Category Archives: culture

Hollywood, Too

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A month into the summer movie season and the box office is already suffering from poor performances by a number of widely panned films.

Box office gross receipts are off nearly 5% through the summer compared to the same period last year and its this-year Memorial Day weekend wasn’t this bad since 1999.

Megan Colligan, Paramount’s President of Worldwide Marketing and Distribution on her studio’s Baywatch:

The cast could not have done more work in aggressively promoting “Baywatch.” Dwayne [Johnson] gave this 150%[.]

It is to weep.  They tried so hard—where’s their participation ribbon?

It couldn’t possibly be that they’re making bad movies, or movies on a theme that’s already played out, or….  Mm, mm.  Couldn’t be.  Gotta be somebody else’s fault.

But it’s expectable.  They’re of a piece.

This is Why We Can’t Have Qualified Non-STEM Graduates

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Joyce Chaplin, Professor of Early American History and Chair, American Studies at Harvard—Harvard American history!—illustrated why that is with this tweet of hers:

Joyce E. Chaplin @JoyceChaplin1

The USA, created by int’l community in Treaty of Paris in 1783, betrays int’l community by withdrawing from #parisclimateagreement today

Think about that.  Don’t be distracted by her foolishness on things climate, just think about what the simulated expert on American history tweeted.

Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) did, also, and he had a couple of tweets.

Ted Cruz @tedcruz

Just sad. Tenured chair at Harvard, doesn’t seem to know how USA was created. Not a treaty. Declaration+Revolutionary War+Constitution=USA.

And

Ted Cruz @tedcruz

Lefty academics @ my alma mater think USA was “created by int’l community.” No–USA created by force, the blood of patriots & We the People.

And

Ted Cruz @tedcruz

Treaty of Paris simply memorialized that fact, of our total victory at Yorktown. Her claim is like saying a plastic globe created the earth.

Not willing to accept the correction of her error, Chaplin expanded on it.

Joyce E. Chaplin @JoyceChaplin1

Sad. US Senator, Harvard Law degree. Doesn’t know that national statehood requires international recognition.

No, Madam (hard to address you as professor), international recognition only that—acknowledgment of a fait accompli.  Recognition creates nothing.

Holy cats.

“Full Responsibility”

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said, regarding leaks to the New York Times tabloid and others,

We take full responsibility for that and we obviously regret that that happened.  With respect to the release of information inappropriately…certainly we condemn that.

The same sort of questions I’ve put to Hillary Clinton applies here: what are you going to do with that “responsibility” you’ve taken?  What concrete actions will you take?

How’re the criminal and civil investigations into the leaks going; what progress are you making in identifying the criminals and the miscreants?

Assuming you find any, what will you do with them?

The Rise of the PRC

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Graham Allison, Director of the Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, had some thoughts in The Boston Globe.  Here’s one that’s not in the usual political or military race discussion.

In STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)…[the PRC] annually graduates four times as many students as the United States (1.3 million vs 300,000).

A better measure would compare the quality of those graduates and their programs so as to arrive at similarly qualified graduates.

Still, numbers have a quality all their own.  Let’s play a bit with these two.  Suppose, for instance, that 80% or American STEM graduates actually know their material, i.e., the graduates didn’t just sleep-walk their way through a mediocre program; they actually got and understood a good, solid STEM education.  That works out to 240k solid STEM grads.

Suppose that of the PRC’s graduates only 50% measure up to that standard.  That still works out to 650k solid STEM grads, or for you non-STEM folks, 2.7 times more quality grads than we’re producing.  That’s something to take seriously.

This is a long-term, generational, race that we can’t afford to lose.

Trump Gifted Francis

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During his visit to the Vatican, President Donald Trump gave gifts to Pope Francis, a normal exchange of gifts between heads of state.

Trump gifted Pope Francis a first-edition set of writings from Martin Luther King, Jr. The White House said the set includes the five books King wrote in his lifetime. Each one is custom-bound and the books are in a custom display case. It also included a piece of granite from the Martin Luther King, Jr, Memorial in Washington.

Maybe Trump should have included, in addition to those, a copy of Martin Luther King, Jr’s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, along with a section of the bar of the cell in which MLK was imprisoned while he wrote his Letter.  A copy of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses would have been a good gift, too.