's real-estate office. How many more days will I be strung along, then? Well, I guess we'll see whether anything comes of the boss's Hail Mary. I don't see this gesture having any effect if the CEO is curled up in a ball and passive-aggressively unresponsive.
In other news: I apparently get one last payday in January. That'll be nice, at least.
I think my boss is in denial. While it's possible he may pull a rabbit out of his ass about our team's future, the passive-aggressive lack of communication from our CEO, whom the boss tries daily to contact, indicates to me, at least, that our streak of miracles is over. Personally, I'm also a bit miffed that the boss is playing this game until the very last minute, i.e., by the time we definitely know that our team will be leaving the company, we'll have only a day or so to clear out. It strikes me as a bit rude not to let the team know, well in advance, whether it's time to move on. The last time this happened, I preemptively moved my stuff out of the office, and by the boss's own admission, it was my initiative that prompted him to try harder to contact the boss and secure us another year of work. It's also how we ended up on freelancer contracts, i.e., more monthly pay but no benefits and no severance.
As things stand, there's not much left for me to do. The designer has to work at his own pace. All that's left is two proofreadings of the textbook we're working on after the designer has had a chance to lay out the text in his way and introduce his own errors into the process... and since our contracts end on December 31 (Tuesday), that's most likely not going to happen, i.e., I won't have time to do two full rounds of proofreadings. We'll be leaving in medias res, with only seven or eight books of a twelve-book series done.
Working for this company has been an exercise in vanity, not to mention a close-up look at the ridiculousness of Korea's "education" system, which is overly conservative and prone to deliberately ruining creative efforts because of an ego-driven need by certain higher-ups to put their "stamp" on things. I've heard this same story in other areas of Korean life as well: native-speaking foreigners who do a perfect job of translating and/or proofreading material, only to have some superior with horrible English come along and make "corrections" based on his daft notions of "nuance." The result is once-pristine material that is little more than a Konglishy abortion. And this happens over and over and over again, with no one ever learning. If I weren't already humorously cynical about the whole process, I'd have rage-quit the industry long ago. But as I've said for years, I'm in it only for the money. And that well now seems to have run dry, at least as far as our current team goes.
This upcoming week is going to be interesting. Brace for impact.
And what a way to cap off this year.
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| When ideology trumps science. And you thought creationists and Flat Earthers were bad! |
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| Moi. |
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| It's the same picture. |
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| If anyone deserves drawing and quartering... |
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| "Don't mind me." |
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| Resolved, luckily. Now, he has to decide whether he still wants to live in New York. |
DeVory Darkins has a balanced take on the H-1B topic:
And here's StaySafeTV's take:
I did get another H-1B-related comment; it was perfectly civil, but it wasn't signed, so I didn't publish it. Sign your name or a screenname, guys!
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| found here |
A passenger plane on Sunday caught fire after a failed landing at South Korea’s Muan International Airport, killing at least 177 people.
Investigating authorities said the plane’s landing gear malfunctioned and failed to deploy during a second landing attempt, forcing the pilots to conduct a belly landing near the end of the runway. The Boeing 737-800 jet failed to reduce speed, exceeded the runway, and crashed into a fence at the outer perimeter of the airport. It then exploded.
Thick black smoke filled the air at the crash site.
Investigators are considering a bird collision as the cause of the malfunction.
At least 177 people—84 women, 82 men, and 11 others whose genders weren’t immediately identifiable—died in the fire, the South Korean fire agency said. Emergency workers pulled two people, both crew members, to safety. Health officials said they are conscious and not in life-threatening condition.
Two people remained missing about nine hours after the incident. Among the 177 bodies found, officials have so far identified 57 of them, the fire agency said.
I didn't even know there was a Muan International Airport.
When the link to this article appeared in my email, it said "28 killed." I guess that's why it's always a good idea to wait for more figures and more news.
UPDATE: horrific video:
BREAKING: Video shows crash of Jeju Air Flight 2216 in South Korea. 181 people on board pic.twitter.com/9rQUC0Yxt8
— BNO News (@BNONews) December 29, 2024
One gets the impression that there was still a lot of fuel on board that aircraft. Not that it would have mattered: the impact was so catastrophic that it's doubtful anyone would have survived had the plane dumped all of its fuel before attempting to land. I guess there will now be a lot of rhetoric about the need for, or lack of a need for, retaining walls like the one that stopped the jet.
And I thought 2021 was exciting, what with the stroke and all! 2024 started optimistically, with me doing stairs training and getting to a point where I could heave my carcass up 1.25 flights of stairs (1 flight = B1 to 26; half a flight = B1 to 14; a quarter flight = B1 to 6). Then in mid-March, I got COVID for a second time. In April, I ended up in the hospital with severe breathing problems. I'd assumed the breathing problems had been COVID-related aftereffects, but the diagnosis came back that I had heart failure—specifically, severe left-ventricular systolic dysfunction. I was given a new suite of meds that led to severe diarrhea; the diabetes doc took me off all of my cardiac meds (I still wonder whether she had the right to do that), and in August, I had a heart attack caused by coronary-artery blockage.
The day the heart attack happened, I'm told I got CPR from (1) a building staffer, (2) a retired doc, and eventually, (3) the paramedics, who also zapped me twice. I was taken to the ER, where I was stabilized, and at some point between the ER and intensive care, I was given an emergency stent, i.e., my blocked artery got Roto-Rootered, and a stent was placed in to keep the blood vessel open. That stent is now in there for life; I feel a bit like a cyborg now. When I thought about this incident later, it occurred to me that my body was following the exact pattern of my father's heart attack in 2006: he, too, had suffered a coronary-artery blockage; and he, too, had gotten stented. There's a certain inevitability to genetics, and both sides of my family have a history of heart problems, with maternal and paternal grandparents dying early.
Things started to get better after that second trip to the hospital, although the heart-failure diagnosis hovers in the background like an actuarial death sentence. My brothers David and Sean came over to see me; David, who hadn't talked to me in years, had to leave his life out in New Mexico, where he'd been for two years already; Sean and Jeff had just started a European vacation when they rerouted to Korea. (I suspect Jeff may be sore about the whole thing given how thoroughly my medical crisis had interrupted his vacation.) My buddy Charles kindly came over with dinner at one point and met my brother David. My buddy Mike also came to see me a bit later. We had fun catching up and watching Season 2 of "House of the Dragon" together. Through it all, my boss (also a Michael) was my guardian (bohoja) at the hospital; my brothers and my buddy Mike had a chance to meet him.
It's been quiet since all of that. October and December saw me doing my interrupted walk. November saw me prepping my yearly enormous Thanksgiving dinner. The docs had told me that I had two or three other 30% blockages forming around my heart, but those blockages seem to be holding steady, maybe thanks to the new new suite of meds I'm on, which includes—unfortunately—exogenous insulin. There's been no return of breathlessness or severe chest pains; just a twinge now and again to remind me that I'm never getting out of these woods. The best I can do is make the slope of my decline a bit shallower, and we'll see how things go. I've been on borrowed time for a while, it seems. The one-year survival stats post-diagnosis are about 100% for most people; the five-year stats, though, drop way down to 50%, so I could croak before I turn 60, which is something I've said as a joke to people around me for years. Little did I know, eh?
Well, it's been a good life, and while I do have a few regrets about certain roads not taken, I'm overall happy with how things have turned out. I'm especially happy that, in 2017, I went ahead with the idea of walking across Korea along the Four Rivers bike trail—an event that changed my life, gave me a new addiction, and altered my perspective on this beautiful country. I'm going to have to arrange for my walk blogs, at least, to somehow survive me and stand as a legacy for the curious to read. They may end up as books once I get a handle on Adobe InDesign, a program for publishing. We'll see. In the meantime, it looks as though I'll be making it to 2025. We'll just take things a day at a time and go on from there, shall we? What a goddamn year it's been. I hope yours has gone better.
Happy New Year and all the best.
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| Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock, with a horse possessed by his symbiote |
Can demonic possession be funny if you do it with aliens? 2024's "Venom: The Last Dance" is a Marvel sci-fi/action flick, the third film in an ostensible trilogy of movies involving Venom, a.k.a. "The Lethal Protector," sort of an antihero who bears little resemblance to the wordless, menacing symbiote we first met in Sam Raimi's 2007 "Spider-Man 3." "The Last Dance" is directed by Kelly Marcel and stars Tom Hardy, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Clark Backo, and Andy Serkis.
The movie's backstory took me a moment to understand. Beginning in some alternate realm, we find out that the god of the symbiotes is a being called Knull (Serkis). The symbiotes somehow rebelled against their god and imprisoned him, and the only thing that can release Knull is something called a codex, which is formed whenever a symbiote bonds with a host, and that host is killed and brought back, thus allowing their life forces to fuse. But Knull has other servants than just the symbiotes: a race of vicious lizard-creatures called Xenophages (xeno = strange/alien; phage = eat) that are still obedient to Knull, and whom Knull tasks with searching the universe/multiverse for one copy of the codex. As it turns out, whenever Venom, the symbiote who has inhabited Eddie Brock (Hardy) for two movies, fully manifests himself as a muscular shell that surrounds Eddie, he becomes trackable to the Xenophages, one of which comes to Earth via the ability to generate a portal/wormhole à la Doctor Strange. Eddie/Venom and the Xenophage play cat and mouse for most of the movie.
Meanwhile, Area 55 scientist/xenobiologist Teddy Paine (Temple), who lost her brother in a childhood lightning accident, works a hundred feet underground with her assistant Sadie (Backo) in a facility that lies underneath Area 51. Area 51 is to be decommissioned, but Area 55, jointly operated by Paine's team of scientists and the US military under the command of General Rex Strickland (Ejiofor), remains in full swing, with a complement of symbiotes picked up from the crash that occurred in the first movie. The scientists are doing what they can to understand the symbiotes; the military, meanwhile, wants to find out how best to fight and kill them, and for much of the movie, they remain unaware of the Xenophage that's been sent to find Venom and take the codex.
The Venom movies are action-comedies, with the main running joke being that Venom inhabits Eddie Brock like a burly-but-friendly demon who has a taste for human brains and chocolate (which, like brains, contains phenethylamine, which the symbiotes thrive on). Eddie hears Venom's rumbling voice (also Tom Hardy) in his head but responds by speaking aloud; the alien apparently can't read his thoughts. Venom has learned a lot about life on Earth from his partnership with Eddie, and he generally likes the planet. Eddie allows Venom to eat bad guys' brains but convinced him early on (first movie) never to eat good people. With a neverending supply of bad people, Venom never goes hungry, and thus is born the notion of Venom/Eddie as "Lethal Protector." Venom can also bond with other living creatures; in one hilarious scene, Eddie and Venom try to rush across the country by bonding with a horse, which charges off madly, having temporarily become a fanged, muscular, tongue-whipping super-steed. When Venom manifests himself around Eddie, Eddie essentially becomes superpowered as well; he's bulletproof, strong, agile, and able to manifest black tentacles to grab opponents or to propel himself Spider-Man-like through the air. Venom functions as something like a barely contained id while poor Eddie, despite his own human wants and needs, must rein Venom in as a sort of superego. It's also never clear where, geographically, Venom is located on Eddie's body; he pops out partially or wholly at odd moments. It's also never clear where Venom's brain-eaten victims go once they've been consumed—are they metabolized instantly by the alien, or do they pass through poor Eddie's own digestive system?
There are actually way more questions than just these: a lot about Venom and his kind simply doesn't make sense. A bit like "Battleship," this is a turn-your-brain-off kind of movie if you want to enjoy it. And overall, I thought the movie wasn't bad. It comes to something of a sad end, and I've heard that Tom Hardy is iffy about reprising the Eddie Brock character, so I have no idea whether this trilogy might become a tetralogy. The movie also recycles actors who've played different roles in Marvel movies: Chiwetel Ejiofor had played Karl Mordo in "Doctor Strange," for example, and Rhys Ifans had played Dr. Curt Connors in "The Amazing Spider-Man" with Andrew Garfield.
While the entire Venom series has been hit-or-miss (you may recall I hated the first movie), it also hasn't been great, and I suppose I watched "Venom: The Last Dance" mainly because I'm a completist and not because I had any strong desire to see the film. This one had some moments of brilliant hilarity, but for the most part, it did little more than make me crack a smile. It's also possible that this movie has more logical holes in it than "Battleship" does, but there are plenty of online articles and videos poking holes in the film.
I will mention a few problems, though. First, it was established in the initial movie that these alien symbiotes don't actually bond that readily with just any human being; there has to be some level of compatibility. But in "The Last Dance," several symbiotes escape their confinement and end up bonding willy-nilly with various human hosts. I also had to wonder why the Xenophages felt bound to obey Knull given that he was imprisoned and thus not in a position either to be a threat or to reward his servants (who apparently weren't intelligent enough to release Knull themselves). Third, I'm also not a fan of the misuse of the word codex, which normally describes a primitive sort of book in the real world. Fourth and related to that: why pursue the codex located on Earth when there must be literally billions of other codices elsewhere in the universe/multiverse? Fifth: why is Knull shown to be a humanoid while his worshipers and ex-worshipers are both decidedly nonhuman? Lastly, how did Knull's creations successfully rebel against him and imprison him? As a god, isn't Knull capable of smiting his creations for disobedience?
Despite these and other problems, though, "Venom: The Last Dance" was entertaining enough. Not enough for me to heartily recommend it, but enough for me to say that fans of the previous two movies (see here and here) will probably like this one, too.
I was in the mood for something loud and stupid, so I watched 2012's "Battleship," directed by Peter Berg and starring a cast as diverse as Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård, Rihanna, Liam Neeson (who is, surprisingly, only a minor character), Jesse Plemons, Tadanobu Asano, Sports Illustrated model Brooklyn Decker, and what appears to be a whole complement of World War II veterans who get a magnificent scene together in the final third of the film. The movie's plot takes a long time to spin up, but it's dead simple: the world uses a special satellite to send a signal out to an Earthlike planet in a solar system's "Goldilocks" zone in the Gliese system. One scientist, perhaps echoing Stephen Hawking's pessimism about contacting aliens, mutters that, should the aliens be advanced enough to respond, it'll be like the Europeans coming to the new world, and it is. Years later, in the middle of a huge, international RIMPAC naval exercise, the aliens from Planet G in the Gliese system show up: five large ships that split up, MIRV-like, into smaller ships. Most of these ships land in Earth's oceans; one has the misfortune of landing in the middle of Hong Kong, killing thousands. The ships that land in the ocean deploy what appear to be huge, dome-like shields that sit upon the water's surface, each shield covering thousands of square miles. They also try to hook up with Earth's satellite systems to be able to relay some kind of message back to their home planet. Most of the RIMPAC ships near Hawaii are blocked by a shield (which also covers Hawaii itself); Lieutenant Alex Hopper (Kitsch)'s destroyer, the John Paul Jones, happens to be inside the shield when it goes up. The rest of the movie, which focuses on the Hawaii part of the invasion, is about repelling the alien attack once it's determined that the aliens are hostile.
As sci-fi movies go, this one may arguably be stupider than "Independence Day," but I generally like director Peter Berg, who is a smarter version of Michael Bay (I've reviewed his "Lone Survivor," "Deepwater Horizon," and "Patriots Day"), and while I thought "Battleship"—inspired by the board game and partly produced by Hasbro Studios—was corny as hell and had plenty of unanswered questions for those of us who think about these things, I also thought the movie hit the spot the way a bag of Doritos might: all empty calories, but strangely satisfying while you're eating it. I also ended up seeing the movie as a sort of fun love letter to American veterans, whom it features in several ways: there's the young, bulky vet who lost his legs in combat and is working through his anger and depression; and there are the old Navy vets who, having been invited to be honored at RIMPAC, are called upon to help revive the old battleship Missouri ("Mighty Mo"), which proves to be the last great hope against the aliens parked by the Hawaiian archipelago. A movie like "Battleship" isn't going to be praised by regular critics, and it's not going to be praised for its plot, its logicality, or its acting, but it is going to be praised for the pace and coherence of its editing, which is spot-on. Any movie that can make big, clunky naval vessels feel light on their feet in slow, ponderous sea battles is all right by me. "Battleship" gets a thumbs-up despite being silly as hell. Nothing about this movie takes itself seriously except for its chef's kiss to America's veterans.
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| with McTears |
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| Bernese Painthound |
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| Tesla doesn't make pretty vehicles. |
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| The left doesn't even care what's coming out of its facehole. |
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| I'm imagining. |
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| Vaccostratus |
I've wondered about this myself, but I've generally chalked it up to the inconsistent way in which all of the superheroes' power levels are portrayed in the movies (and probably in the comic books, too).
Alex Jones defends Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's position on legally bringing in talent from abroad to keep America winning.
Elon Musk Responds to Alex Jones's Breakdown of the H-1B Visa Controversy
It is a classic American policy to brain drain the best from across the planet and bring them here. Musk has ALWAYS advocated for this policy. Everyone bitching that @elonmusk has flip flopped are either ignorant or lying. Elon to a great extent is the poster child for this… https://t.co/WoEaIuu1Sd
— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) December 27, 2024
So I guess I'm ignorant or lying. Probably ignorant. We'll see how this plays out.
One thing I don't get is why all the Prager U. presenters act like slowly thawing zombies.
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| Correct the comma problem. |
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| Guzman and me, we could be brothers. |
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| It's all a sham. |
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| Yes! |
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| brave ladies |
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| First-letter caps for (almost) everything is annoying. And that missing apostrophe! |
Maybe it's now safe to do so: I've stripped the news and commentary channels out of my YouTube feed, so I will no longer be constantly bombarded by rhetoric guaranteed to stress me out. The news will find me, anyway: I still read Instapundit, and YouTube's algorithm will keep feeding me videos from recently unsubscribed channels, and I'll undoubtedly succumb to temptation and watch some of those videos. But for 2025, I'll be doing my best to wean myself off most of that stuff. Instead, I'll try concentrating on science, food, humor, and other non-news-oriented, less stressful sources, mindful that some or most of those sources may still have a leftist tinge to them.
And while I can't guarantee I won't publish more meme dumps, I won't be pre-scheduling YouTube videos the way I did all this year, usually in two-week dumps that I would then supplement with "spontaneous" posts. So next year, you'll see more original content from me, like in the old days. A year of lazy blogging proved to be more stressful than it was worth. And spending my weekends scheduling two weeks' worth of posts every two weeks is just a time sink. I need more time for myself since I have so many projects that I've neglected. I'm kind of hoping I am temporarily out work as of the New Year; there's a lot to do.
I'm probably going to lose readers because of this change, but whatever.
As I ponder the landscape of training in 2025, it occurs to me that there are things I simply can no longer do or no longer attempt. Pretty much any anaerobic exercise is out the window for people with heart failure, so that means stuff like serious weightlifting and the extreme end of bodyweight calisthenics. Lighter weights and easier calisthenics are still within my reach; I simply won't be setting goals like "Do that first planche" or "Do that first muscle-up." Even pushups could be problematic; I'm still looking into that one. Meanwhile, training with lighter weights, doing more reps of easier exercises, and working the lungs are all still possibilities, not to mention any number of exercises related to stretching, balance, etc., where part of the exercise's motion doesn't involve grunting and straining without free breathing. I also see on YouTube that more and more trainers are open to the idea of mixing cardio in with weight training. What that means for me, practically and specifically, is yet to be determined.
I imagine there are athletes with heart failure who will laugh at the above even as they perform taboo exercises and keep pushing past the craven limits imposed by doctors. I'm not quite ready to test my mettle in that way, but this coming year, I hope to focus more on what I can do, which is surely more than anything I've done up to now. Expect more specifics soon: I'm likely to have nothing but time on my hands in the very near future.
This could be bad. View and discuss. Was I right never to fully trust Musk?
This MAGA thing is a fragile coalition that could easily collapse from within.
A young Dutch lady talks about when and how she realized that feminism is a lie:
The "appreciate the temperature" rule is one reason why I'm almost always depressed by grocery-store sushi. If it's just sitting there, it's cold and dead. So, yes: some of these rules of etiquette, far from being pretentious, do make sense.
Antarctic sea ice extent is 17% higher today than it was in 1979. Ice doesn't lie, but climate scientists do.https://t.co/jEmTvGVPdghttps://t.co/cj0675DQBt pic.twitter.com/ivUCtobivp
— Tony Heller (@TonyClimate) December 25, 2024
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| Really? If that's the case... |
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| ...and who remains stuck in the 7th century. |
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| the simple pleasures |
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| Be sure to watch this TED Talk video that features Bill Clinton. |
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| But it's not happening! Stop exaggerating! |
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| Hollywood versus reality—like trying to put your pets on a vegan diet. |
