Heavy Water

‘Believe all women’
https://youtu.be/YMOejqbhB8A

‘Believe all women’
To borrow from Instapundit, “Double standards are the best standards because you have twice as many as less-principled people.”

Yes, because every good lefty knows that “money” comes from the state
Just like electricity comes from outlets.

The irony is that the people most opposed to airlines and us flying lots are also the people who are most in favour of international organisations and solutions. They think people flying in thousands to Climate Change conferences is a good thing.
Meanwhile the US-deplorables and Brexit-gammon are all in favour of international flights — because we are narrow-minded xenophobes. Apparently.

Yes, the Unherd writer makes a stupid remark about state funding for airline recovery.
But most of the article poses fair arguments for why most air travel will take a very long time to recover.
The pandemic and the effects (and side effects) of mitigation policies are a big kick in the ass for lots of bits of the economy, not just travel.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this since I heard that real estate prices around lake Tahoe have been rising. The speculation is that folks are seeing work from home as a way to get out of the mess that is the greater sf bay area.
But if that happens there will be many other effects. My reference example is the US post ww2. Increased private auto ownership and the building of the interstate highway system enabled a huge expansion of suburbia. But also created the shopping mall, the supermarket industry, and made shipping logistics the key to Amazon’s business.
Lots of rural US, for instance, does not have anything like good enough internet bandwidth yet, to support mass work from home. Does that mean big layouts for fiber? Or 5G? or something else? What might that do to competition in the telecom biz?
Google and Amazon and Microsoft already site server farms and data centers based on electricity prices and reliability. How might relocation of demand affect their economics?
So far I’m just pulling ideas out of my ass, but pretty soon I’m going to have to make some heavy decisions related to all this. As are many of us.

I know someone who coordinates peer advising among small company CEOs, and CxOs / SVPs of large companies, and they are now spending a lot of time on these issues. So far, it seems most are focussed on short-term tactics to survive the next year. Long term strategy is not on the table much yet.

… professing …
Typing on a mobile device so totes sux.

Watched Frank Capra’s “Meet John Doe” a few nights ago. No particular reason; we git it years ago, and now that the libraries are closed we’re going through the home DVD collection in alphabetical order.
The movie takes place in 1941, before Pearl Harbor, and the Depression still hangs over America.
Barbara Stanwyck plays a newspaper columnist just fired by the new owner, a plutocrat who wants the paper as his personal mouthpiece. For her last column, she makes up a suicide note from an angry “John Doe”. John Doe threatens to jump off the City Hall roof Christmas eve because he can’t live with all the evil around him.
Column causes an uproar, and newspaper boss hires her back and tells her to find a “John Doe” and keep feeding the public populist anger because it boosts circulation.
Gary Cooper comes in, a baseball pitcher with a busted wing. He agrees he’ll play John if they’ll pay a surgeon to fix his arm so he can play again. He signs a contract to that effect.
His speeches (written by her) sparks a populist wave among the “John Does” of America (read: deplorables). They form clubs, get in touch with neighbors and help each other out. They even hold a convention for people to come from across the country to honor him and the John Doe movement
Just before he goes down to the stadium, visits the newspaper owner’s mansion. Standing out of sight outside the dining room where Barbara Stanwyck sits with a new fur coat and jeweled necklace, he hears the owner announce to his fellow plutocrats that John Doe will announce to the crowd that he’s going to form a third political party and he’ll endorse the newspaper owner for president.
Cooper walks in, steam coming out his ears. Barbara Stanwyck is appalled, but he believes she was in the plot all the time. He lays into the plutocrats, and says he’ll tell the crowd the truth.
Newspaper owner says go ahead, we’ll ruin you.
He goes down to the stadium to speak to the people, but as he reaches the microphone, the newspaper’s goons distribute free newspapers denouncing Cooper as a fraud who never intended to jump off the roof of City Hall. They publish the contract he signed. The publisher races to the podium and denounces Cooper. Cooper tries to speak, but the publisher’s goons cut the wires and stops him.
As the police hustle him out, the crowd turns on him and throws stuff at him.
Cooper goes up on the roof on a snowy Christmas eve. The plutocrats are there too, to make sure he doesn’t jump (publisher tells him the police are below, and if he jumps, they’ll remove his ID and dump his body into Potter’s Field). Stanwyck reaches the roof and pleads with him to keep fighting.
He’s still determined, but some of the common people (who we met earlier in the movie) show up. They confess they were carried away, saw the good he was doing, and plead with him to keep fighting.
He agrees. Happy ending.
The movie was pretty good, although a bit long for my taste. There’s flag waving and we’re treated to the sight of a priest at the stadium calling for an opening [silent] prayer, which I haven’t seen in a dog’s age.
Only thing is, I keep getting the feeling that this reminds me of something, but for the life of me I can’t put my finger on it.

G.E.E. would have an operatic opening act called The Screaming Mimis.
You’ve spelled their name wrong, and they are getting a bit old now : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screaming_Meemees
They were never very good, although apparently OK live.

“Agnes, did you shrink his prostate?”

In culture news, Mr Plinkett reviews Star Trek: Picard.

It’s much easier for people on the European continent to talk about closing down aviation
Yep, they think they’ll be swanning around on the Eurostar and TGV. Which of course are not long metal boxes full of people and their germs, oh no.
I live in Asia and for those with pan-Asian businesses, the only option is to fly. And of course, fuck necessity, we want to fly because we want to explore new places and have fun! I sincerely hope that, once the dust has settled, even the terminally stupid (ie politicians and civil servants) will realise there’s no point in closing down air travel because of a disease that basically only kills you if you’re half dead already.
BTW Australia’s population is actually less than half that of the UK.

Marathon but worth it.
Yes, it’s long, but at times quite pointed. I like the shots of the writers and producers congratulating themselves on how uplifting and sophisticated the series supposedly is, juxtaposed with the wildly incoherent nihilistic shitshow they actually threw together.
Also, “Why make an android that looks like a terrible actress?”

“’whilst professing love for [the idea of] the common man.’ FTFY”
As I often say, they profess an affinity with The People in the abstract, but have a bit of a problem with actual, living, breathing, people.
(With Scottish Nationalists, for “people” read “nation” throughout.)

Anyone get the coof coof test yet? Got one today for some “elective” (not synonymous with “optional” I’ve learned). Typical flu test that wasn’t too bad. However I must pay for a chest X-ray, which my surgeon explained is now being done to make double sure I’m not asymptotic. The X-ray isn’t expensive and the risks are known, however my surgeon reassuring me that he bases his treatments on often held worldwide medical webinar things, and that “Beijing” found that X-rays helped detect cases, was not as comforting as perhaps the Dr was expecting. I likely made a face, though with everyone in masks, who’s to know?

“Changing the face of journalism”
Apparently, it’s possible to hail the “extraordinary talent” and – wait for it – the “honesty” of chronic fabulist Laurie Penny, and to regurgitate her trite vanities without challenge of any kind – while simultaneously being hurt, even puzzled, by the fact that public regard for the media is at a fifty-year low.

helping inform and educate people so that they can make better choices about their own lives…
I’ll just leave this here, shall I?

Now in her thirties, that promise has led Alcindor to cover the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the 2915 shooting at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina for USA Today, The New York Times, and NBC.
Layers of fact checkers and editors. Layers, I say.

From the introduction: “To celebrate their contributions made by journalists, we gathered five extraordinarily women in the field to discuss how they continue to bring us the most important stories.”
It would be nice if a Top (presumably) Journalist (presumably) could actually write English.

One of these days I’m gonna write a book about doing carpentry in a whorehouse.
Funny you should say that. I was gonna write a book about running a business that goes bankrupt operating on the floor below a whorehouse. Imma call it “Too Much F***ing Overhead”.

Like so many other words, journalism clearly doesn’t mean what it once did.
Those who now call themselves journalists are so often no more than courtiers-for-hire.

American beer is a little like making love inna canoe.
Most current American beer drinkers view Foster’s as not much better than water.
That’s an opinion that I share about Foster’s Lager (blue can). I happen to be partial to Foster’s Premium Ale (green can), but there’s a large segment of the American beer drinker population that would claim that it’s close to Foster’s Lager in taste.

Most current American beer drinkers view Foster’s as not much better than water.
I find the taste of alcohol to be utterly ghastly, so I don’t drink any, but according to a reply to advertising that I’ve seen here and there:
Fosters: Australian for Bud.
Then again, for advertising slogans and brewing, there is also:
Budweiser: America’s finest really bad sake!

No Australian drinks Fosters.
That’s the rubbish megabrew the Carlton United Breweries use in the international markets.
There are much nicer craft brews locally – and hopefully will remain so once this awful lockdown finally ends.

C.S. Lewis in 1924 wrote of Macaulay that “He has the journalist’s air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like.” The criticism implied in the comparison seems very familiar.
I don’t think we should necessarily assume that journalism has ever really been a real profession. To a strong extent the internet, and twitter in particular has just exposed the enormous ignorance of the average hack. The only real journalists are those that write for an informed audience or who possess by autopsy some information that no one else could have.
That said, the apparent absence of subeditors, the complete obliteration of any distinction between tabloid and broadsheet journalism, and the tendency towards shameless advocacy and a refusal on the part of hacks to challenge their own assumptions all seem to have become increasingly common in the media over the last twenty years or so.
The timings are obviously approximate, but twenty five years ago the Guardian was a proper, if left-wing paper. Fifteen years ago it was a reasonable newspaper with an increasingly batshit comments section. Today it’s a batshit comment site that surprisingly employs some proper journalists. When I was a kid the Independent was one of the best papers around as well.
Alan Rusbridger seemed bad enough at the time – a sanctimonious, Dickensian hypocrite who spent thousands on a grand piano and waltzed into a sinecure after he left the Graun. But he seems like a proper newspaperman next to a rabid activist like Katharine Viner.

Since Charlie Suet has brought up that C. S. Lewis quote, I’ll give some more of my favorites on the same subject.
“Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true—except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.”
—Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy (Erwin Knoll, editor, “The Progressive”)
“…it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies—unless one counts journalists.”
—George Orwell, “Homage to Catalonia” (1938)
“It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Norvell (June 11, 1807)
Read the whole thing. TL;DR: he DESTROYS them (and he’s not complimentary to us readers, either). https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=text
“I deplore with you the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, & mendacious spirit of those who write for them […] As vehicles of information, and a curb on our functionaries they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief. That this has in a great degree been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit I agree with you […]”
—Thomas Jefferson, letter to Walter Jones (January 2, 1814)
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-07-02-0052
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who *can* be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? […] *He* is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
—C. S. Lewis, “That Hideous Strength”, ch. 5, part 1