Memes that made me laugh 67

 

Gathered around the Intertubes over the past seven days.  Click any image for a larger view.

(Learn more about the seax)

More next week.

Peter

Sunday morning music

 

This morning I'd like to explore one song, and how it's been used to express different emotions and stir up feelings in other entertainment genres.

Leonard Cohen rose to prominence in the 1960's.  He wrote poetry, some allegedly under the influence of stimulants, and set it to music, which sometimes led to lyrics that were hard to put into perspective in the context of his life.  Some have been discussed and debated for decades without resolution.  One such song was "Avalanche", from his third album "Songs of Love and Hate", released in 1971.  I've always liked it for its quasi-religious imagery.

Cohen's song became the springboard for various different interpretations.  The first to come to prominence was by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, an Australian rock band.  Their version, from their debut 1984 album "From Her to Eternity", was more gritty and raw than Cohen's, less reflective, more aggressive.

Nick Cave returned to the song almost 30 years later for the soundtrack of the TV series "Black Sails", a four-season prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's novel "Treasure Island".  He re-recorded it in a more reflective, sorrowful, lyrical mood for the closing credits of Season 2, Episode 9, where the character Miranda is killed.  The song expresses Captain Flint's mourning for her.  (A sequence of photographs linking photographs of them from the series to the lyrics of the song may be found here.)  I much prefer this version of the song to Cave's earlier one.

Swedish rock group Ghost (perhaps that should be "satanic rock group", since much of their music appears to be demonic and evil in its themes, lyrics and performance style) covered the song as well, in a harsh, abrasive version that I don't enjoy.  It appeared as a bonus track on the extended CD of their 2018 album "Prequelle".  I won't embed or link to it here, because my beliefs are diametrically opposed to theirs, which I find utterly loathsome and obnoxious;  but if you want to listen to it, you'll find it on YouTube.

Finally, Aimee Mann performed "Avalanche" as the theme song for the 2020 HBO true crime TV series "I'll be Gone in the Dark".  I think she comes closest to Leonard Cohen's personal vision for the song, and I daresay he'd have approved of her version.  I like it very much.

What do you think of "Avalanche"?  Does the song engage you and draw you in, or is its dark imagery mysterious, even incomprehensible?  I enjoy songs that make me think, reflect, consider them in the context of my own life and beliefs.  "Avalanche" certainly does that for me.

Peter

Saturday not-Snippet: The Day After Trinity

 

This morning, instead of a book excerpt, I'd like to mark yesterday's anniversary of the beginning of the nuclear weapons age by introducing you to a 1980 documentary film, "The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb".

At the time of its making, there were several of the original atomic scientists still alive and functional, and able to contribute their memories of the Manhattan Project and the events of July 16, 1945.  I don't think there's ever been a better documentary movie about the atomic bomb.

The event has personal significance for me.  My father served in the Royal Air Force during World War II.  He'd seen what aerial bombardment could do to troops in the field, and to cities and towns.  My mother served as a fire guard during the war, standing on top of buildings armed with a stirrup pump, a bucket of water and a bucket of sand, watching to see where German incendiaries fell and hurrying to extinguish them before they could set the roofs on fire.  Both of them knew at first hand the terrible destruction wrought by bombing . . . but that was thousands of relatively small bombs, relying on a cumulative effect to produce their devastation.

The atomic bomb changed that forever.  Both of them told me, over the years, how shocked and stunned they'd been by the news of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, each by a single bomb of previously unimaginable power.  Mom used to shake her head slowly, as if in pain, as she described how utterly useless she felt as she looked at her stirrup pump and buckets.  They might have provided at least rudimentary protection against incendiaries, but against an atomic bomb, she might as well have spat in random directions, for all the good they'd do.

My father also looked old and tired as we talked about the atomic bomb.  He'd serviced and maintained bomber aircraft as an engineer officer.  He knew how destructive a bomb bay full of 500-pounders or 1,000-pounders could be:  but this new bomb was equivalent to dropping 80,000 500-pounders, or 40,000 1,000-pounders, simultaneously.  That would have taken an attacking force of five to ten thousand pre-1945 bombers to accomplish over Europe, and they couldn't have dropped their bombs simultaneously.  Suddenly, an even greater devastation could be inflicted by one single bomber.  He freely admitted he couldn't wrap his mind around the magnitude of the jump in lethality.  Even the advent of the jet engine towards the end of World War II didn't make as big an impression on him.  The latter was an incremental improvement on propellers and piston engines.  The former . . . there was nothing incremental about it.  It was transformational.  It changed the face of warfare.

I asked Dad once whether, knowing what we do now, he thought that dropping the atomic bomb on Japan had been justified.  He unhesitatingly said that it was.  He pointed out that few modern commenters had any idea of just how vicious the Japanese defense of the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been, and how it had shaken Allied politicians and military leaders.  They knew that if they had to invade Japan by conventional means, they were looking at hundreds of thousands of Allied casualties, probably more than the war-weary populations of their nations were prepared to accept.  What's more, their fanatical resistance could only mean that the Japanese would die by the millions, perhaps by the tens of millions.  The atomic bomb cut short that prospect, and ended the war relatively humanely, at the cost of only a few hundred thousand casualties.  (My father admitted it was bizarre to put it like that, but on reflection, I think he was right.)

Perhaps most important of all from my selfish viewpoint is that, if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, millions of Allied servicemen - including my father - who'd just won the war in Europe would have been sent to Japan to do it all over again.  Untold numbers of them would have become casualties, and the children they later fathered would never have been born.  Dad said to me once, almost casually, that I might owe my existence to the atomic bomb, because dropping it meant he wasn't sent to Japan and into danger yet again.  That's a sobering thought.

At any rate, the Trinity nuclear test - the first explosion of a nuclear weapon in the history of mankind - took place 76 years ago yesterday;  and today marks the 76th anniversary of "The Day After Trinity".  I thought it was worth commemorating it by reminding ourselves of the extraordinary events that produced this breakthrough, one that's simultaneously terrified, intimidated and protected the world since then.  May it never be used in anger again!

Here's the documentary.  It's an hour and a half in length, but I suggest it's worth your time to watch it.  Trinity changed history.  Unless we're very careful, its more advanced descendants may (God forbid!) end history as the human race knows it.

Peter

Don't get shot by police if you're the good guy!

 

I'm sure many of my readers remember the recent tragic death of Johnny Hurley, who stopped an active shooter, but was then killed by responding police officers because he had picked up the shooter's rifle, and was assumed by them to be the guilty party.

Greg Ellifritz, whom we've met in these pages before, has written a lengthy article explaining how best to respond in such situations, and how to avoid being assumed by police to be the guilty party instead of the "good guy".  Here's a brief excerpt.

• After you shoot and the killer is neutralized, don’t keep pointing your gun at him.  Draw your gun back into a compressed ready position.  Hide it with your off hand.  Better yet, holster your gun.  Keep your hand on the gun if you think you may still need it, but you don’t want to be the guy pointing a gun around a pile of dead bodies when the cops arrive.
• If you think you need to cover the downed killer with your pistol, the killer probably needs to be shot again.  In an active killer situation, I’m going to shoot until the bad guy is no longer a threat.  If you shoot him and he goes down, but keeps trying to shoot other people or access his weapons, HE NEEDS TO BE SHOT SOME MORE.  If he has already killed other people and is not obeying your commands to drop his weapon, HE NEEDS TO BE SHOT SOME MORE.  Solve the problem.  Make sure the killer is no longer a threat and then holster your pistol.
• Consider how you look to responding officers.  In order from most threatening to least threatening you could be:

- Aiming gun at the suspect
- At a low ready position
- At a high compressed ready (“chest ready”) or SUL position
- Gun holstered.  Hand on gun.
- Gun holstered.  Hands in the air.
- Gun on the ground.  Hands in the air.

You’ll ultimately have to decide which is the best position to adopt depending on your analysis of how dangerous the suspect remains or the presence of additional suspects.  Just realize that the higher up on the list you appear when the cops arrive, the greater the chance that you will be shot.

There's much more at the link.  Highly recommended reading.

Friends, please remember Mr. Hurley's tragic death.  He saved who knows how many innocent people by killing the criminal . . . only to die himself in a case of mistaken identity.

One can't blame the responding officer, of course.  He was charging into a known "active shooter" situation, intent on saving lives, and didn't have time to ask questions before stopping what he assumed was the perpetrator.  The same could happen to any police officer, or to any of us, if we find ourselves in a similar situation - and, in today's mad, crazy, violent world, it's not impossible that we will.

Let's make sure, as far as we can, that we don't get shot by mistake.  Greg's article is a good starting point in that process.

Peter

I want one!!!

 

The Babylon Bee does it again.

Popular New Ejection Porch Automatically Launches Vaccine Evangelists Into The Stratosphere

An American manufacturer has been overwhelmed with preorders for its brand new "ejection porch," which is specially designed to detect when Biden's vaccine evangelists are at your door so it can launch them into the stratosphere.

Dang!  A product I'd willingly pay big money to buy, but it's only a satire!  Now, if we can just persuade the Bee to partner with an entrepreneurial spirit to actually build it . . . hello?  Calling Mike Lindell?  Mike???

Peter

The "successor ideology" won't stop coming at us

 

Andrew Sullivan, a left-wing writer and commentator, has some sobering thoughts.  I think he's summed up very succinctly the dilemma confronting us, and the dire threat it poses to our constitutional Republic.  Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.

Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget [critical race theory] for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?

What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.

We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences.

Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that “the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.” She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism.

This is the media hub of the “social justice movement.” And the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough. Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy,” designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot.

The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”).

A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing.

. . .

The movement is much broader than race — as anyone who is dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you. The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.” The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy.” And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.

In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence — and you are either fighting this and “on the right side of history,” or you are against it and abetting evil. There is no neutrality. No space for skepticism. No room for debate. No space even for staying silent. (Silence, remember, is violence — perhaps the most profoundly anti-liberal slogan ever invented.)

And that tells you about the will to power behind it. Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. Liberalism is only concerned with your actions. The successor ideology is concerned with your mind, your psyche, and the deepest recesses of your soul. Liberalism will let you do your job, and let you keep your politics private. S.I. will force you into a struggle session as a condition for employment.

. . .

It is absolutely no accident that this illiberal ideology has no qualms whatever with illiberal methods. The latter springs intrinsically from the former. Kendi, feted across the establishment, favors amending the Constitution to appoint an unelected and unaccountable committee of “experts” that has the power to coerce and punish any individual or group anywhere in the country deemed practicing racism. Intent does not matter. And the decisions are final.

. . .

We are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s. This isn’t coming from the ground up. It’s being imposed ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda, and its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown.

There's much more at the link.  Sobering reading, and food for thought.

I don't agree with much of what Andrew Sullivan says or believes.  I don't like or share his politics.  I think he's way off base in many areas . . . but in this, I think his analysis is very persuasive.  Writing from within the liberal camp, he can see the threat to it from its own left wing - and if it threatens him and his "traditional liberal" norms, standards and beliefs, it's doubly threatening to those of us who don't share that outlook on life.

As I've said many times before, there's no voting our way out of this.  Those who stole last November's election did so calculatedly, cynically, and with every intention of making us come to heel.  They want to impose on this country the new order - the "successor ideology" - that Sullivan identifies.  They're gearing up to fight tooth and nail to suppress and eradicate any and all challenges to the election, even though they may be supported by incontrovertible evidence.  If those challenges persist and strengthen, there's no telling what they'll do, not least because they know that if they lose, the consequences for them would be very bad indeed.  I pointed out some time ago:

The progressive Left has committed high treason.  They've subverted and undermined the US political process to steal power from the legitimately elected candidate.  They know that if they ever lose power, those who take the reins from them will want criminal investigation and prosecution of all those involved in that electoral fraud - and one of the penalties for high treason is death.  For the left to allow the right to win would be to commit at least political, if not a very physical suicide.  This they will never do voluntarily.

I fully expect a weaponized Department of Justice and other organs of the present Administration to be actively deployed against what the current, illegitimate "powers that be" regard as dissidents, even traitors (from their perspective).  They've stolen power, and they'll hang onto it by any means necessary, even if that means breaking the laws and the constitution that still theoretically govern us.  Part of this is that they know the punishment that awaits them if they're convicted of electoral fraud on this scale, and they want to avoid that:  but much more of it is that they're convinced that they're right, and we're wrong, and it's their mission, their destiny, to eradicate our false beliefs and make us toe the Party line.  (I would call it a "mission from God", along Blues Brothers lines, but they mostly don't believe in God, so that would be a misnomer.)

Folks, if you haven't yet accepted the reality of our situation, you need to do so now.  We're in a fight for the survival of our constitutional republic - for the survival of freedom itself.  If we lose, there's nowhere else to go.

We stand or fall here - and we'd better not fall, because if we do, we'll be ground into the dirt, and our children and our children's children will never know what it is to be free.

Yes, the struggle will be hard, and it may turn bloody.  God knows, after all I've seen and experienced in six-plus decades on this earth, the last thing in the world that I want is civil war . . . but those seeking to impose their will upon us have no such scruples.  If that's what it'll take to crush us, to force us to conform to their will, they'll do it.  As far as they're concerned, anything goes, because they know they're right in the very depths of their being, and there's no persuading them that they might, just possibly, be wrong.  They're "true believers".

It may be that many of us will have to pay with our lives to preserve the gift our Founding Fathers left us.  Are you willing to pay that price, if need be?

Peter

If the Internet goes down, how will we communicate?

 

I'm by no means a conspiracy theorist.  Nevertheless, the increasing frequency of "Big Brother" forecasts or analyses, followed closely by action that uncannily resembles those forecasts or analyses, is very troubling.  The most obvious example is the Event 201 "global pandemic exercise", held about a year before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.  The similarities between the exercise's simulated events and responses to a pandemic, and the actual responses of world organizations and governments to COVID-19, have not been lost on many observers.  Some have speculated that Event 201 was a deliberate prequel to a man-made pandemic, planning measures to control the populace that could be implemented within a foreseeable timeframe.  "Fact-checkers" have declared that to be nonsense.  Conspiracy theory, or real conspiracy?  You be the judge.

Similar warnings are being bruited about concerning an annual cybersecurity exercise, Cyber Polygon.  The event is sponsored by the World Economic Forum (WEF) (the same organization that promotes the so-called "Great Reset" of world economies, imposing central control and diminishing national autonomy), its focus on internet security and control worries many - including yours truly.  When the head of the WEF publicly demands that we "immunize the internet", I don't get a warm fuzzy feeling about what he means.

The one thing one notices about totalitarian regimes throughout the world - China, Iran, Russia, North Korea and many others - is that they try to control what their citizens can access on the internet.  They don't want the free flow of information;  rather, they want to restrict it, so that their citizens get only the officially approved version of everything, and can't use the internet to organize themselves and exchange independent, uncensored information.  You'll note that when the current unrest broke out in Cuba, one of the first things the government of that country did was to shut down the internet.  Without that ease of communication, it became much more difficult for anti-government forces to organize and coordinate their efforts, and to spread news of the regime's crackdown on demonstrators.

When an organization like the WEF, already on the record as encouraging centralized control of the economy and actively campaigning against national independence, is actively engaged with so-called "internet security" issues, I have to ask . . . why?  Are they actually trying to develop and "war-game" scenarios whereby the internet can be controlled if necessary, preventing the free flow of information between those opposed to such centralized, inherently anti-democratic control?

Let's use our situation in the USA as an example.  Right now, the mainstream media is in the pocket of the Democratic Party and the Biden administration.  News favorable to or promoted by those sources is actively promoted;  news potentially harmful to them, or that doesn't accord with the "party line", is suppressed.  Instapundit has often commented, "Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense".  It certainly does.

Alternative media are usually restricted to the internet to spread their news.  They don't have their own printing presses or television transmitters.  What if the internet were shut down, or censored in some way?  What if they were prevented from publishing news that the powers that be don't want published?  How would the rest of us learn about it?  A good example is the current investigations into electoral fraud in several states.  The mainstream media are universally panning them as unnecessary or fraudulent, while the Biden administration is weaponizing the Justice Department against them.  How would we know what they're uncovering (which is, to say the least, incriminating) without the efforts of alternative news media to publicize it?

There's also the issue of how any "resistance" will communicate if a central government decides to crack down on politically incorrect opposition.  How can opposition be coordinated, planned, and communicated if the easiest and fastest method to do so - the internet - is shut down or restricted?  We have to expect this as a very likely consequence, if the current "woke" revolutionaries decide to stamp out opposition to their insane "Big Brother knows best" propaganda.

There's also the factor that "Big Tech" is almost uniformly in the pocket of the Biden administration - or is it the other way around?  Either way, they are already restricting and censoring communication that isn't politically correct, when it comes to COVID-19, masks, vaccination, etc.  They actively campaigned against President Trump, and are still censoring his public communications and those of his most active supporters.  Even Google Translate, a service used by millions, has been accused of misinterpreting source material to produce a more politically correct translation.  We can't trust Big Tech not to manipulate the internet if asked to do so, or if they decide to do so on their own initiative.

There are, of course, more secure ways for those serious about privacy and security to communicate.  Some use the internet, some don't.  Many of us have used such methods for years to discuss sensitive matters.  However, they tend to be slower and more laborious than taking the easy route of using the internet.  I suspect many won't bother to go to that much effort.  They'd rather trust that the internet will always be available, and not bother to think further than that.

All I can say is, plan for the internet to go down in a crisis, or be taken down by the enemies of freedom and democracy.  That's already the case for millions of people in totalitarian societies.  As the left becomes more and more dictatorial, totalitarian and Big Brother-ish in America, there's no reason it can't happen here, too.

(If Google starts censoring Blogger, or this blog is removed for any reason, you'll find an alternate version on the Web if you look for it.  I've taken steps to preserve it, and get it up and running on an alternate site.  Look for the URL "bayou renaissance man dot com" [removing the spaces], or check with other blogs that may have links to it.  I'll hopefully be able to post links to their alternate sites as well.)

Peter

South Africa: "Make the country ungovernable" is still a factor

 

The current unrest and destruction in South Africa, about which we spoke yesterday, can be traced all the way back to a deliberate policy choice of the African National Congress (ANC) during the 1980's, when that organization was still banned and functioned as a resistance movement.  It called at the time to make South Africa ungovernable, as part of the war against apartheid.  The notorious encouragement to murder farmers and their families also dates back to this period.

An early indication of the direction that the ANC/SACP was moving in, when it came to the land question, was contained in the ANC National Executive Committee’s January 8th statement of 1984 delivered by Oliver Tambo, which also made the call for South Africa to be made ungovernable. This stated that:

“On the commercial farms, the most merciless brutalisation of our people, especially women and children, takes place, every day and every hour of the day at the hands of the landowners. One of the fundamental elements for the solution of the problems facing our people in the countryside is the resolution of the land question in favour of the tillers. Our immediate task, therefore, is to mobilise the rural masses around the question of land. It is only when the countryside is organised that the rural masses will be able to respond resolutely to the call: ‘Seize the land!’"

Tambo’s January 8th statement in 1985 returned to the importance of organising in the farming areas of the country and placing “the perspective of seizing the land from the dispossessor in front of our rural masses and educate them to understand that this is a task that calls for dedication, determination and sacrifice.” This address stated “The dispossession of our people of the land that is theirs remains one of the most burning national grievances….Millions of our people in the rural areas are brutally exploited as agricultural workers on farms carved out of their ancestral lands. Their daily lives are dominated by the dictates of the racist White farmers and agricultural companies against whom they have absolutely no redress, because they are the least organised and mobilised.” It then delivered the ominous warning, “The land question must be resolved, if needs be, the hard way.”

While the ANC leadership remained cautious around the selection of targets for MK, for which they and their Western (if not Soviet-bloc) funders and backers would have to account, they were far less discriminating when it came to their efforts to incite violence by their supporters. Whatever horrors and excesses resulted could plausibly be ascribed to justified outrage at the injustices and oppression that black South Africans had had to endure for decades under the apartheid system, or as a reaction to the brutal and often murderous state response to the insurrection.

There's more at the link.

I was there at the time, of course.  I well remember the calls to "make the country ungovernable".  Measures included "rent boycotts" and "electricity boycotts", where residents of racially segregated black townships were encouraged (and in many cases forced at gunpoint) to refuse to pay their rent, electric bills, etc.  So widespread did this become that many townships were economically crippled, their administrations unable to pay workers or buy the necessary parts and equipment to perform essential services.  Other measures included boycotting white-owned businesses.  This was brutally enforced, including making housewives who broke the boycott drink the liquid soap and cooking oil that they'd bought to feed and sustain their families.  Others were beaten, some were shot.  Forced compliance through terror was the order of the day, and resistance or disobedience was branded as support for apartheid, with potentially lethal consequences.  Any shops in or near black townships were in constant danger of being looted and burned as part of "nationalizing" white businesses by force - whether or not they were owned by whites.

This had devastating consequences for those who only wanted to live as peacefully as possible.  Some years ago, I wrote about my experiences during one such event.  It had a profound impact on me, and changed the course of my life.

At the end of the apartheid era and the start of a fully democratic South Africa, this created an ongoing problem.  After a decade or more of refusing (or being threatened to make them refuse) to pay rent and utility costs, many township residents came to assume that these services would be supplied to them as of right, and saw no reason to resume paying for them.  (Endemic unemployment and poverty provided plenty of immediate justification to those who thought that way.  After all, was not "liberation" supposed to make them free?  Then why did it not include housing, services, etc. - also free?)  The fact that many black South Africans were economically illiterate, as a direct result of the abysmally poor and deliberately inferior standards of "Bantu education" in that country, was undoubtedly an important factor in such attitudes.  The concept that somebody had to pay for such services was incomprehensible to many.

Just as attacks on white farmers have never died down since the mid-1980's "militarization" (or should that be "terrorization"?) of the land struggle, so the instinctive response to boycott oppressive regime structures has never gone away since it was deliberately encouraged and inculcated during the same period.  Therefore, to see residents of still largely segregated areas (this time de facto rather than de jure, but still the fruit of apartheid policies that had initially set them aside for a particular race group) rioting, destroying township infrastructure, and attacking businesses to take what they need or want rather than paying for it, is in so many words a continuance of the habits they were encouraged to adopt during apartheid.

The ANC now forms the government of South Africa.  It's bitterly ironic that its calls to "make the country ungovernable" during its struggle against the apartheid regime are now bearing poisoned fruit in its own struggle to govern a post-apartheid South Africa.  The fact that the ANC's problems are largely caused by inefficiency, corruption, nepotism and just plain criminality, rather than by resisting an entrenched racist government, is neither here nor there.  It's become as unpopular among broad swaths of the population as the apartheid government ever was, and it's being resisted in the same way.  "The biter, bit."

I said, back in 1994, that I thought it would take at least two generations for the bitterness and brutality of the apartheid years to work their way out of South African society and allow a truly democratic nation to grow from their ashes.  Reckoning a generation at 25 years, we've only just entered the second of those generations.  When it ends, will the residue of the years of struggle and revolution have had enough time to abate?  Right now, it sure doesn't look that way…  I might have to adjust my forecast to three, or even four generations.

*Sigh*

Peter

Our entertainment choices are changing the world around us

 

Wolf Richter recently pointed out how Disney's new model of releasing movies was impacting traditional movie-watching habits.

During its opening weekend, Black Widow brought in $80 million at box office ticket sales in North America. This was only a “record” for any movie since March 2020, a “pandemic record,” so to speak.

But these ticket sales lagged far behind the actual records set during opening weekends by other movies. According to movie data tracker, The Numbers, those ticket sales were in 98th place!

And they were 78% lower than the record debut weekend for a movie, “Avengers: Endgame,” which premiered in April 2019 and grossed $357 million at theaters in North America during the first weekend.

The brutal reality for brick-and-mortar theaters now:

• “Avengers: Endgame” played in 4,662 theaters the weekend it premiered; on average each theater grossed $76,601.
• “Black Widow” played in 4,160 theaters over the weekend; on average each theater grossed $19,231. That’s what this “record” means for movie theater chains.

. . .

Walt Disney disclosed the other fascinating thing about the plight of brick-and-mortar movie theaters: It had raked in $60 million from streaming “Black Widow” over the weekend on Disney+, for $29.99 per home, on top of the monthly subscription fee, no theaters involved.

Disney gets a cut of maybe less than 50% of the $80 million in box office ticket sales. But it gets 100% of the $60 million it took in via Disney+.

This … shows the very chilling prospects for brick-and-mortar theaters.

What changed during the pandemic was Disney’s decision to release movies simultaneously in movie theaters and on Disney+.

So now, some people can go to a theater to watch a movie when it premiers and make an event out of it; others can watch the movie at home when it premiers, the whole family for $29.99, which cheap soda and popcorn thrown in on top.

. . .

… the power relationship between studios and theater chains has changed forever. And studios have their own streaming services. If theater chains try to boycott a movie, so be it; they will just push more people to the streaming service.

There's more at the link.

I grew up in an era when "going to the movies" was a real treat.  In South Africa, of course, we had no television at the time (it was only introduced in the 1970's, for various religious and cultural reasons), so as far as "modern" visual entertainment went, the movie theater was it.  There were no other options.  Even so, the Saturday morning movies for kids put on at our local cinema were special occasions, and to be deprived of them was a huge blow to a child.

Even as an adult, with TV available, an evening excursion to a movie theater was somehow "special";  freely available, but a choice to be ranked alongside many other forms of entertainment.  Some movies, such as the Star Wars trilogy, were far and away best watched on the big screen.  They just didn't have the same impact or immediacy when viewed on a goggle-box.

Now, however . . . there are whole generations who've grown up regarding the TV as their primary form of visual entertainment.  The sale of outsize screens for "home theaters" has become a normal feature of the marketing landscape.  The pandemic merely hastened an already-growing trend:  it was no longer necessary to go outside the home to watch visual entertainment.  Even sports crowds were dwindling as more and more people discovered that the close-ups, replays and commentary available on TV made the game more interesting at home, and a heck of a lot cheaper than being bled by stadium ticket and concessionaire pricing.

I'm not sure what this means for more traditional forms of live entertainment such as classical music, ballet, opera and the like.  I used to enjoy visits to a symphony concert.  The Cape Town Symphony Orchestra used to perform every week at very reasonable ticket prices, and people would dress up and attend with season tickets.  Frequent "low-brow" concerts, at lower ticket costs and without dress codes, were also held, making classical music available to everyone at accessible prices.  Now?  The pandemic has disrupted all that, on top of the impact of home viewing, the availability of HD recordings of concerts, operas, etc., and the growing complications surrounding planning a night out (babysitting, transport, parking, weather, and now the risk of demonstrations and riots as well).  Can classical music and its associated arts recover from that blow?  Can they survive without an audience?

What about art?  Will consumers make the trek to see a famous painting or statue in person, or will they be content to watch a TV program about it, complete with close-ups, commentary, etc.?  What about museums?  There are plenty of TV channels dedicated to history, science, technology, etc.  Is it worthwhile to many younger people to go to a museum to see a famous aircraft, or the skeleton of a dinosaur, or whatever, when they can learn all about it on the goggle-box?

As far as movie theaters go, the big production companies are increasingly eager to glom onto every dollar they can make, at the expense of sharing their income with distributors, exhibitors and other associates.  If it's more profitable for them to direct most of their marketing effort to home entertainment, they'll do so in a heartbeat.  I'd hate to be a theater operator today - cinema, concert, or whatever.  The economics of staying in business amid a sea change in the way they do business must be daunting, and I'm not sure the latter can be made to work.  One can't automate many of the functions involved, so it's hard to save money on personnel costs, and one must deal with all the competition from lower-cost home entertainment.  Can the neighborhood movie theater, or the city symphony concert hall, survive?  One can't be sure.

Will our children grow up with such entertainment venues and habits still available?  Who knows?  And does it matter, except to nostalgic oldsters like us?

Peter

Chickens come home to roost in South Africa

 

The current rioting and unrest in South Africa was sparked by the imprisonment of former President Zuma, but its roots go back much, much further.  Zuma was merely the spark that lit a fuse long laid and prepared.  The BBC reports:

The death toll in South Africa has risen to 72 as violence continues across the country following the jailing of former President Jacob Zuma.

Crowds looting and setting alight shopping centres clashed with police in several cities on Tuesday.

. . .

President Cyril Ramaphosa has called it some of the worst violence witnessed in South Africa since the 1990s, before the end of apartheid, with fires started, highways blocked and businesses and warehouses looted in major cities and small towns in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces.

Ministers have warned that if looting continues, there is a risk areas could run out of basic food supplies soon - but have ruled out declaring a state of emergency.

. . .

More than 200 shopping malls had been looted by Monday afternoon, Bloomberg news agency quoted the chief executive officer of Business Leadership South Africa, Busisiwe Mavuso, as saying.

Several shopping centres in Soweto - South Africa's largest township which was once home to Nelson Mandela - have been completely ransacked, with ATMs broken into, restaurants, stores selling alcohol and clothing shops all left in tatters.

Soldiers working with the police managed to catch a few rioters; in total almost 800 have been arrested, but law enforcement remains heavily outnumbered, he reports.

In KwaZulu-Natal - where livestock has also been stolen - the unrest continues with ambulances coming under attack by rioters in some areas, South Africa's TimesLive news site reports.

Video footage shows that a blood bank was looted in Durban as Mr Ramaphosa addressed the nation on Monday night.

. . .

Low income levels and unemployment - standing at a record high of 32.6% among the workforce and even higher at 46.3% among young people - are seen as the ticking bombs that have exploded.

There's more at the link.

There are many lessons to be learned from the current unrest in South Africa.  Kim du Toit, a fellow South African expatriate, addresses many of them in a blog post this morning.  Here's an excerpt.

The mayhem of the last 48 hours has wiped out our supply chain in KZN. Last week it was there, but today its gone. That complex web of transactions that moves goods across the landscape, like an army of ants on a single minded mission, each moving their package relentlessly throughout the colony of ants. Our network is now gone.

So as the day dawns I can reliably predict that we will rapidly start to encounter shortages of crucial goods like fuel for motor vehicles, food for hungry stomachs, medication for the sick, cash to grease the wheels of trade and spare parts to keep the machinery of commerce going.

ATMs are gone, so we will rapidly run out of cash. Grocery stores have been destroyed, so even if they can procure goods from the warehouses now burned to the ground, they will be unable to transact because the tills are gone and the point of payment card machines destroyed. The retail malls have been so destroyed that it will take months to rebuild them. More importantly, the Clicks and Diskem pharmacy chains that are the most efficient delivery vehicles for the national vaccine rollout, are simply no more.

I therefore predict an acute shortage of fuel, food and medication. These three things will hit almost everyone, and very soon.

More at the link, and highly recommended reading.  As Kim notes, "Anyone who thinks this can’t or won’t happen here is deluding himself ... think Minneapolis and Ferguson, times ten.  I see burned-out city centers, and rampant poverty and lawlessness therein."

There are many issues besides unemployment that have raised tensions in South Africa, but it's probably the biggest single problem confronting the country.  Inadequate education and a lack of resources and facilities - a problem going back generations - has meant that many of the country's youth are not only unemployed, but unemployable in a modern economy.  They're educated only sufficiently to perform manual labor, not for anything more demanding of skills and logical reasoning - and in a modern economy, there's only so much demand for manual labor.

Another issue coming to the fore during the rioting is widespread xenophobia.  Millions of people from other African countries and South-East Asia have migrated illegally to South Africa, because poor though its economy may be, it's light years ahead of most other African nations, and offers at least the prospect of earning enough to support a family.  However, South Africans - particularly those less educated, competing for a limited number of jobs - regard them as intruders, taking the bread out of the mouths of locals.  There have been riots in the past about this, and killings too.  I rather suspect that the current unrest will serve as cover for more of the same.

The fundamental problem remains that South Africa's economy is simply too small to accommodate massive population growth.  That was aggravated by an exodus of many qualified people, mostly white, who found themselves increasingly discriminated against following the end of apartheid in 1994.  Basically, anyone - of any race - who had the skills and education necessary to qualify for emigration to any nation offering better prospects has already taken advantage of that.  One can't blame them, of course.  (I didn't leave South Africa for economic or political reasons, but I certainly took advantage of the opportunity when it arose.  Quite frankly, it's probably the only reason I'm still alive.  The life-threatening pressures and tensions of the period 1976-1994, from the Soweto uprising to the first fully democratic elections, took their toll on me, and I'm sure contributed greatly to my heart condition.  Stress will do that to you.)

Widespread poverty, corruption and nepotism have led to the current unrest.  The Zuma controversy was merely "the last straw that broke the camel's back".  There's no solution in sight, and as long as the present government continues in office, I doubt one will be forthcoming.  If the ANC is voted out of office, the odds are very good that it'll be replaced by a far more radical, extremist party that will push the country into hard-line socialism, if not actual communism.  That may be the death knell for South Africa as we know it.

I'm sure there'll be some who claim that this would never have happened under a white government.  They're wrong, because they ignore demographics.  Rule by a racial minority that, as a proportion of the South African population, was becoming ever more of a minority with every passing year, was fundamentally unsustainable.  Demography is inexorable and relentless.  Its numbers don't lie.  Apartheid was a desperate attempt to deny the undeniable, to delay the inevitable - and, inevitably, it failed.  However, largely due to its failure to promote an overall South African national identity and properly educate its people as a whole, apartheid must bear its fair share of the blame for the mess in which South Africa finds itself at present.  It's not solely responsible, but it's right up there with other factors.

Of course, there are those who'll have different views to mine.  In the interests of fairness and a broader perspective, see this video interview yesterday between Lauren Southern (whom I regard as a white nationalist extremist) and Ian Cameron, a firearms and personal defense advocate in South Africa.  I agree with some, but by no means all, of what Mr. Cameron has to say.  There are many who'd be more on his side than mine.

Peter

If you use a lot of flour, pasta or cooking oil, take note

 

There are growing reports that the wheat harvest this year is likely to be severely affected by drought.  Instapundit linked to this report from a farmer and agronomist on Facebook:

PSA for anyone who eats in the US or Canada. This year's wheat harvest is shaping up as dreadful. Durum, used for pasta and bread flour, looks to be the worst in at least 60 years. Soft White Winter wheat, used for pastry flour, and Hard Red Winter [all-purpose] are facing the worst harvests since the 1988 drought.

This is a good time to stock up and hoard, since the news is not widely known. Pasta keeps just about forever and a doubling in price is not inconceivable. Same with assorted flours if you bake at home, except flours should be stored in a freezer to prevent damage from Indian Meal Moth and other bugs. Bread also freezes quite well, and will do just fine for at least a year, probably two.

Canola oil is also likely to see a price jump, as the crops across Alberta and Saskatchewan have also been clobbered. It also keeps well for years.

A report from Reuters confirms the above forecast.

Hot, dry weather has swept through western North America, contributing to hundreds of deaths, igniting wildfires and roiling canola and wheat markets in one of the world's most fertile regions. Canada's Prairies produce more canola, used to make vegetable oil and animal feed, than any other global region.

The result of the heat wave is a potential worst-case scenario where … canola may reach only 20% of last year's yield.

. . .

Worries about heat damage have driven canola futures to a new high for harvest delivery and taken spring wheat futures to the highest in eight years.

Spring wheat, another major Canadian export, is also struggling on the Prairies and in North Dakota, the biggest U.S. producer of the crop. In that state, 50% of spring wheat is in poor or very poor condition as of July 4, according to the North Dakota Wheat Commission.

There's more at the link.

Drought conditions are widespread and unrelenting.  Consider the current drought map as of July 6 (click the image for a larger view, and click the link for a newer version).

Reuters reported last month:

A harsh drought grew more severe across major parts of the U.S. farm belt this week, threatening recently planted corn, soybean and spring wheat crops in Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas ... the severe moisture deficits suggest crop yields in key U.S. production areas remain at risk.

Drought has already scorched much of the U.S. West, prompting farmers in California to leave fields fallow and triggering water and energy rationing in several states.

Crop development in the central U.S. is highly watched this year as grain and oilseed prices hover around the highest in a nearly a decade and global supplies tighten.

About 41% of Iowa, the nation's top corn producer and No. 2 soybean state, was under severe drought as of Tuesday, up from less than 10% a week earlier, according to the weekly U.S. drought monitor published on Thursday.

Cooler weather this weekend and some rain through next week will bring some relief to crops in the western Corn Belt, although far northern areas may see less rain.

"Montana, Nebraska, Minnesota and even northern Iowa would still be a little shortchanged, especially the Dakotas," Keeney said.

Conditions in North Dakota, the top producer of high-protein spring wheat that is used in bread and pizza dough, remained dire, with about two-thirds of the state under extreme or exceptional drought, the most severe categories.

Again, more at the link.

Of course, this will affect many crops, not just wheat or canola.  California is the primary supplier of many root and leaf vegetables eaten in the USA, and it's being severely affected by drought.

What's more, this is going to have a knock-on effect far beyond our borders.  Many nations rely on imported crops from North America to supply their needs.  If that source dries up (literally), they'll have to find what they need (or alternative foodstuffs) elsewhere - and that will mean short supplies worldwide, including of products that we need in the USA and import from other countries.  Think "vicious circle" and you won't be far wrong.

If you bake a lot, or make your own bread, or rely on pasta as a staple dish, you might want to stock up while the going's good.  Think of it as expanding your emergency food reserve.  This time, fortunately, the shortage is predictable, and you have a little time to prepare for it.  As for fresh fruit and vegetables, if supply shortages come along, we'll just have to make do with what we can get.  Expect frozen and canned fruits and vegetables to become harder to get and more expensive.

As for canola and other cooking oils, I suggest this is also a good time to stock up.  I'd try for at least six months' worth in your pantry, if not more.  I don't think it'll dry up completely, but I suspect it'll get considerably more expensive, which will drive up the cost of alternative products as well.

(In case you think that stocking up in advance of shortages is somehow selfish or "hoarding", note that Popeyes has been stockpiling chicken for months.  It's neither selfish nor "hoarding" - it's sound common sense, and makes business sense too.)

Peter

Not your usual wasteline…

 

Found on MeWe, in a comment to a post asking for information about concealed carry holsters:

I've been using a Cross Breed inside the waste band for my LC9, and it works great.

"Waste" band?  Does that mean the commenter is attaching the holster inside her colostomy bag support band?  That could lend an entirely new and unsanitary meaning to the term "quick draw"!

Sorry.  Sometimes my sense of the irreverent takes over!

On the subject of "waste bands" (sic) and the like:  a friend of mine came out of hospital several years (decades!) ago, wearing a catheter and a urine bag for a few days to speed his recovery after an operation.  He described going home as a mixed blessing.  It was great to be with his wife and kids again - until about five o'clock the next morning, when his two young girls bounced onto the marital bed and demanded that Daddy wake up and play with them.  Guess where they landed?  You got it… right on his urine bag.  I quote:  "Have you ever tried to pee backwards?  It sheds a new and horrible light on the human condition!"  Apparently his wife was torn between sympathy at his pain, trying to shield their daughters' ears from his (very and explicitly vocal) reaction, and helpless laughter…

Peter