A fine Marvel comic book movie, it works pretty much from beginning to end. It’s better than I expected from the trailers.
Benedict Cumberbatch plays an arrogant New York neurosurgeon (rather like William Hurt in The Doctor) who loses control of his hands in a Lamborghini crash. When no doctor can repair them, he ventures to a monastery in Katmandu to see if the Mystical Wisdom of the East can help him. Tilda Swinton plays the Celtic head sorceress and Chiwetel Ejiofor is her right hand man. Mads Mikkelsen is the Nordic bad guy.
Doctor Strange draws a fair amount visually from Inception, especially the city block-folding, along with Harry Potter movies and Matthew McConhaughey driving a Lincoln commercials.
Most big budget blockbusters these days are either about eugenics or death. This one is about death. The dialogue is better than you’d imagine.
Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity is that Cumberbatch attempts an American accent. He sounds reasonably authentic but it straitjackets him compared to what he could do with his classically trained English accent. In contrast, Swinton and Ejiofor use their standard English stage actor accents to good effect. This kind of higher hoo-ha works better with an English accent.
English and Australian actors have become much better at imitating American accents since Cary Grant’s day. The old movies never tried to explain Grant’s accent.
By Anthony Hopkins’ time as an American movie star, there was often some sort of vague explanation about how his American-born character had been a Rhodes Scholar or something and picked up the accent at Oxford. Personally, I think that’s fine, except when trying to do biopics like Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s Nixon.
The introduction of videotapes enabled young men in Manchester and Perth to practice sounding just like their American movie star favorites.
Thus in Mel Gibson’s new movie Hacksaw Ridge, all the English and Australian actors are quite competent at playing American GIs. On the other hand, the only featured American, Vince Vaughn, stands out. He seems to be having more fun with the dialogue than the non-American actors. (On the other hand, Vince Vaughn has long been on the ambiguous edge of being a a leading man movie star. Having him drop down to a supporting role like in Hacksaw Ridge does a lot for a movie.)
I suspect Cumberbatch would have had more fun playing Doctor Strange speaking the Queen’s English. Give Doctor Strange a backstory like the Anglo-American Nolan Brothers, whom the movie borrows from: English father, American mother, and an upbringing back and forth between London and Chicago, so Christopher has an English accent and Jonathan has an American accent.
AFP
Javier Tovar, with Said Betanzos in Tijuana
AFPNovember 11, 2016
Los Angeles (AFP) – When would-be immigrants Bernardino and Samuel got word in Mexico of the election of Donald Trump, they immediately gave up their plans to cross illegally into the United States. …
Bernardino, a 34-year-old Honduran who declined to give his last name, was looking for a “coyote” to help him slip into the United States near the border city of Tijuana when he abandoned his plan. So did 18-year-old Samuel, a Salvadoran.
Both men said they feared that if they are caught, their family members living north of the border might suffer.
“Imagine if they stop me, after a while my family living over there would have problems. The truth I never imagined is that the blond man might win,” Samuel said at Padre Chava’s breakfast hall, a soup kitchen in downtown Tijuana that provides food and clothing for more than 1,000 immigrants every day.
Cam Newton was today named MVP of last February’s Super Bowl for his 265 yards of passing. Granted, his Carolina Panthers scored only 10 points to the Denver Bronco’s 24, but that wasn’t a fair way to determine who won the game, it was recently decided by Carolina fans.
The Electoral College is a curious institution, but there’s never been much momentum to overturn it in this century because partisan advantage doesn’t last very long.
In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote by 0.5 percentage points but won the Electoral College 271-267. So, I assumed heading into Election Day 2004 that the Electoral College gave the Republicans a structural advantage. But then it turned out that Bush beat Kerry pretty conclusively nationwide, by 2.4 percentage points, but late into the night Kerry had a path to Electoral College victory if he could win Ohio. Ultimately, he lost Ohio and lost the Electoral College 286-251, but it was close enough to fuel four years of Democratic conspiracy theories about Diebold voting machines being rigged for the Republicans.
After 2004, Democrats lost interest in doing away with the Electoral College, seeing the EC as possibly to their benefit.
In 2008, Obama beat McCain easily in both the popular vote by 7.2 points and the Electoral College 365-173. In 2012, Obama’s popular vote margin narrowed to 3.9 points, but he won most of the close states, especially in the Upper Midwest, and romped in the Electoral College 332-206.
The Republican Party issued an “autopsy” in 2013 proving that the GOP’s only hope in 2016 was to win more Hispanic votes through Comprehensive Immigration Reform because there is nothing more important to the Cuban and Puerto Rican voters of Florida than their deep feelings of racial solidarity with Mexican illegal aliens in California. And the Republican nominee attempting to be less unappealing to white voters in the Upper Midwest would be inconceivable.
In 2016, by the time California gets done with its siesta and finally counts its votes, Hillary will win by about a point or so. But Trump has won in the all-important Electoral College 306-232. Interestingly, he won by so much that he had multiple paths to victory. He could have lost Florida and still won 277-261. He could have lost Florida and Iowa and still won 271-267. Trump could have lost Michigan and Pennsylvania and still won 270-268. Trump could have lost Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina and won 270-268.
And Trump didn’t win almost all the close states like Obama did in 2012. Trump lost New Hampshire, Minnesota, Maine, Nevada, and Colorado by less than 3 points (and won a single Electoral Vote out of Maine for winning a Congressional District).
So now Democrats are going to be talking about getting rid of the Electoral College for awhile, but any enthusiasm for doing it will probably disappear the next time the EC swings in their favor, the way they stopped complaining about it after 2004.
Democrats in recent years have been especially enthusiastic about how immigration will turn Texas into a Democratic pillar in the Electoral College. The Democrats loved to reflect upon how Republican votes were over-concentrated for Electoral College purposes in southern and Great Plains/Basin states. But then instead of nominating Ted Cruz of Texas, who would have run up big majorities from Wyoming to South Carolina but gotten crushed in the Electoral College, the Republicans had the audacity to nominate the most New York New Yorker in New York.
Arrival is a girl sci-fi movie in the tradition of Jody Foster’s Contact. Amy Adams plays a linguist (or some other kind of language-related academic) with a sad back story much like Sandra Bullock’s in Gravity. She is hired by the US Army to try to communicate with the aliens inside the giant flying saucer hovering a few feet above Montana. The plot is aimed at a female audience: the titanic history-changing events are really just a cover for a story about the loss of loved ones.
It’s a fairly distinctive movie although not a spectacular one (its budget is a moderate $47 million, which doesn’t pay for a lot of special effects). In style, the movie is reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov’s sci-fi short story “Lance” in which a story of the first expedition to Mars is told in the most oblique manner imaginable, with the main characters being the elderly, worried parents of one of the astronauts. (The son being an astronaut was a metaphor for the Nabokovs’ son being a mountaineer and all the worry it caused his parents.)
Arrival is directed by French Canadian Denis Villeneuve as pretty much the exact opposite of his Mexican border narco movie Sicario. Where Sicario was violent, dusty, and sun-beaten, Arrival takes place mostly in a northern valley of clouds, rain, green grass, and dim light. There is almost no action in Arrival and what does happen is shown obliquely, often with the camera pointing at a person reacting to whatever it is we really want to see. Dialogue is not on the on the nose and can be a little hard to hear. Amy Adams’ disoriented scientist is plagued by insomnia and in much of the movie is either on the verge of nodding off or is just waking up. The style of the movie is similarly blurry.
Overall, I’d say: good, not great. But the movie is different enough that I’ll leave open the possibility that it may eventually become the consensus that it’s very good.
By the way, is this the golden age of science fiction movies? It seems like there are several ambitious and accomplished sci-fi movies per year in this decade, perhaps double the rate when I was a kid.
The polls might’ve struck out on the 2016 presidential election, but at least one Alabama political science professor was almost 100 percent correct in guessing the outcome.
George Hawley, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama, guessed 48 states correctly during a prediction of the election’s outcome last week.
Hawley was the only one of 22 faculty and graduate students within the Department of Political Sciences to guess a win for President-elect Donald Trump. Everyone else predicted a victory for Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“People thought it was an unlikely scenario,” Hawley said about Trump winning. “I wasn’t dead certain it would be the case, either. But I’ve been making this point since my second book came out that if the Republican Party has a future, it lies in the upper Midwest. That may end up being the case.”
Hawley missed only on two states – New Hampshire and Michigan.
Trump won Michigan with 47.6-47.3 percent differential, a stunner in a Democrat-leaning state that overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.
“I thought (Trump) would do well there, and outperform previous Republicans, but I didn’t think he’d turn out enough people,” said Hawley. “Turns out, I was mistaken.”
New Hampshire was a slight Clinton win.
“I thought there was evidence it would lean more red than it did,” Hawley said.
North Carolina and Florida, also both swing states, went with Trump. That was no surprise to Hawley.
“The fact (Republican Mitt) Romney was able to win North Carolina (in 2012) indicated to me that it was probably not going to swing back into the blue camp,” said Hawley. “Florida, I thought, was going to be a lot closer than a lot of people thought because of what I perceived to be an enthusiasm gap between the two candidates.”
Hawley said he’s not prepared to tilt his research toward political predictions and polling. He joined the department in 2013, and has written several books including one released in February entitled “Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism” which focuses on the history of the American right since 1945.
He said that polling is becoming increasingly difficult, especially with conservative voters.
“It turns out that we can say that we are now seeing a trend following the Brexit result (in Britain) earlier this year that when you have these types of questions that relate to ring-wing populism which is the Trump phenomena … it’s very difficult to gauge,” said Hawley. “People aren’t giving accurate answers.”
Aggregating polls worked pretty well until the polls stopped working well.
Forget Nate Silver. There’s a new king of the presidential election data mountain. His name is Sam Wang, Ph.D.
JEFF NESBIT SCIENCE DATE OF PUBLICATION: 11.07.16.
TIME OF PUBLICATION: 6:30 PM.
Jeff Nesbit is executive director of Climate Nexus, a DC-based communications firm focused on climate change. He was the communications director to former Vice President Dan Quayle (R-IN) at the White House and the legislative and public affairs director at the National Science Foundation. He is the author of Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP.
Haven’t heard of him just yet? Don’t worry. You will. Because Wang has sailed True North all along, while Silver has been cautiously trying to tack his FiveThirtyEight data sailboat (weighted down with ESPN gold bars) through treacherous, Category-Five-level-hurricane headwinds in what has easily been the craziest presidential campaign in the modern political era.
When the smoke clears on Tuesday—and it will clear—what will emerge is Wang and his Princeton Election Consortium website and calculations (which have been used, in part, to drive some of the election poll conclusions at The New York Times’ Upshot blog and The Huffington Post’s election site). What will be vindicated is precisely the sort of math approach that Silver once rode to fame and fortune.
Wang says his method differs from Silver’s in its approach to uncertainty. “They score individual pollsters, and they want to predict things like individual-state vote shares,” he wrote in his blog on Sunday. “Achieving these goals requires building a model with lots of parameters, and running regressions and other statistical procedures to estimate those parameters. However, every parameter has an uncertainty attached to it. When all those parameters get put together to estimate the overall outcome, the resulting total is highly uncertain.” By contrast, he says, PEC’s model relies on a snapshot of all state polls every day, and then makes sure unrelated fluctuations are averaged out.
… Most likely, it’s because presidential forecasting isn’t Wang’s real job. He’s a professor of neuroscience at Princeton. …
This year, Wang called the election at 8:55 PM on October 18. He promised to eat more than just his hat if Clinton loses: “It is totally over. If Trump wins more than 240 electoral votes, I will eat a bug,” Wang tweeted to his 23,000 followers. He expects Clinton to receive at least 298 electoral votes.
When Michigan is eventually called for Trump, he will have 306 Electoral Votes.
Wang has been the intrepid election data explorer furthest out this election cycle, never once wavering from his certainty of a Clinton win. The only real uncertainty left on Tuesday, he said, is how many people show up to vote. But even that doesn’t change the presidential election outcome.
… Even if you factor this voting uncertainty into his election model by 5 percent—which is an unprecedented level historically, Wang says—Clinton still wins. It is precisely this sort of deep analysis that has endeared Wang to both financial analysts who make a living with math-based market predictions and to political journalism analysts who handicap elections. …
Wang has said for months that it was a five-point race; that there haven’t been dramatic swings in polling, only non-responses from depressed voters in the middle of news cycle swings; and that this has actually been the most stable election in a long time. What’s different, Wang has said to those willing to listen, is the media coverage of the “full meltdown” of emotion as Trump has seized control of the GOP. …
Natalie Jackson, the senior polling editor at The Huffington Post, told me that Wang uses the HuffPost Pollster data feed and that they both use the same polls, which explains the similarity.1 “Our forecast has been in line with Sam’s for most of the time it’s been up (we posted Oct. 3), and our probability of Clinton winning never dipped below 84 percent,” she said. “The polling data has never consistently shown anything but a Clinton win.”
Jackson, who coordinates site’s Pollster section, said that the data is truly what matters, and it’s been consistent at the presidential level. “With everything we know about polling in general elections—that opinions are fairly stable, and fluctuations in national polls aren’t necessarily reflecting people changing their voting decisions—it makes sense to keep a calm, steady approach to aggregating and forecasting,” she said. “It might not be the best way to generate news, but it’s a very good way to model noisy data.”
The Huffington Post Washington bureau chief Ryan Grim has been in a very public feud with Silver in recent days over precisely this question of “noisy data.” Grim accused Silver of deliberately skewing his own data at FiveThirtyEight with what amounts to political punditry. Silver fired back on social media with some ugly language.
Silver, after blowing the Republican primary, gave Trump a higher chance to beat Hillary than his rivals did, some of whom denounced him for giving aid and comfort to Trump supporters.
So when the smoke clears on Tuesday; when enough non-white and female voters haven’t been harassed or intimidated enough to stay home; when Clinton crosses the finish line with something close to 300 Electoral College votes and a popular vote victory somewhere between two and five percentage points; and Nate Silver is telling his 1.7 million Twitter followers that he’d been right all along this election, Sam Wang will be standing tall above the fray, draped in his “median-based probability election” cloak.
If you are in Southern California, the best deal in entertainment this weekend and next is the Pacific Opera Project’s hilarious production of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, one of the top ten most performed operas of all time.
I just got back from sitting at a table for four front row center for $30 per person including a bottle of wine and a platter of food.
They aren’t world class singers, but they they are quite good and are good comic actors, plus the English supertitles are filled with jokes.
Also, the ingenue diva weighs about 108 pounds, which you don’t see at operas for ten times the price. Maybe Meagan Martin isn’t yet as great a singer as Cecilia Bartoli, but she’s a lot younger and skinnier.
Both candidates live in liberal New York, but Trump defeated Clinton by six points among whites in the Empire State. Among white men, Trump crushed Hillary 59-36 in the state of New York.
As I mentioned recently, the Washington Post ran a trial balloon claiming that Hillary intended to run in the fall on immigration expansion and gun control.
Looking at the 2012 electoral college map, that looks even more suicidal than it originally sounded. The Democrats prospered in 2012 by carrying almost all of the heavily wooded Rust Belt Great Lakes states where deer hunting is a big part of the culture, like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.
… And Obama carried a higher share of white male votes in these states than he did elsewhere.
If Hillary were running against Ted Cruz from Texas, she could probably count on carrying the Great Lakes states out of cultural incompatibility. But Donald Trump has upset the old map and nobody is too sure what the new map is going to look like. …
Or it could be that Hillary is thinking of gun control as a potential women’s issue that’s not lesbian-feminist, that’s more of a mother’s issue that will appeal to the women-with-sons slice of the electorate. She campaigns with various black mothers of boys shot by cops so maybe she even figures she could buy off BLM with gun control without alienating pro-law-and-order white moderates. Cops kind of like gun control, right?
The problem for the Democrats that they always run into when they get excited about gun control is that:
- They want to take handguns away from dangerous urban minorities.
- They will never ever admit that’s what they want to do.
So whenever the Democrats start talking about gun control, they end up going on and on about how the real threat is all those evil redneck white males with their scary rifles.
They just can’t help themselves.
And then they lose the election.
Here’s the 2016 map, with Michigan not yet quite certain for Trump and New Hampshire not yet quite certain for Clinton:
Clinton’s advisers have explained to the stunned candidate that she lost the race of her life in large part due to Comey’s October Surprise — they said their plan of winning college-educated white voters and turning out record levels of Latinos was working until Republican-leaning supporters shifted back to Trump in the wake of Comey’s bombshell letter, 11 days before the election, and the necessary enthusiasm among Latinos and African-Americans could not hold. By the time he released his clearance letter on the Sunday before the election, it was too late to re-energize voters. …
But Clinton allies are also faulting the campaign for failing to develop a credible message for downscale white voters, arguing she could have won by a larger margin on the economy.
And some began pointing fingers at the young campaign manager, Robby Mook, who spearheaded a strategy supported by the senior campaign team that included only limited outreach to those voters — a theory of the case that Bill Clinton had railed against for months, wondering aloud at meetings why the campaign was not making more of an attempt to even ask that population for its votes.
Thanks for a terrific second day for the end of the Current Year fundraising drive. We may not be on the right side of history, but we’re on the right side of reality. Or, then again, maybe we are on the right side of history.
Here are seven ways for you to contribute:
First: You can use Paypal (non-tax deductible) by going to the page on my old blog here. Paypal accepts most credit cards. Contributions can be either one-time only, monthly, or annual.
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Steve Sailer
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I’m using Coinbase as a sort of Paypal for Bitcoins.
The IRS has issued instructions regarding Bitcoins. I’m having Coinbase immediately turn all Bitcoins I receive into U.S. dollars and deposit them in my bank account. At the end of the year, Coinbase will presumably send me a 1099 form for filing my taxes.
Payments are not tax deductible.
Below are links to two Coinbase pages of mine. This first is if you want to enter a U.S. dollar-denominated amount to pay me.
Fifth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrAT aol.com — replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.) There is no 2.9% fee like with Paypal or Google Wallet, so this is good for large contributions.
Sixth: if you have a Chase bank account (or even other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com — replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it’s StevenSailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.) There is no 2.9% fee like with Paypal or Google Wallet, so this is good for large contributions.
Seventh: send money via the Paypal-like Google Wallet to my Gmail address (that’s isteveslrATgmail .com — replace the AT with a @). (Non-tax deductible.)
From it: “You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps.” You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.
You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.
Or you can send money via credit card (Visa, MasterCard, AmEx, Discover) with the industry-standard 2.9% fee. (You don’t need to put money into your Google Wallet Balance to do this.)
Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone — the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).
Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google’s free Gmail email service. Here’s how to do it.
Last year, a prominent group of supporters asked Hillary Clinton to address a prestigious St. Patrick’s Day gathering at the University of Notre Dame, an invitation that previous presidential candidates had jumped on.
Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. had each addressed the group, and former President Bill Clinton was eager for his wife to attend. But Mrs. Clinton’s campaign refused, explaining to the organizers that white Catholics were not the audience she needed to spend time reaching out to. …
Hillary wound up losing white Catholics 60-37, and narrowly losing a lot of Great Lakes States in the Electoral College.
And she ceded the white working-class voters who backed Mr. Clinton in 1992. Though she would never have won this demographic, her husband insisted that her campaign aides do more to try to cut into Mr. Trump’s support with these voters. They declined, reasoning that she was better off targeting college-educated suburban voters by hitting Mr. Trump on his temperament.
Instead, they targeted the emerging electorate of young, Latino and African-American voters who catapulted Mr. Obama to victory twice, expecting, mistakenly, that this coalition would support her in nearly the same numbers. They did not.
In the end, Mr. Trump’s simple promise to “Make America Great Again,” a catchphrase Mrs. Clinton dismissed as a vow to return to a racist past already long disappeared, would draw enough white Americans to the polls to make up for his low minority support.
“The emerging demographic majority isn’t quite there yet,” said Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist and former White House communications director. “The idea you can get to a presidential campaign and just press a button and they’ll vote, it’s not there yet.” …
Early on, Mr. Clinton had pleaded with Robby Mook, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, to do more outreach with working-class white and rural voters. But his advice fell on deaf ears.
The sophisticated data modeling Mr. Mook relied on showed that young, Latino and black voters would turn out as they had hoped. But while they favored Mrs. Clinton overwhelmingly, she could not run up the score with them like Mr. Obama had in 2012.
With voters 29 and younger, for example, Mrs. Clinton won by 18 points, down from Mr. Obama’s 22 points in 2012, and 29 points in 2008, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research.
The Clinton campaign was also betting on college-educated suburban voters who ended up drifting away from Mrs. Clinton in the final days, which the campaign attributes to the F.B.I.’s renewed focus on her emails as early voting began.
A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Brian Fallon, said the campaign did not cede white working-class voters to Mr. Trump, pointing to a bus tour Mr. and Mrs. Clinton and her running mate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, went on in rural pockets of Ohio and Pennsylvania after the Democratic National Convention in July. He added that shaving into Mr. Trump’s lead among these voters would not have given Mrs. Clinton a path to victory.
Yeah, it would have. She lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and their 46 Electoral Votes, enough to put her over the top, by a little over 100,000 votes.
The campaign also appeared to overestimate how offended Mr. Trump’s female supporters would be by an “Access Hollywood” recording in which Mr. Trump is heard bragging about grabbing women by the genitals. Mr. Trump lost among women by 12 percentage points, exit polls showed, about the same deficit Mitt Romney had in 2012.
In the final weeks of the campaign, a despondent Mr. Clinton held a flurry of his own events in Ohio, Iowa, the Florida Panhandle and Wisconsin, talking to the white voters who like him but who view his wife with distrust.
“I think Bill Clinton was right” about the need to concentrate more in those areas, said Jay S. Jacobs, a prominent New York Democrat, pointing to Mr. Trump’s victories in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan, states Mrs. Clinton’s campaign had largely overlooked.
Former Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania also said he had encouraged campaign aides at Mrs. Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters to spread their vast resources outside Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and focus on rural white pockets of the state. “We had the resources to do both,” Mr. Rendell said Wednesday. “The campaign — and this was coming from Brooklyn — didn’t want to do it.” (Mr. Trump won Pennsylvania by one percentage point.)
But Mr. Jacobs and others said Mrs. Clinton’s campaign leadership thought Mrs. Clinton was an imperfect messenger to connect with Rust Belt voters on issues like global trade deals, which she had previously supported.
“In 2000 and 2008, working-class voters saw her as their champion — it was the core of her support,” said Mark Penn, the chief strategist of Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign. “By 2016, issues of trade, stagnated wages and immigration had piled up, and Trump was successful at exploiting those against her.”
The situation was made worse in September, when Mrs. Clinton described half of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Afterward, she told one adviser that she knew she had “just stepped in it.”
And in the end, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed proved more powerful than any of Mrs. Clinton’s poll-tested slogans, said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic political consultant.
“Class anger won,” he said, delivering a staggering defeat to the Clinton strategy of “more money, more consultants, more polling and more of a campaign based on what we thought we knew rather than what the electorate felt.”
Angry outgoing Administrations can do a lot of harm. For example, they can take a dive on bad lawsuits filed by their friends. In January 1981 the Carter Administration trashed the federal civil service test in a consent agreement to the Luevano disparate discrimination case.
What mischief will the Obama Administration come up with over the next three months?
From the Daily Caller’s article on supposed White House jobs:
Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller — an immigration hawk and former communications aide to Alabama GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions — is under consideration for a variety roles, including deputy chief of staff for policy, director of speechwriting, director of the domestic policy council and director of communications. Miller often warmed up for Trump during rallies in the Republican primary and embodies Trump’s message of limited immigration, free trade skepticism and distaste for the donor class.
Miller isn’t the only former Sessions aide being considered for a Trump administration. Rick Dearborn, Sen. Sessions’ chief of staff, is listed as the sole option for leading the office of legislative affairs.
Former Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter has a depiction of “The Narrative” in one of his novels. Now, here’s former New York Times entertainment industry reporter Michael Cieply with some interesting observations on The Narrative at the NYT. From Deadline:
It’s been a moment for soul-searching, and to some extent repentance, at the New York Times. In much-discussed remarks to his own media columnist James Rutenberg, executive editor Dean Baquet offered a mea culpa for having missed the Donald Trump surprise, though he spoke less for the paper than for journalists in general. “We’ve got to do a much better job of being on the road, out in the country, talking to different kinds of people than we talk to — especially if you happen to be a New York-based news organization — and remind ourselves that New York is not the real world,” Baquet said.
… “As The Times begins a period of self-reflection, I hope its editors will think hard about the half of America the paper too seldom covers,” wrote Spayd.
She continued: “The red state America campaign coverage that rang the loudest in news coverage grew out of Trump rallies, and it often amplified the voices of the most hateful. One especially compelling video produced with footage collected over months on the campaign trail, captured the ugly vitriol like few others. That’s important coverage.
Or it’s intentionally misleading.
But it and pieces like it drowned out the kind of agenda-free, deep narratives that could have taken Times readers deeper into the lives and values of the people who just elected the next president.”
Having left the Times on July 25, after almost 12 years as an editor and correspondent, I missed the main heat of the presidential campaign; so I can’t add a word to those self-assessments of the recent political coverage. But these recent mornings-after leave me with some hard-earned thoughts about the Times’ drift from its moorings in the nation at-large.
For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”
It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”
The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”
You can see this in agenda-driven stuff like World War T and the Military / Campus Rape Culture hysterics. These are not news, they are planned campaigns of psychological warfare.
Hillary took some big steps to get Black Lives Matter mojo on her side in order to turn out black voters, like putting the mother of failed cop-killer Michael Brown on the stage of the Democratic Nation Convention. But she wound up losing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Just maybe, though, a lot of blacks aren’t all that crazy about BLM, a movement that seems to consist of a largely homosexual elite that uses words like “intersectionality” and a base of street knuckleheads who like a little undocumented shopping. They felt racial pride in voting for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, but voting in 2016 for a white lady who expects them to vote out of solidarity with BLM … well, that just wasn’t #1 on their to-do lists.
I wrote in VDARE on November 10, 2014 after the big GOP wins in the midterms:
… The lack of black enthusiasm for voting after the Democrats’ Ferguson Campaign speaks well for African-Americans’ sense of self-respect. They turned up in vast numbers two years ago to vote for Obama, who, for all his flaws, is at least a respectable credit to his race. This year, in contrast, they found the prospect of voting for Michael Brown depressing.
I suspect something similar may have happened again in 2016.
Consider Ferguson’s homestate of Missouri. In 2012, Romney won Missouri easily by 9.4 points (up from McCain’s 0.1% margin in 2008). But in 2016, two years after Ferguson, Missouri was a Republican landslide: Trump won by 19.1 points.
The Political Ferguson Effect sure didn’t seem to do Hillary much good in Missouri.
Steve Sailer is a journalist, movie critic for Taki's Magazine, VDARE.com columnist, and founder of the Human Biodiversity discussion group for top scientists and public intellectuals.
Well, OK, but anyone can count on 20% of the votes outside the corridor.
The 10 most populous counties in the US have 40 million people, and the popular vote winner had about 60 million. There's some diversity in those 10 counties--Arizona, for example--but a lot of American culture has become...
Rush just bought up the standard fare explanation about the EC: The 1960 World Series. The Yankees scored about twice as many runs as the Pirates and as a team hit for way better average, but the Pirates won the WS because they won four games to the Yankees three.
The film's doing excellent business:
Dropping only 49% in its second weekend, Disney and Marvel's Doctor Strange delivered an impressive $43 million in its second weekend as the film's domestic gross climbs to over $153 million in just ten days of release. Among Marvel's single-character intro...
As for the film, caught it last weekend. I rather enjoyed it. The visual effects are striking, and the performances are solid (I particularly enjoyed Rachel McAdams and Mads Mikkelsen). As someone who devoured reprints of the classic Lee-Ditko Dr Strange comics in my youth, I have a few quibbles...
I never thought Grant sounded particularly British (even though he was). His mid-Atlantic accent blended in pretty well with the similar accents of many American actors in that period.
Put Grant in a scene with Jimmy Cagney and Katharine Hepburn, and he's not going to sound out of place.
Chiwo Ojowo a Celt!!! He couldn’t even pass as Welsh. Only in Hollyweird.
Swinton's the "Celtic" character in the film.We don't hear anything about the background of Ejiofar's Mordo.
How is whitey, desperate to live in Manhattan, going to craft a protest over that outcome? Above 125th street on the west side, it’s essentially Dominican. Massive piles of illegal Dominican immigrants dominate the land there, since they ethnically cleansed it of blacks decades ago. In Los Ange...
English and Australian actors have become much better at imitating American accents since Cary Grant’s day. The old movies never tried to explain Grant’s accent.
Grant's accent was sui generis, a unique blend of Bristol, RP, New York, and General American. I'm not quite sure how someone co...
We could say the same about you guys. ;-)
However in recent years the number of Americans doing credible English accents seems to have risen. Gwyneth Paltrow, Meryl Streep, John Lithgow, James Cromwell, Rene Zellweger (very close), Johnny Depp (sort of). Gillian Anderson (spent part of her chi...
One of the remaining puzzles I have over this election is the demographic breakdown of the vote which allowed Trump to win.
From the exit polls, I see numbers that just don't seem to add up. Supposedly, Trump got 1% fewer votes from whites than did Romney, though he did get an additional 2% more...
Bingo. See Obama’s disgusting disclaimer when he nominated (((Garland))) for the USSC. “Yeah, he’s a white guy, but….”
Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Garland. With the last, four of the last five Democratic nominees to the Supreme Court are Jewish. And leftists tell me I hav...
I think this would be an appropriate place to reproduce a comment I had made earlier. It's point is that the Electoral College could indeed prove to be a pretty long term advantage for Trump style candidates who appeal to the white working class:
One of the more interesting consequences of th...
"Yes, whites do often know what is good for them through their own personal choices – like choosing to live in white neighborhoods, or at least not overwhlemingly black neighborhoods."
Or like choosing to live in mixed neighborhoods, or choosing not to have their fellow whites restrict their...
From what I’ve seen in the commercials his accent sounds unbearable even there. It’s weird that we can do English accents but they can’t do American accents.
I'm sure Englishmen used to hearing atrocious American attempts at English accents would disagree.
We went to see "Dr. Strange" ope...
That is one of my favorite bits about those cheesy old sock and sandal movies. For some reason, in Rome the aristocrats and legionary officers all have Oxford accents, and the street rabble and foot soldiers have Cockney accents. Also, it is easy to tell who the villain is, it's the guy with the...
The EC is the ripstop fabric of the election process. As pointed out in a previous post, Cook County, IL, gave Hillary over 1.5 million votes this year compared to a little over 400K for Trump. That 1 million vote delta in just one county in Illinois accounts for her popular vote lead, gave...
And the Republican nominee attempting to be less unappealing to white voters in the Upper Midwest would be inconceivable.
Haha. Karl Rove makes a decent stand-in, doesn't he?
Rove: "Inconceivable!!!"
America: "You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."
iSteve: Perhaps on the Wrong Side of History, but on the right side of reality.
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