Welcome to Friday July 12, 2024, and National French Fry Day. When you want fries, you want a LOT of fries. Here’s a big cone of fries (it’s actually a “small” one) of “patats” that I got not long ago in Amsterdam. I ordered mayo, the traditional topping as the sauce. If you haven’t tried fries with mayo, do make an effort. I used to think the combination would be disgusting, but it’s delicious!
It’s also National Michelada Day (beer and tomato juice; don’t knock it till you’ve tried it), National Pecan Pie Day (the BEST pie!), World Kebab Day, and National Eat Your Jell-O Day (when’s the last time you had Jell-O?).
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 12 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Obituaries first, and this is a sad one. Shelly Duvall died at 75.
Shelley Duvall, whose lithesome features and quirky screen personality made her one of the biggest film stars of the 1970s, appearing in a string of movies by the director Robert Altman and, perhaps most memorably, opposite Jack Nicholson in “The Shining,” died on Thursday at her home in Blanco, Texas. She was 75.
A family spokesman said the cause was complications of diabetes.
Ms. Duvall wasn’t planning on a film career when she met Mr. Altman while he was filming “Brewster McCloud” (1970); she had thrown a party to sell her husband’s artwork, and members of his film crew were in attendance. Taken with her, they introduced her to Mr. Altman, a director with his own reputation for oddball movies and offbeat casting. He immediately asked her to join the cast, despite her lack of training.
She said yes — and went on to appear in an unbroken string of five more movies directed by Mr. Altman: “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (1971), “Thieves Like Us” (1974), “Nashville” (1975), “Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson” (1976) and “Three Women” (1977). She also starred as Olive Oyl opposite Robin Williams in “Popeye” (1980).
“I thought: boy, if it’s this easy, why doesn’t everybody act?” she told The New York Times in April.
Her work with Mr. Altman cemented Ms. Duvall’s career; with her gossamer frame and toothy smile, she was the go-to actress for any role that called for an out-of-the-ordinary performance.
She dated Paul Simon and Ringo Starr. She hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 1977. Photos of Ms. Duvall, often wearing a draping, sheer dress and holding a cigarette almost as long and thin as she was, became an enduring image of 1970s celebrity life.
But it was her appearance as Wendy Torrance in “The Shining” (1980) that, for many viewers, remains her most memorable role. In that movie, she and her husband, Jack (Mr. Nicholson), along with their son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), move into a mountainside hotel as caretakers while it is shut down for the winter.
Here’s director Robert Altman explaining the casting. There was NOBODY more suited to play Olive Oyl (note that Gilda Radner was the first choice). Sound up.
@shelleyduvallxo Shoutout to Robert Altman for pushing Shelley to be Olive Oyl, which turned into the role of a lifetime! 👏🏻 #shelleyduvall #moviefacts #cinema #movieclips #popeye #helloimshelleyduvall #interview
*This was a predictable NYT op-ed by the editorial board (not that I disagee): “Donald Trump is unfit to lead” (archived here).
The Republican Party once pursued electoral power in service to solutions for such problems, to building “the shining city on a hill,” as Ronald Reagan liked to say. Its vision of the United States — embodied in principled public servants like George H.W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney — was rooted in the values of freedom, sacrifice, individual responsibility and the common good. The party’s conception of those values was reflected in its longstanding conservative policy agenda, and today many Republicans set aside their concerns about Mr. Trump because of his positions on immigration, trade and taxes. But the stakes of this election are not fundamentally about policy disagreements. The stakes are more foundational: what qualities matter most in America’s president and commander in chief.
Mr. Trump has shown a character unworthy of the responsibilities of the presidency. He has demonstrated an utter lack of respect for the Constitution, the rule of law and the American people. Instead of a cogent vision for the country’s future, Mr. Trump is animated by a thirst for political power: to use the levers of government to advance his interests, satisfy his impulses and exact retribution against those who he thinks have wronged him.
He is, quite simply, unfit to lead.
The Democrats are rightly engaged in their own debate about whether President Biden is the right person to carry the party’s nomination into the election, given widespread concerns among voters about his age-related fitness. This debate is so intense because of legitimate concerns that Mr. Trump may present a danger to the country, its strength, security and national character — and that a compelling Democratic alternative is the only thing that would prevent his return to power. It is a national tragedy that the Republicans have failed to have a similar debate about the manifest moral and temperamental unfitness of their standard-bearer, instead setting aside their longstanding values, closing ranks and choosing to overlook what those who worked most closely with the former president have described as his systematic dishonesty, corruption, cruelty and incompetence.
That task now falls to the American people. We urge voters to see the dangers of a second Trump term clearly and to reject it. The stakes and significance of the presidency demand a person who has essential qualities and values to earn our trust, and on each one, Donald Trump fails.
This is also a call for Biden to step down, of course, something the NYT has already called for.
*You’ve probably heard that actor Alec Baldwin is on trial for shooting two people (and killing the cinematographer) during the filiming of the movie “Rust.” He was handed a gun that the armorer assured him it was not loaded. It was. Now he’s on trial for involuntary manslaughter. I never understood why, since the responsibility for making sure the gun wasn’t loaded was not his. At first they weren’t going to try him, but now he faces jail time (the armorer got only 18 months). Over at the Free Press, Kat Rosenfield explains why this trial is misguided.
What happened that day, in October 2021, was a horrible tragedy, but also unambiguously an accident—and yet, Baldwin has been subjected to an unusually zealous prosecution by New Mexico authorities. It’s a case that illuminates just how complex things can get when criminal justice intersects with a person’s celebrity status.
The prosecution’s motivations in the case are myriad, including a grudge on the part of the district attorney who initially brought charges against Baldwin. In a recent New York Times deep dive, Mary Carmack-Altwies said her decision was influenced by the fact Baldwin gave an interview to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in December 2021 to share his side of the story. She told the Times she found it enraging: “This guy, how dare he?”
If the man on trial were not a celebrity, we might recognize the gross authoritarianism of this: a tragic but accidental death escalated to a felony trial, just because the prosecutor took exception to the defendant’s exercise of his First Amendment rights.
Baldwin may, in fact, still serve jail time, depending on whether a jury finds that he was grossly negligent in his handling of the prop gun. It’s a tenet of basic firearm safety to never point a weapon at anyone, loaded or not. But some movie scenes require guns to be plausibly aimed at people, so it’s also a tenet to have a crew member on set whose sole job it is to make sure none of the weapons contain live ammunition.
On the set of Rust, that person was armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed—who first allowed real bullets to be mixed with the set’s dummy rounds, then allowed one of those bullets to make it into the chamber of the revolver she handed to Alec Baldwin, assuring him as she did that it wasn’t loaded.
This spring, Gutierrez-Reed was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison, but the media’s treatment of her has been tempered with sympathy, invariably mentioning how inexperienced she was, how overworked and underpaid. But Gutierrez-Reed wasn’t famous. Alec Baldwin is, which puts him at a disadvantage in a world where celebrity trials are treated like a spectator sport.
I still don’t see why aiming a gun that someone is paid to ensure is unloaded can be considered a felony, especially because guns are aimed in movies all the time. Perhaps some lawyer can explain.
*John McWhorter’s new op-ed explains: “What a linguist hears when Biden speaks.” (h/t Peggy).
Biden has never been the most starchy of orators, but many observers, myself included, were struck by how far his sentences had strayed from the complexities and subtleties he once controlled effortlessly. It is alarming to see someone who is asking to be elected president of the United States — someone who already serves as president of the United States — communicate in such an ineffective manner. But what is actually going on there, linguistically? One way to understand what is happening is to think of it as unraveling.
For all of the attention that the shaggy text flow he slips into at times gets, such as when he seemed to say that he was the first Black vice president, it’s not pidgin-like, and needn’t be alarming. Such a lack of elocution — which Donald Trump is also quite given to — is mainly a symptom of casualness, not pathology. We tend to underestimate the extent to which context, facial expression and intonation clarify the words we speak, including when we are addressing two or three topics at a time within the same stretch of speech.
Other aspects of his speech are more suggestive of unraveling. In his interview last week with George Stephanopoulos, Biden repeatedly used verbless chunks in the place of sentences, with utterances such as “No indication of any serious condition,” “Nobody’s fault, mine” and “Large crowds, overwhelming response, no slipping.” This is hardly unknown in casual speech, but Biden leaned on it a lot given the gravity of the interview. The linguist Ljiljana Progovac has described such inert word sequences as “living fossils” of earlier stages in the development of human language, before people combined those chunks into the flowing, complex sentences we are familiar with.
In other words, Biden is linguistically de-evolving. A bit more:
Biden’s control of suffixes also appears to be slipping. Most discussed has been his “I did the goodest job as I know I can do,” which suggested that he had forgotten that “good” does not take the superlative suffix but rather the modifier “best.” I’m pretty sure I hear him early in the interview saying “preparance” rather than “preparation.” That, too, made me think of pidgins, which have very few or even no suffixes.
Added to this is Biden seeming more generally to lose sight of the social levels of the language. Pidgins do not usually have “high” and “low” vocabulary or sentence styles. In the same interview Biden tossed off “Whatever the hell it is,” while in another interview he said “I’ll be damned if I let this S.O. — excuse me, this president …” Yes, Trump lets off the occasional cuss word, and public language these days is much less buttoned up than it used to be. But imagine Barack Obama using this kind of language in such interviews, or, if we grant Biden his salt-of-the-earth Scranton guy image, Bill Clinton.
McWhorter’s summary:
Any one of these examples would have been unremarkable on its own. The issue is that they piled up to such a degree, in contexts in which a more considered style of expression is the order of the day. In particular, they are occurring at the very moment that the president is trying to reassure the nation that he is in complete control of his verbal faculties. Biden was never exactly Churchillian, but even in interviews as recent as four years ago, the contrast to the present is striking.
In the end, informality and a messy imagination are one thing. The rapid decline of complex sentence structure into something even distantly resembling pidgin is another. Pidgins do a basic job but aren’t designed for detail, grace or suasion. Increasingly, Biden’s speech submits to an alarmingly similar judgment.
It’s hard to find any expert: doctor, political observer, and now a linguist, who isn’t worried about Biden’t mental acuity.
*From Bill: A video of a neurologist who assesses Biden’s mentation. She’s very careful and gives lots of caveats, but does conclude that she’s very concerned, that Biden should have a full several-day cognitive test, and that “she wouldn’t be surprised if Biden had a neurocognitive disorder.”
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,
Hili: When I was little there was a huge old apricot tree here.A: Unfortunately, we had to cut it down because it was rotten.
Hili: Jak byłam mała to tu była ogromna, stara morela.Ja: Niestety, trzeba było ją ściąć, bo uschła.
And Szaron, the world’s most affectionate cat, though somewhat blurry:
*******************
From Malcolm; note the grammatical error (it could be remedied by adding “do” to the end of the sentence).
From Cat Memes:
From Science Humor via Haiasi Sötnás. It’s an excellent meme:
From Masih: a woman sanctioned for singing:
Recently at Aspen Ideas, I mentioned that the Islamic Republic in Iran bans women from singing, claiming it arouses men. Shiama Moazzami, a nurse and singer whose uplifting videos for sick children went viral, revealed her absence from social media was due to “verbal warnings and… https://t.co/q6sqrytcXP pic.twitter.com/JmIzI1X90z
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) July 11, 2024
From Barry: Kay and Peel on advice for a gay wedding:
From Malcolm; miners escape danger. Judging by the jubilation, I think they all escaped.
Congolese miners escaping a collapsed gold mine
— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) July 6, 2024
From my feed. First, look at that proud tail! It must be a Maine Coon:
Look at that tail!😮🤩 pic.twitter.com/rqqbNjcrbk
— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) July 10, 2024
Watch till the end:
Perspective
[📹 lexbu]pic.twitter.com/zOAjHpNTkL
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 11, 2024
From Bill; have a gander at what Palestinian kids learn in UNRWA schools. And yet the whole world funds UNRWA!
Ever wondered what education UNRWA 🇺🇳 provides?
There you go 👇
“Stabbing Jews brings dignity to the Palestinians”
“We have to constantly stab them”
“I want to fight against Jews”
“They teach us that Jews are terrorists”
“I am ready to stab a Jew, and drive a car over them” pic.twitter.com/gYTVvtU80X— Vivid.🇮🇱 (@VividProwess) July 10, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial: 7,000 gassed to death in 3 days:
10-12 July 1944 | After selections made by SS at the BIIb sector of #Auschwitz II-Birkenau (a so-called family camp for Jews deported from #Theresienstadt ghetto) some 3,000 people were transferred to other camps & the remaining some 7,000 were murdered in gas chambers. https://t.co/ZivpGMLkIo
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) July 11, 2024
Two tweets from Matthew. The first one shows how diligent he is writing his Crick biography. He paid £8 to get this magazine on eBay, and it was disappointing:
23 May 1994, Francis Crick appeared on Start the Week on @BBCRadio4. The programme was chaired by Melvyn Bragg and also featured Maya Angelou, Tom Stoppard and Salman Rushdie. I decided to buy an old copy of Radio Times and reproduce the listing in my Crick biography… pic.twitter.com/WWfj5fiXP7
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) July 11, 2024
I love these “scale” videos:
The scale of the microscopic.
📽: MetaBallStudios pic.twitter.com/2H5tNeU71I
— Wonder of Science (@wonderofscience) July 6, 2024
Beer and tomato juice sounds terrible – and probably worse at 7am than later in the day. But the wikipedia description of michelada “a Mexican drink made with beer, lime juice, assorted sauces (often chili-based), spices, and chili peppers. It is served in a chilled, salt-rimmed glass.” has a bit more promise. Happy Friday
French fries and tartar sauce are the best!
Is anything wrong with just salt and vinegar “as god intended”?
(I have to admit I kind of like them with tartar sauce too)
That is good. But I’d wager dipping hot fries into a vanilla milkshake is even better.
Or a in chocolate milk shake with an excellent hamburger?
That can’t be wrong. For me, vanilla works better in this circumstance.
A “several-day cognitive test”? Hell, I’m five years younger than Uncle Joe and I am sure that I would not fair well or at least above the mean or median expectation. I get worked up and worried about the annual five minute Medicare cognitive check each summer…will I remember the words? Will they call my wife to drive me home if I miss one? Joe Biden must be “on” 12-16 hours a day. He has an incredible command of U.S. history and foreign policy from more than 50 years of living and creating much of it. John M, I do not worry much about the informality of his verbal discussions, since real treaties, agreements and deals are carefully written and vetted by layers of staff expertise. All this carrying on about a soft target while tRump whistles past the graveyard. Shame on you bullies.
I am not sure Vice President Trump and President Putin of the Ukraine would agree with you.
12-16 hours a day pretty much all recorded, Dr B. Point is I am extremely confident that no mis-speaks find their way into formal written agreements….because they are simply mis-speaks….at least in Biden’s case!
Hear, hear!
Jim, before you call those, who think that Biden should not run for a second term, bullies (“Shame on you bullies.”), please explain to us why an 81-year old must be president again. Why can’t he retire? What is shameful about being an 82-year old retiree?
You write:
How about worrying more about whether Biden, because of his advanced age (and his recent debate performance), won’t be able to beat Trump in the presidential election? After all, about 70% of swing voters (or independents), who are going to decide the election, think that Biden is too old for a second term as president.
My “bullies” are those who pile on that he is unfit for another term finding this and that to denigrate. No, I think that he has provided an incredible career of public service to the nation and surely is deserving of a comfortable retirement if he wanted it. But it appears that he still has some things that he thinks he can shape and do. And surely, I believe, he can see and do them better than the other guy.
RE you writing:
This is irrelevant. What is relevant:
1. Most swing voters (about 70%) think Biden is too old for a second term as president. And they are the ones who will decide the election, not people who habitually vote for the Dems.
2. Biden’s approval ratings, now, are low (37%), lower than Trump’s (now). It’s swing voters’ perceptions of Biden’s presidential performance that matter, not whether you or I, or Biden himself, think he has been a good or great president.
3. In 2020, Biden beat Trump by a razor-thin margin (about 42,000 votes; that’s the sum of Biden’s winning margins in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin) after having been ahead in the national polls, at this point of time in the cycle, by 9-11% (Biden is, at best, now tied with Trump, nationally). (State-by-state election results matter. So the fact that Biden ended up gaining 7 million more votes, nationally, in 2020, than Trump is irrelevant).
4. Biden claims that he has the best chances of any Democrat to beat Trump. He claims that this is so because he has beaten Trump before (but see my point 3), and because he has done a good or very good job as president (but see my point 2). When you ask voters how they would vote if the contest were between Trump and another named Democrat (Whitmer, Newsom, etc. – all at least 20 years younger than Biden), those other potential Democratic candidates, at this point, do no worse than Biden does against Trump. This refutes Biden’s claim that he has the best chance of any Democrat to beat Trump. (You can find this poll result on Brian Leiter’s blog, entry from July 01, 2024).
I think the point is that he won’t get to do things because he will lose to Trump. And not just because of his possible infirmities. Any Democrat who aligns with the open border, far left, pro Hamas, dei etc. (or is perceived that way) has a good chance of being defeated by Trump.
Just saw the response from Peter, a much better explanation.
I’m not American, but I think Biden (and the Democrats if he runs for re-election) has lost either way. On the one hand, if there is indeed some kind of health problem with Biden and he doesn’t step down, this is not very reassuring to voters. I’m guessing Trump will use this at every opportunity to cast doubt on Biden’s abilities and clarity of judgment. On the other hand, if Biden’s health is not an issue, well… just the fact that everyone is discussing this at the moment is not a strong start for the election campaign. Trump will still use it to cast doubt on Biden’s abilities and clarity of judgment.
Even if Biden wins and then steps aside for the Vice President, there is a strong possibility that Trump may use this to try to overturn the election results again.
Yes, Biden has done everything you say. But as for “….he can see and do them better than the other guy,” that is the lowest bar imaginable.
Joe Biden is not a policy wonk hidden away in the background, he’s President of the United States. That role requires an ability to communicate effectively verbally, both in private discussions and in the public domain, and as you concede he can no longer do that. Therefore an inability to carry out fundamental duties of the office is by definition something that should disqualify him for that office.
But more to the point…Biden has never been a great intellect or statesman in the first place. Despite his early and obvious ambition to be President (note his disastrous 1988 campaign), there is a reason why was was always considered a third-string, “break glass only if absolutely necessary” option by the Democrats.
Also, he did not create the majority of US foreign policy in the last 50 years, as you absurdly suggest. No one person could have done that, and even if there was such a person, it would not be Joe Biden! Biden is simply someone who has been around politics forever, which does not necessarily translate into a high level of competence.
The Democrats should do whatever they can to get Joe to step down, and hand the reigns to Kamala. She is not an ideal option by any measure, but she is the sitting VP, she has no obvious health issues, and she will not run the country of a cliff.
Re: women can’t sing because it arouses men, also can’t show their hair because it arouses men, also can’t, in some places, show even their eyes because it arouses men, etc.
If it’s the MEN who can’t control themselves, why not lock THEM up? Why is that women’s responsibility?
L
Perhaps those men have their brains between their legs?
Rational men have their brains between their ears!
There actually is an answer to that question, which women will not like:
In a society where men do all the gainful work building and running the infrastructure, nothing would get done if the men were all locked up to keep them away from free-range half-naked women. Besides, the restrictions on women are not there to protect women, they are to protect the honour of their male relatives and husbands. The rape of a woman is primarily a crime against the man who owns her.
And finally, if you have power, you don’t squander it by allowing yourself to be locked up to protect someone with less power.
In those societies, men do the gainful work because women are not allowed to. So the argument becomes circular.
L
Not so simple as circular. Let’s say helical: a complete turn doesn’t bring you to the same place, but rather up on down one pitch. Even in sexually egalitarian societies there are some essential jobs that women can’t or won’t do, so they need or want men to do them….but can’t force them to because few women can physically overpower any man older than 14. (Nor can they lock them up, for the same reason.). So they have to trade sex for a share of the fruit of that labour. Therefore you can’t lock up all the men and let women do all the work, but you could vice versa, and many societies do. Men could be nurses, social workers, and HR/DEI compliance officers. They just prefer in patriarchies to assign these tasks to women. Thus not circular.
Note that men are physically capable of enforcing both patriarchy and the more desirable egalitarian society, whichever they choose. Women are not capable by themselves of enforcing matriarchy or egalitarianism against men, domestic or foreign, determined to overthrow either. And there’s no incentive for men to fight for matriarchy, which sets sex-based limits on their advancement.
Leslie.
“In a society where men do all the gainful work building and running the infrastructure”
I have been to Iran and believe me the men do not do much of a job building and running the infrastructure. It was actually better under the Shah when Iranian women were not repressed.
+1
So true, Robert. Iran under the shah unrecognizable by today’s standards. One of my closest girlfriends (who happens to now be married to my ex-husband who happens to be Lebanese) escaped Iran post ’79 Revolution. She knows first hand what being a woman in Iran was and now is like. Those “sisters” David speaks of are indeed the primary enforcers. They deliver the “code breakers” to the basiji. Masih has it right. The ill-informed so-called “liberals” who are worried about “Islamophobia” are not doing Iranian women any favors.
I’ll add that in the place where women are – without question – the most oppressed: the Islamosphere, most of the enforcement of these medieval codes and rules is done by women.
It is mom, auntie, older sister and that bitch neighbor that is going to enforce the headscarf/veil before a young lady even gets our the door and onto the street to be pestered by old men.
In our western, feminism infused culture we think of it as men oppressing women but in the Islamosphere although it is indeed what the men seem to want, and what they invented, most of the actual policing is done by the “sisters.”
D.A.
NYC
https://democracychronicles.org/author/david-anderson/
…most of the actual policing is done by the “sisters.”
Mainly, it seems, old women— very hard to tell when covered from heat to foot— who arguably, have a somewhat better life by siding with the regime. But if they didn’t go along with it, they’d lose those benefits in an heartbeat.
10+++++
For Linda’s original post
That’s what the Ayatollahs think.
Early post-election news. The Senate defeated the SAVE act, which was intended to prevent non-citizens from voting in Federal elections (when the House passed it earlier this week, 198 Dems voted against it). In Michigan, Gov. Whitmer signed a bill that prohibits re-counts pursuant to allegations of voter fraud.
Always in the details. Here we learn that this is about voter registration, not actual voting. But there were problems with the bill. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/five-things-to-know-about-the-save-act/
The current safety net is actually quite good.
Foreigners voting and voter fraud are provably ridiculous Fox news low-IQ magical thinking social panics.
They’re the right wing’s version of lefty “Trans Women Are Women” idiocy.
There’s a horseshoe of retardation which gets too much attention on either end.
D.A.
NYC
(former foreigner, now devoted voter).
Virginia governor Youngkin’s executive order directing the state’s department of Ed to develop model guidelines that bab phones in k12 classrooms was really yet another paean to parents following his order on k12 transgender policies for schools. He won the governorship partly on his drive to put parents back in charge of educating their children and partly due to an arrogant and terribly executed campaign by his opponent, Dem former governor terry mcaulliffe. In the latter policies, the state guidance defines a “transgender student” as one who is 18 or older, an emancipated minor, or a minor with written request from a parent on file with the school division. Anyone else must be called by their official birth name or “recognized regular nickname for their official name like betty for elizabeth” and appropriate pronoun for sex at birth. Moreover, any conversation that a student has with a teacher or counselor regarding posible transgender must be reported by the schools to the parents. In its bienniel survey of almost 120,000 high school students, CDC finds almost 2% self-identify as transgender. Assuming that some of these do not fit Mr Youngkin’s cynically restrictive definition of transgender student, there are a significant number of troubled youngsters in Virginia who will receive no services from their school.
This is not a transgender or even an LGBTQ…. Issue. It is simply about whether ALL fragile children receive appropriate supportive services from their public schools, including not putting them in harm’s way from violent parents.
It looks like this was a Hili Dialogue add-on:
“In its bienniel survey of almost 120,000 high school students, CDC finds almost 2% self-identify as transgender. ”
Does the CDC report the false positive rate for this psychological evaluation?
Well, note that it says (bolding added):
Then self-identify is an error by the CDC – it should be self-report which means reporting the use of pharmaceuticals or bodily alterations.
Carlin – sorely missed.
Him and Hitch.
It’s illegal to point a firearm at someone you don’t have lawful cause to shoot….for the simple reason that guns sometimes discharge and kill what they are pointed at. Movies are make-believe but firearms are real. In general you can’t contract or delegate your legal criminal responsibility away to someone else because neither the state nor the person you kill through your own negligence was a party to the contract. Perhaps a lawyer or a studio executive can weigh in as to why the movie industry should presume to place itself above the law for the sake of profit and artistic expression.
But meantime, check how often real guns (instead of props) are used in movies, and how often an actor really points a real gun at another person (instead of the scene being filmed and edited and special-effected to look that way.) Remember the movies are all about creating illusion. Obviously an actor or stuntman “shot” in a scene wasn’t really shot. Much else depicted in movies didn’t really happen either.
The charge of manslaughter is a fair and reasonable allegation to put to a jury.
I agree, Leslie. Certainly in our AI/3-D fabrication world, a fake weapon that is totally scaled to the real thing, ie appearance, dimensions, volume, weight, and balance, can be fabricated.
That is clarifying. One would think an actor would be aware of these details, even though I wasn’t. And the entertainment industry should be very careful to apprise everyone of these points.
He didn’t just point it. He pulled the trigger too.
Basic firearms safety is that you never point a weapon at someone unless you intend to shoot them. Pointing and pulling the trigger is at the very least reckless. Anybody doing that on a range, even after personally checking the weapon isn’t loaded, is going to be lucky if they’re only ejected and barred.
Doing it on a movie set is clearly dangerous – even if it had been loaded with a blank, those can also injure, blind or kill.
I left out the trigger bit because that is an allegation yet to be proved. The pointing is self-evident because bullets go where the gun is pointed (mostly, except for divine intervention or the presence of a nearby massive body with gravity similar to the earth’s.). And this one went into the bodies of two people behind the camera.
The miners escaping from the collapsing mine are amazing. What a video!
Speaking of videos, the children whose brains have been damaged by UNRWA will never be right again. And thus, another generation of terrorists is born.
Please listen to the Dispatch debate between Jonah Goldberg and Niall Ferguson, rational, polite, erudite, historically aware, and compare it to the Biden-Trump debate. And weep.
YES! Do. It is excellent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qBwRA3fJKc
Ferguson is one of the smartest people in the public sphere and Goldberg is no idiot either.
Worth your time.
D.A.
NYC
That is a great conversation. Thank you for posting it and thank you, David, for posting the actual link. Definitely worth the time! High caliber stuff!
I just heard the case against Baldwin was “dismissed with prejudice”.
I found the clip of him in court on eXtwitter. The summary says evidence was withheld….
I gotta read more…
… or listen to the judge, Mary Marlowe Sommer :
x.com/lawcrimenetwork/status/1811887545162055816?s=46
https://twitter.com/mubiuk/status/1811420796017119698 💐
I love you Shelley Duvall. Rest in peace. 💐❤