It sure seems like the era of “superhero movies” being a license to print money is over. Granted the DCEU flicks have not had a great track record, but the latest outing, “Blue Beetle,” seems to be shaping up to be a *disaster.*
The production budget was $104 million. The marketing was probably the same, so the cost of the movie was $208 million. As of today, it has taken in $59M domestic, $46M foreign. But the studio only gets half the US box office ($29.5M) and about a third of the foreign ($15.3M), for a total of $44.8M. The movie was released 19 days ago, so it still has time to rake in some more moolah, but unless some amazing miracle occurs I have trouble seeing it reaching $60 in actual returns to the studio. If it does it will have lost Warner bros “only” $148 *million* dollars.
Couple “superhero fatigue” with “Blue Beetle? Who’s that?” and you could have predicted that this wouldn’t do so great. Add in the disastrous marketing (a DC superhero movie that features a prominent character calling Batman a fascist is not a great idea) and this flick was doomed from the get-go.
It’s well known that a lot of cops are not great people. Ill tempered, quick to anger and violence, ready to smack someone around, break rules, break laws, corrupt, willing to enforce unjust and unconstitutional laws. Why are they like this? Well, part of it is doubtless due to some of them having been not great people before they were cops, and were drawn to being a cop by the allure of power. But then there are doubtless other not great cops who started off as great people, intending to protect and serve. And then they spend years encountering the very worst of society. Murders, rapists, thieves, Socialists, the worst of the worst. This has got to grind a person down. But it seems to me that even more damaging to a cops psyche are the run of the mill scumbags they run into more commonly than TV-movie villains. People who are riding the Dunning-Kruger effect *hard,* marrying stupidity with unearned entitlement. Making every second of the interaction a misery. People like these specimens:
And then you get the lunatics, the type who are celebrated by our social betters, but who really aught to be in loonie bins:
Said it before, will say it many, many more times: we need phasers with stun settin
Before there was the Budweiser Disaster, there was Gillette. Back in 2019 they released one of the worst ads in history… a company whose primary market was men used an ad to tell men that they were evil for being men. This, unshockingly, did not result in an increase in sales. It did do some damage to the brand and to their stock price, but nothing like what happened to Bud; perhaps this indicates a shift in the culture, with sane people beginning to realize their power to boycott.
I thought the ad was simply bad planning married to bad marketing. But then, I don’t spend my time trying to analyze propaganda techniques (perhaps if I did, I’d have better sales). However, this feller seems to have a channel devoted to such things, so, perhaps somewhat delayed, he went through the ad almost frame by frame. He came up with some interesting discoveries and conclusions, both about what was done and what was done wrong.
J. Robert Oppenheimer is justly famed for his role in developing the A-bomb. He is considered to be something of a martyr for what happened later… during the “Red Scare” he was stripped of his security clearance. But was it actually wrong to do so? Was his interest in the Communist Party some minor childish dalliance from his earlier years… or was it more serious? The recent movie, and most modern depictions, portray him in a positive light.
But he *was* a Communist. What’s worse, there’s good evidence – lots of it from the actual Soviets – that he actively worked for them. He apparently slipped them heaps of data to help their bomb program, and then once the Soviets had the bomb, he worked to sabotage the American bomb program.
It’s probably well past time that Oppenheimer be re-examined. And if it’s finally concluded that he was a traitor, which there’s good evidence that he was, his name needs to be appropriately blackened as any Communists should be. We tear down statues of people who supported slavery 250 years ago; we tear down statues of people who supported the CSA for *whatever* reason 160 years ago; we would tear down statues of anyone who supported the Nazis 80 years ago. We should tear down statues and monuments and hagiographies of anyone who supported Communists a hundred years ago, fifty years ago or today.
Communism is every bit as bad as Fascism, and arguably worse; Communists *today* are universally terrible people because they have a century of blood-soaked failure that they *choose* to ignore. Communists, their supporters and their wishy-washy Socialist wannabes need to be called out for the monsters and morons that they are. And that includes historical figures.
One woman (40) donated her womb to her sister (34) who was born with a malformed womb. So both women can have kids. This is good news. The first uterus transplant was in 2013 in Sweden, so this has been going on a while, if not widely.
But since we can’t have anything nice, here’s where this will go:
The curious thing is that the Venn Diagram of “people who support taxpayer funding it so guys can get pregnant” and “people who thing we should reduce the population if western nations” probably overlaps a *lot.*
Besides the basic insanity of using surgery to affirm delusions, there’s the issue of what it’s gonna do to the prospective offspring. At the least they’ll know that they’re the product of Mad Science; they will also be raised by someone claiming to be their mother, but who does not have the upbringing of a woman. *THEN* there’s the issue of… even if the womb works, what’s going to happen to the fetus? DudeMom won’t produce the same hormones a woman does. HShe’ll doubtless have to spend the term of the pregnancy constantly getting shot full of drugs and hormones in a desperate attempt to give the embryo a hope in hell of gestating correctly. And then, there’s the end: the new womb probably didn’t come with a new pelvis. The male pelvis does not have space for a proper birth canal. So any offspring resulting from this will, like French Bulldogs, likely have to be brought about via C-Section.
And then there’s this to consider: in the second article above, it’s suggested that it’ll be 10 to 20 years before transplanting wombs into males becomes a reality. But… in 10 to 20 years, chances seem decent that bespoke organs can be produced via 3D bio-printing, cloning, etc. Use the “mothers” own DNA to create a womb with “moms” own DNA.
And then there’s this: in 10 to 20 years, the United Kingdom will be a fundamentally different place. When the UK becomes London writ large, the culture will be upended. It seems a bit unlikely that these sort of surgeries will be performed in a Britain, any more than they’ll be performed in Uganda or Saudi Arabia.
“Our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said.
How about No. SpaceX is building the future of national security. I say let them be as got-dayum picky as they want to be *especially* when it comes to hiring people of dubious loyalty.
The next time we get a President who is non-insane, non-senile and pro-America, they need to go through the halls of the Federal Government with leafblower hooked up to a backpack full of pink slips.
A few years ago a lot of people were blown away to find out that a sizable fraction of the population has no inner monologue. Some people can’t “hear” themselves think or “hear” remembered music, movies, things loved ones said. Related, some people can’t envision things: they can’t see an apple in their minds eye, because they don’t have a minds eye. For those of us who can, this is a bit mind blowing; I honestly can’t imagine how I’d go through my day. But for those who can’t hear or see within their minds, finding out that others can sounds like insanity. “You have voices in your head?”
Now here’s another way in which people differ: “conditional hypotheticals.” Take for instance, if Person A were to ask Person B:
“How would you feel if you hadn’t eaten yesterday?”
Most of us, I would assume, would respond with something like “I’d be hungry,” or “I’d be happy to be on my diet,” or “I’d be filled with an unquenchable rage to destroy my enemies and see their women driven before me.” You know, normal stuff. But there are those people who simply cannot understand the question. “But I *did* eat yesterday.”
In retrospect, over the years I’ve encountered this sort of thing *a* *lot.* For example, a few years after the invasion of Iraq and the taking out of Saddam, I got into a pointless online argument. My argument went along the lines of “What if we *didn’t* invade?” The point being that the inspection regime was coming to its end. Within fairly short order Saddam *would* have been able to restart his WMD programs. That could well have led to a far, far worse war. Or not, who knows, it can be fairly argued either way. But what astonished me was the other guy, when I asked my hypothetical: “But we did invade.” No amount of trying to get him to see alternate histories would budge him past the fixed point of “it happened, that way.” I thought he was just being a jackass. Now… perhaps he was just *incapable* of seeing alternatives.
Perhaps this issue is a feature of lower IQ. Perhaps, like the lack of an inner monologue, it can hit just about anyone. But whatever, such people should probably be kept from important roles dealing with planning for the future, especially when future plans are dependent upon learning from past mistakes. Someone with this issue would seem to make a *terrible* strategist.
The State Department, in its warning, encouraged Americans still in Belarus to depart the country immediately and categorized the country as a Level 4 risk, the highest security warning.
Two possibilities spring immediately to mind:
1) The US Government knows that something is about to happen
2) The US Government *wants* Putin to think that something is about to happen
There are of course less charitable explanations for seemingly random proclamations:
So a lone 23-year old decided to make a Scooby-Doo fan film. To do this, he used computer generated stop-motion to replicate the look of a Rankin-Bass holiday TV movie from back in the day… and an AI voice generator. This latter was due to the fact that this project had no budget to afford voice actors. The resulting dialog is a *little* stilted and stiff, but it really does sound like the original Scooby cast, and if you didn’t know it was done by AI, you might not pick up on it. Well, ok, who cares. It’s just a little fan film. However, some professional voice acting units got in a snit, pitched a fit… and basically ticked off the majority of those who gave a damn. The result of *that* is some blowback against the actors strike. The end result will likely be *more* acceptance of the use of AI for voices.
Right now the professional writers and actors don’t want to write or act. But they also don’t want the *amateurs* to do their thing, either. This sort of attitude is exactly the sort of thing that irritates the public. This sort of thing will accelerate the obsolescence of actors and writers… and studios as well.
A video started making the rounds online a day or two ago. It shows an airline passenger nightmare: the little kid behind you not only kicking your seat, but the lil’ monsters mother not only doing nothing to stop that behavior, she’s aggressive in preventing anyone else from stopping it.
A number of commenters are using the video to discuss this or that: race relations, the lack of fathers, the lack of discipline, the power and arrogance of the matriarchy, etc. All valid issues to discuss, but there’s one little issue: that ain’t an airplane. Jetliners don’t have slab-sided walls, nor do they have support columns. It’s a set, and they’re actors.
It’s a “comedy” video, though nothing about it seemed all that funny; it just doesn’t seem to be played for laughs, but for realism. The “Beverly Hills Comedy Team” has a number of airliner-based vids using the same set. The full length vid is on Facebook:
