Saturday, May 9, 2020

Former First Lady Gets Less than Stellar Reviews on Her New Netflix Film

About herself....

I'm sure Michelle Obama was expecting better reviews from the usually fawning media for her new Netflix film about herself. Titled "Becoming", the critics called Michelle's first big Netflix production “bland,” “self-celebratory,” and “paper-thin.”  Of course immediately afterward the same critics made sure to let you know how awesome Mrs. Obama herself is.

Time magazine softened it's harsh judgment of the film by noting the Dear Leaderess “deserves more than a worshipful gaze” such that the documentary offered. Critic Stephanie Zacharek wrote that Michelle is so wonderful that she didn't need the documentary. “Obama deserves so much more than the worshipful glassy gaze of this documentary;" opined Zacharek. "She’s so far beyond it that it can barely contain her.”

Indiwire's Kate Erbland damned with moderate gushing. “While the film’s star and subject is never less than dazzling, even her most inspiring moments can’t obscure a paper-thin exploration of a remarkable life in transition.”  She acknowledged that the film was "an unfocused collection of concepts," she went on to drool that every unfocused concept "could all inspire their own films.”

In promoting the film, Ms. Obama stated candidly that having children was a ‘concession’ that cost her her ‘dreams’. What a mom!

Honestly, I could NOT have read anymore. While I still maintain that what looks like an organized conspiracy is more often simply a sharing of basic ideas and values. The university professors of the United States have been enamored of socialism since the 19th century. Socialism promises those who educate America's future journalists, politicians and leaders, an exalted place in the new order. Remember, the same class of educated fools praised Hitler and Stalin, built statues to Mussolini in New York and openly thought that sterilizing and/or euthanizing people with disabilities, mental illness, and the useless elderly was a dandy idea. That sort of cold logic still underlies much if not most of academic thinking. Listen to professors talk fondly of "aborting" babies up to two years old if genetic defects are found in them or at the very least castrating them.

While I don't believe that the fawning movie critics are totally dishonest, (they did honestly report that the film was a poorly done puff piece after all), the could not leave it at that, but had to soften the blow with glowing praise for the subject of the film.

I don't think anybody paid these guys to sell their souls to kneel before the Lightbearer II, I do believe that their educational indoctrination enabled the to do no less. These journalists are more like worshipers than unbiased reporters. They blame the faults in the film on the filmmaker, saying it wasn't worthy of the Dear Leaderess, conveniently ignoring the fact that Michelle was the star of the show and that it was produced under the new contract that Netflix has with the Obamas to produce films for the movie streaming giant.

Try looking it up on Google or any browser really. You'll get page after page of "critical" reviews that basically say the film sucks, but Michelle shines! When have we ever heard a more disingenuous load of claptrap from supposedly hard-hearted journalists like the movie critic cadre?  Hint: You probably won't.

Again, I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think it's worse. I think what we have is what happened to the Israelites who went over to the worship of Baal. They bought the easy lies they were told by the media, academia and the film industry equivalents of the time. Next thing you know, good Jewish parents were tossing their kids into the fires of Moloch. And how come these devilish forms of government always seem to want to kill children in large numbers?

Turns out Senator McCarthy may have been on to something after all when he started turning over rocks and finding communists. Perhaps there were communists after all! How else do you explain the fact that supposedly independent, unbiased journalists could not criticize a very bad film without softening the blow and kissing the ring of the self-centered narcissist who narrated the whole thing. Somebody's been passing out communist propaganda for so long that the rubes in our leader clas have, in disturbing numbers, bought that nonsense hook, line and sinker.

My worry is that this attitude is so pervasive that those of us who received at least part of our education from conservative and Christian teachers will soon be seen as enemies of the state or at least a threat to the new order. Some people already do if you listen to Bernie Sanders' supporters who speak openly of gulags for those who resist the progressive socialist movement.

To quote a tired maxim, "If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck, it's more than likely a duck!"  In the same way, "If it looks like a socialist, talks like a socialist and walks like a socialist, it's very likely to set up gulags and commence firing up the furnaces."

© 202 by Tom King



Tuesday, May 5, 2020

How Well is Sweden's CoVid-19 Strategy Working?

Turns out the curve is headed into low-Earth orbit!

The supposed Swedish herd immunity model has been touted lately as the way to go for the good old USA. Good old conspiracy theorists say it's best to go ahead and let everyone get it right away. Okay, I'm sorry but the "let everyone who's gonna die, go ahead and die" strategy doesn't much appeal to me - a 66 year-old diabetic with vicious arthritis. What's the advantage in that?  Decrease the surplus population?  How very Dickensian! I thought they said Obamacare wasn't going to do death panels. The herd immunity strategy doesn't work too well for those of us in the kill zone.

Meanwhile, the Swedish government flatly denies they are pushing any sort of herd immunity coronavirus strategy. I'm not sure they even have a coronavirus strategy. Perhaps they are hoping to wipe out some of those immigrant ghetto "no go" zones their police like to stay out of. I suppose if you want to thin out the immigrants, the infirm and the old people, it would certainly make national healthcare more affordable for the Swedish taxpayers who are left alive.

As it turns out, despite all the crowing by the media and assorted conspiracy theorists (most of whom are young and healthy and not likely to die from the virus), things are not going well in Sweden.
So far their mortality rate is up around 12%*. That works out to be  4 times the worst predicted death rate in the USA. Per capita they have a whole lot more infections than the United States. Sweden is now the sixth worst hit nation on the planet so far. Interestingly all of the worst hit places (per capita) are in Western Europe except for China which is shaving their death totals quite shamelessly and probably have far more fatalities than they are admitting. Of course, since China has eased off the two child maximum laws, they are now facing a glut of old people, sick people and disabled people, which by sheer coincidence are the favorite targets for CoVid-19. I'm not saying they are deliberately killing people who are no longer useful, but even socialist here are saying never to "let a crisis go to waste". 

Hooray for socialized medicine! 
 
I'm just saying
 

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Explain To Me How Your Inconvenience Is More Important Than My Life



I had someone this week tell me that, "Well, they were only originally predicting 200,000
deaths and that even without the self-quarantines and other 'extreme' measures, some are saying the death numbers would have been about the same either way." The theory being that we were all exposed before the flu manifested itself in China. My friend further speculated that the shut down did nothing to minimize the spread of this flu. According to the latest conspiracy theory, most of us were exposed in October and November of 2019. And my friend further argued that there is one study that shows the main exposure & sickness happens in households when families stay inside for longer periods of time. In other words, if you stay home you are more likely to get sick.
At this point I take a deep breath before refusing to bow before hindsight looking for something to bitch about.  Let me take this argument point by point.

  1. The 200,000 deaths number is appalling anyway you look at it. And that number was suggested before doctors discovered that this particular virus made you contagious up to two weeks BEFORE you even knew you had it. So you're running around like individual CoVid-19 Marys infecting everyone you know and quite a few folks you don't know. After this was known estimates jumped into the millions of deaths without some kind of drastic measures being taken. After the travel ban and self-quarantines were initiated, the rate of infection slowed dramatically.
  2. The argument that we all had the flu in October and November is a purely agenda-based conspiracy theory passed around by people with cabin fever. That the flu was loose in the US that early is really wild speculation. A lot of folks had flu last fall and not coincidentally after taking this year's flu vaccine. We were warned it might make us sick and it did. A friend told me that after this year's flu shots in Texas prisons, a lot of the inmates had mild to moderate cases of the flu. My wife and I both had flu-like symptoms after we took the flu shot before flying to Texas. Sometimes the vaccine gives you a mild to moderate case of flu depending on how strong the flu virus it's designed to fight. There's even been some anecdotal evidence that this year's vaccine helped protect some people from a mild exposure to CoVid-19. Thinking that we should have done nothing to address such a very virulent virus strain is taking risks with a lot of lives and I believe is irresponsible to suggest..
  3. If you think because you are young and healthy and not in the virus's kill zone, that you're hurting no one but yourself if you catch it, you are truly delusional. It's like the anti-vaccine folks who say, if your kid has taken the vaccines, why should you worry if my kid catches it? What they don't take into account is that every time an epidemic goes through the human population, it mutates and becomes something a little different. Does anyone want to play revolving vaccines with smallpox, diptheria, measles, mumps or rubella? Do we really want to expose pregnant women to the measles outbreak among the unvaccinated rich Democrats, conspiracy theorists and illegal aliens?  My baby brother Craig died because we gave Mom the measles while she was pregnant with him. I don't want to see the annual death tolls from infectious deceptively named "childhood" diseases.
  4. Finally, the snowflakes, conspiracy theorists and habitual whingers have complained that this whole thing is a big plot to do everything from converting the USA into a socialist state, a Nazi state with President Trump as dictator, or a communist state ruled by China. And this vast conspiracy was concocted all to prevent them from cruising the bars, having sex on the beaches and attending concerts, raves and mass protests where you get laid afterward. Conspiracy theorists are so much fun to jerk around. They will believe anything that makes them the victims of the evil forces that they firmly believe rule the world.  Sorry guys. neither the gray aliens, the Illuminati, the Freemasons, Big Pharma nor the Reptiloids from Dimension 9 are out to cramp your hard partying style. The truth is that even the politicians that are trying to be in control aren't really in control. Nobody is in control unless you're a Christian claiming Romans 8:28.

Well, excuse me if you've been inconvenienced by precautions that have been taken (mostly voluntarily) to stop the spread of this stuff. I'm 66 years old. I've got crippling arthritis thanks to a life of doing good things that happened to have battered my joints. I take handfuls of pills to control my blood sugar and my blood pressure. I do exercises that hurt like all git-out!

Even then, despite the nearly constant pain and difficulty getting around because I'm living on a fixed income, I find that I am singularly uninterested in being killed off by suffocation by the coronavirus because some snowflake passed it around because he felt unhappy about taking precautions around people who were old and therefore of no value to him!!!!! And I find young people who live outside the CoVid-19 kill zone to be incredibly self-centered when they whine about not being allowed to risk everyone's life by spreading this stuff to tens of millions of their fellow human beings.

 
I was hoping to meet Jesus in the air when he comes and miss out on the whole death business. So I'd rather not be killed by a virus I got from some self-centered snowflake who wasn't worried about passing around a disease that kills older people like me thank you very much.

The fact that it's not 200,000 dead or worse with a virus infinitely more contagious than our regular garden-variety flu, tells me what we've done is working. Why can't America ever do something right with the conspiracy crowd? Always looking for someone to blame. It was America's fault the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor. The Jihadis wouldn't have attacked the world trade center if we hadn't been richer than they are and hadn't been helped by President Bush. And on and on and on.

I think when we get opened back up and the economy recovers, we should take a victory lap. We know now that the virus came from the lab in Wuhan and that our previous administration pumped a lot of money into research into bat flu at that very lab which already was notoriously inept at security. We know China bought up tons of personal protective gear early on leaving other countries having to do emergency manufacturing while their people were dropping like flies. Italy didn't worry about taking measures to protect themselves and look where that got them. If we'd been hit like countries that ignored it, we'd have done 200K and probably better. I thank God it was Trump making those decisions and not some conspiracy theorist or (worse) Hillary Clinton.


Buck up, Buttercup! We're saving you from yourselves.


© 2020 by Tom King