Got Ham?

When you get right down to it, Gotham and Metropolis are the same place -- a setting for superheroes with an unsettling resemblance to New York City on a really bad day.  Gotham is a nickname for NYC, first applied to the future Metropolis at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century by Washington Irving (Of Sleepy Hollow and the "Headless Horseman" fame). It wasn't meant as a flattering appellation -- it means "Goat Town" (not GOAT town) -- but caught on nonetheless. After decades of hypergrowth, the five boroughs were merged into a great big Metropolis at the end of the century.

I recently watched Zack Snyders treatment of Batman and Superman, where Gotham plays Newark to NYC's Metropolis. The two movies -- Batman V. Superman (Ultimate Edition) and Zack Snyder's Justice League -- are available on Max and are quite long. They took about a week to watch, although I did take some breaks for sleep and such.

I thought bringing the two cities together worked about as well as bringing Batman and Superman together -- by which I mean not well. Batman is a regular man (an especially good one) who battles regular human criminals (the especially bad ones -- who may have been goosed with this or that toxic juice). Toss him at high velocity against reinforced concrete and he's done, no matter how good his armor is. In the fight scenes with Superman, that happened quite a lot, though the Supe' fought with a kryptonite handicap. In the end, they became friends and took on a big -- I don't know what the hell it was, but it was big -- something or other. Wonder Woman shows up to help. "I thought she was with you," was the best line in the movie.

Not to ruin it (I don't think it will), but Superman dies at the end of the first movie and comes back to life halfway through the second. I thought it was another bad choice. It's ridiculously hard to kill the guy and when it happens it should mean something. Of course, I knew it couldn't last since he was going to be in the second movie. 

Originally, Gotham was a metropolis in its own right, with its High Society, uber-wealthy, and widespread corruption. It got downgraded into a depressed, hollowed-out, post-industrial has been. Its character changed, and so did Batman, who became less of a detective and more of a Gatling gun.

The Justice League was so long that towards the end I began rooting for the Vile Henchman and his Flying Monkey minions (an homage, I presume, to a much better film, The Wizard of Oz). Quite simply, I wanted planet Earth to be put out of its misery -- and the rest of the multiverse with it (talk about high stakes). Then there is the small matter of the epilogue. A couple of minutes to round things up wouldn't do.  Instead, we launched into another bizarre movie, and a very confusing one -- except it turned out to be a bad dream, a Batman bad dream.

By this time I zoned out and the credits began to roll, backed by a soft piano instead of a mighty orchestra. I reached to turn it off but stopped. I wondered: Is that Hallelujah? I hadn't heard the Leonard Cohen song in a few decades and the piano piece was more of an improv. But a few minutes into it the Lady sang:

I've heard there was a secret chord

That David played, and it pleased the Lord,

But you don't really care for music, do you?

Well, it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth

The minor fall, the major lift

The baffled king composing Hallelujah

And so on. I don't know what that song had to do with that movie, but it was the best part.

Allison Crowe - Hallelujah

And some bonus Superhero introspection:

Superman's Song

They Unleashed the Demon in Demography

 

New Chinese Demographic Data = Population Collapse || Peter Zeihan

Could it be worse than bad? Yep.

In 1982 I worked as a consultant for the United Nations Population Fund for Asia in Bangkok. I wrote summaries of population studies and was glad when that project was over.

One night in a bar in Hong Kong, I talked to a fellow who worked on the "One Child Policy" that the CCP installed on the mainland. I kept my own council but thought the idea was a bit screwy -- but not because I thought they would fail. The iron law of government institutional immortality says that once they built a giant bureaucracy around the "One Child Policy," it would roll on well past its "should die" date, resulting in something like an upside-down population pyramid.  One insight I picked up from my work at UNFPA was that population growth falls as economies develop and infant mortality declines, so recovery from any "overkill" would be hard. The data from China's urban areas bears this out.

But at least the bureaucracy can survive, switching from forced abortions to forced births as they launch a thirty-year effort to right the list before the ship-of-state rolls over and sinks.

Bloody War Catch-up

 And Now We Return to Our Regularly Scheduled Program (Ukraine War Updates)

Peter Zeihan looks at Ukraine's counteroffensive as it enters its fourth week.

When Putin launched his invasion, I didn't expect it to go well because the iron law of armed conflict is that wars are easier to start than to stop -- although there are notable exceptions to the rule.

In the 1930s, Ukrainians were "starved into submission" by Moscow (Putin's a veteran of the "security service" that carried out that particular genocide). They suffered rough treatment immediately before and after WWII -- during which large armies engaged in brutal combat rolled over the area twice. As a result, Ukrainians could expect a Russian victory to be followed by a heavy hand holding a mallet.

Because of Moscow's previous rule over the country, numerous fifth columnists were in place (the Russian thrust out of Crimea went surprisingly well). As the effort stalled, the worm -- and the Ukranian nation -- turned.

Unfortunately, Russia grabbed a lot of territories, and taking it back is a long and bloody process, even with Western Military aid -- a fraction of which, delivered before the invasion, would likely have prevented it.

The Dastardly Motive behind the Russian Coup Attempt.

This whole coup attempt was staged by Putin to divert the world's attention from the January Sixth Insurrectionist window-breaking incident at the Capitol in D.C., as well as the many crimes of Donald Trump. Putin, who is not known as the forgiving type, graciously pardoned everyone involved in the "Militarized March on Moscow," just to make Joe Biden and the Democrats appear petty and vindictive in their pursuit of justice. If he can forgive the downing of high-tech spyplanes and attack helicopters, the Dems can forgive a few broken windows. It is Russian interference in our Judicial System, plain and simple.

Limp Noodle

Prigozhin has called off his march on Moscow. Previously, I wrote that Noodles Romanov wanted to become Tsar Romanov.  But now he's just all wet.

He should stay away from windows and swimming pools. I suggest a world tour -- make that an anonymous would tour after plastic surgery.

They done-gone crossed the Don.

Update: This was a quick take on Pregozhin's mutiny. Interestingly, he didn't follow the oldest advice in politics: when you strike at the King, kill him.

Suddenly, Ukraine against Russia is Ukraine against a Russia that's against itself, as the recent uncivil arguments among military leaders turn to civil war.

Someone has done-gone crossed the Don -- both the "Rubicon" River Don and the Don of the top Russian crime family. Yevgeny Prigozhin has launched his Wagner group at the throat of his Godfather, Vlad-the-invader. Maybe Putin putting this "criminal cook" at the head of a powerful, well-armed, independent, and ruthless military organization was a bad idea. Or a good one, depending on your point of view.

"Tsar" is the Russian form of Caesar and Prigozhin is doing a Juilius -- except Julius Caesar won his wars before he crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome. Yevgeny behaves like he's Noodles Romanov but aims to become a Tsar Romanov -- successor to Putin the Terrible. I anticipate the Male Heirs of any Prigozhin era will be male errors. OK, enough with the puns.  

The conflict between Prigozhin and the rest of the Crime Family went on a slow boil last year. The Ukrainians holding on to the City of Bakhmut turned up the heat as the slaughter progressed. At first, I thought the dispute with the Defense Minister was contrived but it became so public I soon believed it was real. 

Could we see a repeat of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of a century ago? Aspiring Tsar Vladimir Lenin relinquished much of the Russian Empire to exit World War One and launch his Communist Red Army at the Bourgeoisie Whites in a bloody civil war. By announcing the withdrawal of Russian forces in Ukraine to the 2/22/2022 lines, Putin could free up troops to come at the Wagners from the rear while splitting NATO into "war-continuing" and "peace-declaring" camps. He should do this now while offering some sort of joint military guarantees for a semi-autonomous Crimea that the West -- if not Ukraine -- will quickly accept.

Interestingly, Prigozhin made a statement attacking the premise of the invasion of Ukraine that could well be a bid for support from NATO countries. If Putin doesn't act, Prigozhin may get it. The offer of a quick end to sanctions by the West in return for withdrawal to the 1991 borders with Ukraine would help Wagner Inc. win the support of the Russian elites.

The West will want a quick settlement here, if possible. A prolonged Civil War in Russia could quickly spread throughout central Asia and beyond.

Wagner is Going to Moscow.

Indiana Jones and the National Socialists

 

Indiana Jones 5 is DOOMED, claims Nerdrotic.

I like that he refers to the Nazis as the National Socialists throughout his presentation (I'm one of the people who watch him without subscribing). For decades I've referred to the Nazis as the National Socialists. Socialists would tell me the Nazis weren't true socialists and I'd point out that they claimed to be the true socialists and millions of Germans believed the National Socialists were the True Socialists. So it's a bit like Russian Roulette with no empty chambers.

Why are Progressives so Obsessive?

Leeja Miller, the fast-talking left-wing lawyer on YouTube, wonders why conservatives are so obsessed with Trans Kids. I think"Kids" is the operative word here. Progressives love to launch society-wide social experiments and then walk away from the awful results (The Great Society Program an attempted to recreate the "New Deal" of the Great Depression but instead recreated the Great Depression in the industrial heartland). The left-wing slogan "Forward" means leave wreckage in our wake as we blissfully sail into calm waters that will become storm-tossed as we arrive.

The old Progressive slogan for taking governmental control was "fight childhood hunger" (resulting in widespread obesity among the young, and, as a result of that "wide-spread," the Body Positive Movement).  Now they tell us, "A baby's sex at birth is just God guessing."

I can remember when "low self-esteem" caused people to steal, rape, murder, or be irritating at work. For about a decade, we were all supposed to work on, not only improving our own self-esteem but everyone else's as well. So, when being mugged, you should try to make your mugger realize his true worth as a human being -- but carefully, in a way that won't get you killed.  

Then there was the "Childhood Recovered Memory of Abuse" fad.  Here, a rare phenomenon -- where a child is molested and represses all memory of the horrible event -- was said to be quite widespread. So adults all over the place began blaming their lousy character traits (but not the good ones) on their discovery -- often with the help of a therapist -- that they were abused as a child. This worked until the children of these adults began accusing these adults of abuse.  At that point even PBS turned against the movement.

In a political sense, the left suffers from "Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy."  They are so fond of getting credit for being on the right side of history and wanting to solve society's problems that they are blind to the fact that they cause many of the problems they claim to want to solve (i.e. San Francisco's Homelessness).

Know any Gnostics?

TIK History: The cult many are in but don’t realize. He delves into Dialectical Materialism and Gnosticism; Marx and Hegel.

A half-century ago my philosophy professor said that Hegel described History as "God's Mind Marching Through Time." This means God could make a mistake and say, "Let's try that again, but with different people in charge." The class read Hegel with an English Translation on one page and an attempt to make sense of it (in English) on the facing page -- in this (at least to my 18-year-old brain), they failed.

Back in the 1960s I talked to Marxists in the Milltown I grew up in, and much of what they said didn't make sense. I assumed it resulted from a certain lack of theoretical sophistication in the provinces. Later, when I traveled some, I'd talked to Marxists who went to the Ivy League, Oxford/Cambridge and even the Sorbonne, and realized I'd done my hometown Marxists dirty -- they were totally up to speed.

If You Can't Fool Him Twice, Lock Him Up.

Candidate Donald Trump now talks of Firing the "Deep State"-- that network of self-serving, unelected officials and their cronies. That might explain why they want him slapped into a Supermax cell.

The President can appoint about 4,000 positions and in 2017 President Trump should have replaced all of them on Day One. He didn't and was still getting stabbed in the back by people who worked for him two years later. Republican Presidents have a bad habit of leaving Democrat appointments in place.

President Obama, his predecessor, was an ideological leftist who appointed ideological leftists who would, themselves, appoint ideological leftists. They, in turn, network with their fellows in and out of government (Wallstreet, Foundations, Universities, Contractors, Lawyer-Lobbyists, Journalists, and on and on). This maze of special-interest groups forms what I call "The Crony Class" -- those who want to control their fellow citizens (and benefit from that control) through their control of Washington DC. They possess a "Crony Class Consciousness."

Like Lois Lerner (who "slow-walked" tax-exempt status for right-leaning groups in 2012) and the DOJ lawyers currently targeting Trump and his supporters, those with Crony Class Consciousness don't need to be instructed in what to do and their actions come with prepackaged rationalizations. They are building a better future free of racism and such. True patriotism is loyalty to that better future. They are responsible for that better future, not the horrible past or the messy present. Current deficiencies are on the normies who are in need of re-education.

Meanwhile, the Crony Class takes care of its own. Lori Lightfoot, the failed Chicago Mayor, landed a teaching gig at Harvard upon leaving office.

Favorable Indictments

Peter Zeihan asks: How Will Donald Trump's New Indictment(s) Impact the Election?

Peter thinks the various indictments will not prevent The Donald from getting the nomination but will prevent the Republicans from winning in 2024 because "swing voters" will swing away. This parallels the thinking from 2015. The DC crowd thought they could spend a lot of time attacking The Donald and he would get the nomination because of their attacks (even they know they are disliked). They figured they would clobber him among the swing voters in 2016, who hate them so much less. It didn't quite work out that way.

In 2020, through a combination of Covid Lockdowns, NGO-sponsored riots about race, Helicopter Money and Helicopter Ballots, the DC establishment beat The Donald. Still, he got 10 million more votes than he got in 2016. 

Riots and Lockdowns are off the table for 2024 because such systematic destruction will blow back on Biden.  Helicopter money will likely cause double-digit inflation. In other presentations, Peter Zeihan says that poor grain harvest will increase food prices. Will higher food prices affect the ballot harvest?

It seems Joe Biden got millions from Ukraine when he was V.P., which is why they impeached Donald Trump (the impeachment involved the "good" mishandling of classified material on the part of DC insiders). The money was well spent on Ukraine's part (it's pay to play with HIMARS) but makes Joe's motives for supporting them to the hilt less than pure. I suppose he could say, "I took a lot of money from the Chinese but look how I'm screwing with them!" Vote for Joe, he won't stay bought and if he does, they'll indict Trump.

In 1988 I thought Joe might make a good president and then he stole the biography of the UK Labour Party Leader (Neil Kinnock, I believe it was). I thought it a bad choice of biographies to steal. Of course, in 1992 Jerry Brown, the Progressive California governor, supported a 13 percent flat Federal Income Tax (including the Social Security tax) so...people change (or grow, in the case of a Progressive).

During his first term, the DC crowd actively worked to frame Donald Trump as a Russian spy, the type of thing horrible people do. DC is full of awful people. It attracts manipulative, self-dealing sociopaths -- and that's just the journalists. I don't expect it to improve. But I'll vote for The Donald anyways.

The Inditments should have been Leaked

The Trump indictments about mishandling classified material should have been classified as Ultra top-secret and then leaked to the New York Times. The source would remain anonymous. This person is not authorized to mishandle these top-secret documents about mishandling top-secret documents. You see, the undercover source leaked the documents to an undercover reporter who was under the same cover and in the same bed. As part of the resulting brouhaha, dotGov throws a big investigation to find the culprit who's not authorized to mishandle the classified material about mishandling classified material. The years-long investigation will go nowhere because why would it. Meanwhile, the New York Times will editorialize about how Trump mishandled documents he had previously declassified and kept locked up.

Of course, some secrets should be kept secret. For instance, the secret that Joe Biden is corrupt. This is purely a "need to know," and only the people actually paying the bribes (and enabling officials and journalists) need to know. So when President Trump's Ultra top-secret phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky -- where Biden's corruption was touched on -- was leaked by someone not authorized to leak it, Trump was impeached. Obviously, Trump had no "need to know" of Biden's corruption. In any case, it was the best five-million Ukraine ever spent.  It's pay to play -- with HIMARS.

When Biden announced his Presidential bid not long after Trump took office, I said it was meant to keep corruption indictments at bay.  In 2017 even the mainstream media was reporting on his corruption as Vice President. Declaring his candidacy as the Democratic Party hopeful was a way to shut them up and get the "respected media" to actively suppress a story that would cast the entire Democratic party in a bad light. So I don't think Dr. Jill will allow Biden to gracefully bow out after one term and give up this anti-indictment superpower.

How Reagan Ruined Everything

Fast-talking lawyer Leeja Miller makes the case against Ronnie. It's not the massive concentration of power in Washington D.C. that's the problem: it's the partial slowdown to that process caused by RR. It reminds me of how the Democrats successfully ran against Herbert Hoover for fifty years. Trying the same trick with Reagan might not work as well.

Lawyers concentrate on winning the argument rather than solving the problem, because by winning the argument they have solved the problem -- their problem, which is winning the argument. Unfortunately, despite all the argument-winning, the crisis persists -- an underfunded and underpowered government sector.

I remember when the Federal government had to function on a meager nine-hundred billion dollars a year -- no wonder it couldn't make everything affordable in a sustainable manner! It was argued that by increasing that amount to a mere one trillion (a "more" that actually sounds like "less") we would solve this persistent funding shortfall. But did it? No! Now some people actually argue that seven trillion a year should be enough (that's 7,000 billion dollars). Really? With so much persistent want in the country (especially among lawyers and lobbyists), how will that solve the problem? To hell with trickle-down! I'm for tinkle-upon economics! Who doesn't want to feel that warm flow of federal dollars running down their back?