How delicious: Ken Burns might want to make his final documentary a history of the French Revolution
/
Off to a tumbril
Would-be PBS filmmakers attack Ken Burns
Is it time to cancel Ken Burns at PBS? It’s not easy being a white, male, cisgender filmmaker these days over at the taxpayer-funded public television network. Burns has achieved immense success for his documentaries made for PBS and has been generously rewarded for his work there. A group of nearly 140 filmmakers and other professionals is blasting PBS for a lack of diversity behind the scenes. Their complaint says there is just too much Ken Burns.
A group of people that includes filmmakers, producers, directors, executives, and programmers signed on with their support after an essay by a Korean-American filmmaker was published by the Ford Foundation. The purpose was to lodge a complaint that PBS is too dependent on Burns, “America’s storyteller”, for its programming. The woke are going against their own network, in other words, because of what amounts to what looks like professional jealousy.
Grace Lee, an independent producer, director, and writer working in both narrative and nonfiction film, according to her byline on the essay, credits her career to PBS. She now asks “how much does PBS reflect the audiences it was intended to serve?” She compares the time given to documentaries by Burns versus that of her own, which was on Asian Americans.
From the occasional comments I’ve read from Mr. Burns (a college classmate of several of my friends, who shares my same 1953 birth date, and may also share some Huguenot ancestors, coincidentally, ) I’m sure we’re on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but his documentaries are superb, engrossing, and accurate. I’m certainly no authority on the Civil War or country music, for instance, but I do know quite a bit about both, and Burns’ films on those subjects were not only accurate, they added amazing amounts of historical information I’d never have happened upon on my own.
So I’ll be sorry to see him go — he’s already gone full Mao self-criticism mode; Ken, we Huguenots were made of sterner stuff — and I will no longer tune into PBS to see what my tax dollars have wrought, but it’s interesting to watch the decline and fall of a nation, live.
I'm a dog lover, but these recent French Bulldog grabs remind me of the Ransom of Red Chief
/
French Bulldog snatched at gunpoint
Grab one of my kids, yeah, I’ll pay you a couple of bucks to cover their taxi-ride home. My lab, name your price. A friggin’ French bulldog? — I’ll tell you my price to take it back.
(Edit: I’ve got to remember to check my links — I wondered why the comments seemed off-point, until I looked. Understand, please, that the linking process in Squarespace is tortuous, requiring up to 7 steps; miss just one of them and the whole damn thing goes down )
Love the idiots, hate the idiocy
/
Madonna della Strada chapel, loyola university; who knew there were christians here?
I absolutely hated it’
Honor students at a Catholic university recently complained during a townhall Zoom meeting about the incorporation of the Bible into the curricula.
Loyola University Chicago’s Honors BIPOC Coalition, which has asked the university to increase the diversity of the honors program curricula, held a discussion on Wednesday, March 24. A number of students criticized how much the Catholic university makes them read the Bible.
“I personally did not like reading the Bible whatsoever, in any capacity,” Himani Soni, a Loyola student, said during the online meeting.
The trouble with having lost all interest in baseball years ago is that I can't quit watching it now
/
Who the f’k cares?
(Bumped, to include new material)
MLB Baseball moves All-Star game out of Georgia
Commissioner Robert Manfred: “I have determined the best way to demonstrate our value as a sport is relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft.” Mission accomplished.
Someone points out that you need an I.D. to pick up tickets at a ballpark or buy a beer, but it’s raaassist to ask a voter to do the same.
Circling back: As Republicans move to revoke MLB’s anti-trust exemption, something no other sports business enjoys, here’s a great article explaining the 1922 Supreme Court decision that granted MLB that status (interesting note: the plaintiff was a competitive league’s team owner who was denied permission to join the big guys because his fan base in Baltimore had “too many negroes”.)
And over at Twitchy.com, lots of fun at the expense of that grubby capitalist LeBron James.
[M]any conservatives are dragging James for weighing in on the Georgia law when he stayed silent on China back in 2019:
“When I speak about something, I speak about something I’m very knowledgeable about, something I’m very passionate about. I feel like with this particular situation, it was something not only I was not informed enough about, I just felt like it was something that not only myself or my teammates or my organization had enough information to even talk about it at that point in time and we still feel the same way.”
That was then, this is now:
From reader “Charles Smythe”:
Dems have controlled our legislature for 60 years. We have no early voting, to get an absentee ballot you have to sign an affidavit with a valid excuse and return it to your local board of elections and you have to show some form of ID in order to vote in person. If Georgia said, "we scoured the country and think CT does things the right way" and enacted a carbon copy of our state election laws, that result would be significantly more restrictive than what they recently enacted. Would that be "Jim Crow on steroids"?
And Dear Jesus, imagine if he'd had an atomic bomb, instead of a car.
/
The victim was killed by the car driven into him by a Nation of Islam adherent, but never mind: narrative.
And right there with her, MSN PRAVDA weighs in:
Politics and vaccine
/
would we lie to you? I mean, twice?
Pfizer “never took a penny from the U.S. government for developing our vaccine”
Health Digest, March 20, 2020
Currently, 11 vaccines are in late-stage trials, including four in the United States, The New York Times said. Operation Warp Speed, a federal effort to rush a vaccine to market, promised Pfizer $1.95 billion to deliver 100 million doses of the vaccine for the federal government to distribute to Americans free of charge. However, Kathrin Jansen, Pfizer's senior vice president and the head of vaccine research and development, said that Pfizer has taken no federal money. "We were never part of the Warp Speed," she told The New York Times. "We have always said that science is driving how we conduct ourselves — not politics."
On November 10, 2020, post-election, Pfizer “clarified” that statement to admit that it had been paid $1.9 billion as party of Operation Warp Speed, “but we wudda done it anyway’.
Did Pfizer and the FDA collude to delay the announcement of the FDA’s approval of Pfizer’s vaccine until after the election? You can read a complete debunking of that theory by MSN PRAVDA here. The money quote, so far as I’m concerned, comes at the last paragraph, from one of Trump’s enemies within his own administration:
Some Trump aides said it was probably better for vaccine confidence for the data to be released after the election.
“Honestly, from my perspective, it’s probably better that we announced anything about the vaccine after the election because it’s going to be more trusted by the American people,” said a senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he had not been authorized to discuss the matter. “I’m not sure Pfizer did the wrong thing.”
So clearly, there were discussions on the release of the news post-election, and just as clearly, after those discussions, Pfizer made a decision to stay mum until November 9th.
Wokeness, Original Sin, and our new religion
/
[T]he idea “whites are permanently stained by their white privilege” is similar to the Christian doctrine of original sin. Theologians commonly characterize original sin as the idea humans inherited a tainted nature and tendency towards sin, and historians believe the notion originates from the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo in the third century.
BUT:
There is one crucial difference that separates pseudo-religious “wokeism” from traditional religion. The notion of atonement and forgiveness is a central teaching in the Christian tradition, yet the actions of today’s mob suggest no equivalent for “wokeists,” according to the Federalist.
Related, somehow: Vermont opens up China Flu vaccine availability to all who “identify” as minorities. Not that it’s necessary for such an obviously unconstitutional and illegal action, but here are the citations.
