An Elegy for Oscar

Sasha Stone has made a career out of following the movie industry and the Oscars. Writing for Tablet, she describes the prolonged death throes of the US film industry. 

Stone lays out why the Oscar winners are most often films you've heard little about and have no desire to see. She describes how and why the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was enlarged by adding people from overseas film studios who have no commitment to the Hollywood product.

Along the way she shares how someone blew her cover and reported that she'd voted for Trump in 2016, it destroyed her decades-old relationship with the US film industry, via cancel culture.

She notes the industry still produces an occasional audience favorite and mentions Top Gun Maverick, Oppenheimer, and Barbie as examples. Her main villain is "woke," which the industry has whole-heartedly embraced while the country has mostly shrugged off when it voted to reelect Trump.

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

How They Died

There's been a lot of interest in the deaths of actor Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa. The autopsies have been done and we know or can guess what happened and it is damned sad. ABC News has the story.

Hackman, 95, died of cardiovascular and Alzheimer's disease likely around Feb. 18, about one week after his wife died from a rare syndrome, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, on about Feb. 11, officials said.

Arakawa, 65, died from hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a rare disease transmitted through rodent urine, droppings or saliva, officials said.

Reading between the lines, Hackman was out of touch with reality, his much younger wife was caring for him at home, and they were relatively isolated from neighbors and local friends. She got sick and died, he wasn't able to call for help. With her dead, he wasn't fed and watered so he died several days later, alone and forgotten.

This could happen anytime an elderly couple is hanging on, caring for each other, and the healthier one dies while the more shot-down one is left to die from lack of care, having been unable to get help for the sick partner. 

There are older couples everywhere thinking, "Could that happen to us? Are we at risk?" It's a wake up call for sure.

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's 

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Citing the Precedent

National Review reports the arrest on espionage charges of three soldiers in the Pacific Northwest, charged with selling classified documents to China. All three have names strongly suggesting they are ethnic Asians, likely Chinese - Jian Zhao, Li Tian and Ruoyu Duan.

Do a Google search for "Chinese spy cases in the US" and you'll find most of the dozen or more so named perps appear to be ethnic Chinese. I don't think FDR had this much evidence when he interned the ethnic Japanese in western North America, with Canada's help.

It doesn't require much imagination to foresee the internment of ethnic Chinese then resident in the US in the event hostilities between the US and China break out. Who can forget Manzanar and the other 9 camps holding Japanese internees? If we win the war we can always apologize later; if we lose, we're screwed regardless.

If I were FBI director I'd be sure those conducting security background checks on Asian Americans in sensitive jobs were extra thorough. Occasional randomized rechecks might be justified. 

As was the case in 1941, most of the target population is probably innocent, but sorting out collaborators in time of war ... isn't easy or quick.

The irony is that the CCP can bribe Asians living here using money we spent buying their heavily advertised Temu gimcracks. Hat tip to Lucianne.com for the link.

Afterthought: This is a problems nations with large immigrant populations share. One that low-immigration countries with homogeneous populations don't have. 

Long-standing examples of the former are the US, Canada, and Australia. More recent examples include much of Europe with the exception of Hungary. China and Japan are examples of low immigration societies.

Blowing Their Cover

 A quote to ponder from John Hinderaker of Power Line:

Congressional Democrats are nearly all on the far left, the difference is whether they conceal the extent of their leftism to be electable in moderate districts. Swing-district Democrats are angry at safe-district Democrats for blowing their cover.

Not kidding. One thing the "far-" anything folks have in common is a lack of common sense, which may well emerge as the label historians someday give the current era.

Happy Data

Steve Hayward is the charts guy at Power Line  He has posted the chart below produced by CBS News/YouGov, which is certainly no ally of Donald J. Trump. 

For extra enjoyment, imagine the angst it produced at CBS as you absorb what the chart shows - a very positive public response to the President's speech to Congress and the nation last night.

Our Hope

The other DrC and I were reflecting about our reactions to the Trump/Zelensky dust-up. Neither of us are comfortable with Trump saying he sees equivalence between the two sides in the Russia vs. Ukraine war. We certainly don’t.

We independently have concluded we hope Trump is playing 3-D chess, while others are playing checkers. That he has a grand plan and is working a sophisticated bargaining scheme. 

The alternative is ugly and we hope unfolding events will prove supportive of the clever bargaining hypothesis. Getting the warring parties to the table is the first step. For a deal to be successful both parties need to end up feeling somewhat okay with the outcome. This sometimes requires people to say things they don’t entirely believe.

China Leaving Panama Ports

Red State reports a consortium headed by US pension investor BlackRock is buying the port operations of Hong Kong firm CK Hutchison. Be clear, the selling firm is under CCP control. 

These facilities include the two ports at either end of the Panama Canal, an issue about which President Trump has expressed national security concerns. Count this as another win for the Trump administration.

Weird Serendipitous Science

If someone told you a drug based on vitamin B9 aka folic acid - used to help chemotherapy patients deal with side effects - has been found to help children with autism improve their speech, or even speak for the first time, would you think it a joke? It could be true.

The Daily Mail (U.K.) reports preliminary research suggesting many children with autism have a genetic defect that makes it difficult to uptake folic acid from the diet, and somehow that lack interferes with the brain's speech center.

The "why" of all this is only imperfectly understood at this point, and those being so treated are doing it "off label." I hope future double blind studies show this inexpensive drug to be efficacious for at least some subset of autistic children. Speech, after all, is a big part of what makes us human.

Monday Snark

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics Cartoons of the Week.

The Joys of Climate Migration

Just a reminder of why we are snowbirds. Here is a screen shot of a webcam in our part of Wyoming this morning.  We'll be there roughly two months from now.

Here we are 4000 ft. lower and 500+ miles further south. Yesterday I was outside in the NV desert wearing a short sleeve shirt and very comfortable.

Four months from now the temperature here will be 110℉ and maybe 82℉ in WY. Our summers there are warm and dry, but not hot. Our winters here are cool and dry, but rarely cold. In both locations rain is rare enough to be a fun novelty when it occurs.

We have achieved "perpetual spring" and it is marvelous.

Turkey Outplacement

Another way civil service managers rid themselves of non-performing subordinates is by helping them gain a promotion to a higher paid vacancy in another government agency. You might think of it as getting kicked upstairs or failing upwards, but I called it "turkey outplacement."

It works something like the following. The boss of someone ineffective makes clear to them they have no promotional future in the agency where they currently work, but might have in another government agency. 

Then a letter of recommendation is drafted, curated, and polished that makes the ineffective individual look good "on paper" while not actually lying. The goal is to get rid of the turkey and if s/he gets a promotion in the process, it is no skin off the current boss's nose.

If the new agency is lazy and doesn't do their due diligence, they can get stuck with a real loser. It happened to the agency I worked with when we hired a new director of public information (public relations by another name) who had held a similar position for a smaller agency where the job paid less. 

After we'd had the new guy long enough to know he was an empty suit, we met some employees of his former, smaller agency who said they couldn't believe we'd hire such a jerk. Needless to say they considered his move to our agency a real plus for their shop.

Why do federal managers engage in such chicanery? Because firing a loser is too difficult and uncertain, thus ultimately not worth the grief and actual risk to one's own career. 

Another Viewpoint

One more link, this time to an Atlantic column, about the Zelensky vs. Trump and Vance dust up in the Oval Office, echoed at msn.com. This one keys off the fact both Z and T were successful television personalities with curated but quite different images. 

It captures something real yet performative about both men, and suggests they may not be able to agree about much. It is worth your while.

The "Inside Baseball" of Federal Service

You see the occasional reference to comments attributed to Elon Musk saying that there are "phantom" civil servants and people with no particular work assignments in the federal civil service. He is probably correct in this allegation.

Congress in its less-than-infinite wisdom has made firing a civil servant who has been on-payroll for over a year, and thus not probationary, very difficult. In the normal run of things, relatively few such are fired.

As my supervisor told me decades ago when I worked in DC for a couple of years as a temp consultant, "Many of us will fire one loser in our managerial career. Almost nobody ever fires a second one, the process is designed to be too punishing to the firing boss."

It takes a boss many hours per week over perhaps 3 years to finally get rid of someone, presuming they haven't been caught red-handed committing a gross felony at work.  During this multi-year period the loser continues to sit in the outer office fomenting ill-will and drawing pay. Plus not every attempt to fire someone succeeds, some win their cases constituting a total loss for the boss.

How do managers cope with a set of constraints like these? Sometimes by parking the offending person in a cubby and giving them no work, or only make-work assignments of no importance. I remember hearing of an office in the Ag Building where several guys sat around all day reading the newspapers. I presume they'd been moved out of the chain of command and left to serve out their time till retirement.

I betcha some such were sent home to do, effectively, nothing during Covid and in some cases have moved out of the DC area and basically just get their paycheck for doing nothing. The hope with the buyout offer that some 70,000 took was to get such individuals off the payroll without firing.

The presumption of the DOGE effort is that layoffs do not claim the individuals being fired are bad workers. Rather that the Government no longer needs the services they were hired to provide.

If you find the above reprehensible, you are of course correct. The blame lies with Congress which has over-protected non-probationary employees. They've done this because our elected officials do not like dealing with irate constituents who are also civil servants under threat of dismissal.

Inflated Numbers

The Pentagon recently announced transgender troops will be separated from the military, and no new trans individuals will be recruited. Breitbart reports.

The establishment media have touted advocates’ claims that 15,000 transgender people are serving in the U.S. military. But this week, President Donald Trump’s Pentagon revealed the transgender population is just 4,240 service members.

That adds up to one transgender person for every 500 service members in the United States military of 2.1 million active and reserve members. That transgender share is just 0.2 percent, or one-fifth of one percent, of the military.

With a hat tip to Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, "They'd none of 'em be missed."

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Whither Zelensky

At Power Line three viewpoints on the Zelensky vs. Trump and Vance blow-up in the Oval Office yesterday, on live TV no less, posted by Steve Hayward. One cites the views of a Polish diplomat and the other cites the comments of Victor Davis Hanson and of David Goldman, both often noted here. 

All of this helpful in understanding what went down and how it is viewed in various quarters. What follows are some of my insights.

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While we've dumped a sh*tload of money into Ukraine, they've been bombed all to hell and lost dead and wounded maybe a million people in a war they didn't start. And we've given them just enough arms to fight to a standoff. 

We never meant Ukraine to win because, if it looked like they were winning, the Russians would probably go nuclear. Nobody knows where that ends, maybe with most of us dead?

I think Zelensky believes we don't accept that they were fighting a war we would have had to fight later somewhere in NATO with our troops and arms, and all it cost us was the billions we paid to "rent" the Ukraine military. 

In return Ukraine has ground up most of Russia's armor, and many of its best troops. NATO can breathe easier for maybe the better part of a decade until Russia can rebuild their military.

Trump says Russia would never have attacked Ukraine had he been president. Whether he actually believes this or it's his usual braggadocio is another question. So he claims the whole war is Biden's fault for being a wuss and Ukraine is just collateral damage.

In the international game of chess, our main worry is China, Russia is more of a European problem. Trump is trying to pry Russia loose from China. That will require him to find a way to "ally" with Russia even though Russia is a black hat led by a dictator. 

If that requires him to claim a false equivalence between Ukraine and Russia, he appears to be willing to go there. Zelensky can't accept that Ukraine is merely "roadkill" in the larger geopolitics, Trump's realpolitik is a bridge too far for Z to accept.