Daily Archives: October 27, 2019

Arriving onstage coiled and poised to strike, the auditorium thrilled with anticipation and schadenfreude at the prospect of what Edna might inflict on them. Edna's talent for mockery is legendary, and as several hapless latecomers filed in, you wondered which part of her vast arsenal of delicious putdowns and backhanded compliments she might reach for.

As it happened, she pursed her lips and kept her powder dry, saving the barrage of banter and casual judgment for "non-entities" in the front rows and, after interval, selecting three guests to come up on stage for a taste of talk-show treatment.

That went swimmingly. Edna asked one woman about her husband's most annoying habit, and on discovering he was dead, held a mortified expression for a few moments before replying: "Well, there's nothing more annoying than that!"

Playful audience interaction was the main game, but more traditional jokes, potted reminiscences and occasional bursts of song featured too. Just under the make-up, you could tell Humphries was itching to be politically incorrect, and though nothing too outrageous was said, a gag about Edna's trans stand-up comedian daughter Valmai proved a bit of a clunker.

Not, mind you, because it disrespected trans people. Edna's approach to buzzwords like diversity, inclusivity, gender and ethnicity satirises suburban blindness, or at best lip-service, to them, and if there was any doubt about that, it was removed at the start, when the Dame acknowledged the Pratt family as traditional owners of the land on which we met.

It's more that with Edna's trans daughter the landscape of political correctness isn't assiduously surveyed. And Humphries seems to have poached his punchline from George Bernard Shaw, who used to appear in dressing rooms after shows he did not admire and exclaim, "Marvellous is not the word!"

Dame Edna maintains a terrific rapport with her public, though, and Humphries' enduring comic genius survives the show's loose format and digressive style. Fans should grab, while they still can, the chance to see Edna live.

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Years on, there's still nothing like a Dame - The Age

Mark Zuckerberg's Congressional testimony makes it clear that he takes inspiration from China, where WeChat serves as a one-stop portal to the greater internet. There, users conduct their banking, shopping, and bill payments without ever leaving the app. The ability to control users' economic interactions comes with the privilege of deciding the medium of exchange. If it follows suit, Facebook may end up looking like another familiar monopolist - our own government, which creates the national currency we use to pay our taxes.

It's no wonder regulators and central banks view the Libra project as a threat to the international monetary system. In a recent report, the G7 Working Group warns that global cryptocurrencies could undermine cross-jurisdictional efforts to combat illicit finance. All international transactions using US dollars currently clear through the New York Federal Reserve, where they can be monitored and stopped if deemed unsavory. Previously, members of the Senate Banking Committee have expressed concern over Facebook's ability to handle economic sanctions on foreign regimes.

Zuckerberg has promised that Calibra, Facebook's payment app, will include robust compliance systems to fulfill regulatory obligations. However, the greater risk is that Calibra will go above and beyond its regulatory duty. Facebook already employs a more restrictive speech code than legally required - the platform blocks various forms of hate speech, harassment, misinformation and inauthentic behavior. Publishers must accept Facebook's opaque Terms of Service or risk not being seen at all. It's one thing to deny politically incorrect figures the ability to share inflammatory content; it's another thing to leave them economically isolated.

In a competitive market, those who disagree with Facebook's terms could simply take their business elsewhere. The Libra Association currently includes twenty-one member companies, after some early members dropped out. If Facebook mimics WeChat in establishing itself as a go-to payment portal, those former members may have no choice but to return to the cartel.

Global regulators are so worried about preserving their own monopoly status that they've forgotten that monopolies have victims. Just look at what Facebook did to publishers. When Facebook emerged as the arbiter of eyeballs, publishers lost control of their audiences and ad revenue, and consumers ended up with a barrage of clickbait. If Facebook disintermediates the banking system, it could take control of the economic relationship between businesses and their customers, with greater restrictions on financial transactions than ever before. It's almost enough to make you wish for a decentralized currency.

Elaine Ou is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access in San Francisco. Previously she was a lecturer in the electrical and information engineering department at the University of Sydney.

MCT

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Facebook could do to banks what it did to newspapers - The Australian Financial Review

ON Wednesday we published an article headed Polar bear expert frozen out for telling the truth by Dr Benny Peiser, Director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. That and the comments of our readers prompted us to compile a list of academics who have recently been sacked, suspended or otherwise come under siege because of their politically incorrect views.

We begin with the man who perhaps more than anyone else has confronted modern repressive academic orthodoxies and, reportedly, has taken a bit of a beating in terms of his health for his worldwide one-man stand.

Professor Jordan Petersons views are well known to our readers, not least for his authorship of 12 Rules for Life and his take-down of Channel 4s Cathy Newman.

It was his refusal to use the non-binary gender pronouns zee, hir and per communicated in a series of videos that brought him to prominence. So what, you might say. But for a professor employed by the University of Toronto, backed up by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, it constituted discrimination, and is punishable by law.

Earlier this year Professor Peterson was in the news again because an offer of a visiting fellowship at Cambridge Universitys Faculty of Divinity was rescinded, a decision in which the university Students Union appeared to have quite a say.

Professor Sir Roger Scruton, another TCW favourite our intellectual mentor, no less is one of Britains most distinguished beleaguered academics. His Damascene conversion in 1968 to small-c conservatism set him on a trajectory for, in his own words, a life beyond the pale of institutional academia. It was the Marxist gobbledegook of the then New Left, which almost every other social thinker at the time lapped up, that got to him.

His academic career at Birkbeck was blighted by his conservatism, and particularly by his third book, The Meaning of Conservatism (1980).

It did not succeed in quenching his prodigious output, volleys in his lonely intellectual war against what he sees as the academic and philosophical shortcomings of Left-wing thinking in the 20th century.

Yet hostility to his views has never let up and extended, this year, even to the Conservative Party in whose name he founded a Philosophy Group. Sacking this most eminent conservative thinker from his unpaid role advising the government on how to build better towns was, as TCWs Robert James described it, another squalid milestone in its journey Leftwards.

Earlier in TCWs history we were the first out of the traps in condemning University College Londons treatment of one of the countrys foremost scientists, the Nobel prize winner Sir Tim Hunt (physiology or medicine 2001). In 2015 he was made to issue a grovelling apology and resign his honorary professorship for what can only be described as a petty thought crime. Yes, he was nave enough to make a joke about women worse, scientific women one that, I suspect, if subjected to dispassionate scientific investigation would not have been without an element of truth. He has since sought a new life in the less judgmental Japan. Who can blame him? It is the UKs loss.

Since then the Left have become progressively more intolerant. Until last year the Italian physicist Dr Allessandro Strumia was unknown outside his field. But in a workshop about gender at Cern, the European nuclear research centre in Geneva, he dared challenge the politically accepted code, saying that physics was invented and built by men, its not by invitation.He further observed that it is men, not women, who now suffer from gender bias. He was fed up, it emerged from later interviews, with the false feminist narrative of complaint about discrimination, and had set out to show it was not true.

These people are so worried about problems that dont exist. What I actually said has good purpose. We are not discriminating, women have been helped for years, Dr Strumia said, pulling the rug in one tug from under the feminist victim narrative. It wasnt the message they wanted to hear.

It was unacceptable to Cern, contrary to their code of conduct and to a brigade of virtue-signalling scientists. They announced Strumias suspension with immediate effect.

The Cambridge academic Noah Carl is one of the latest victims of the new intolerant academic culture. St Edmunds College terminated Dr Carls post after academics and students called for his appointment to be investigated in a classic example of how the Left destroy anyone they dont agree with.

More than 1,000 signed an open letter accusing Dr Carl of producing racist pseudoscience.

The sociologist had become a controversial figure after speaking at the London Conference on Intelligence, where eugenics was allegedly debated, and publishing a paper arguing that stereotypes about the criminality of certain immigrant groups in the UK were reasonably accurate.

At the start of this year students started a petition to stop Professor John Finnis, Emeritus Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy at Oxford University and a world authority on natural law, from teaching on the grounds of what they declared to be a long record of homophobic, transphobic and other discriminatory views. This is their interpretation of the professors position that the state should deter public approval of homosexual behaviour while refusing to persecute individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation, basing this position not on the claim that homosexual sex is unnatural but on the idea that it cannot involve the union of procreation and emotional commitment that heterosexual sex can, and is therefore an assault on heterosexual union. The case pitted an unusually distinguished and subtle defender of traditional beliefs against an unusually incoherent campaign, the Catholic Herald pointed out.

This once doctoral supervisor of US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, and author of the most scathing critique of the UK Supreme Courts recent prorogation ruling, survived to see another day and fight another fight.

Another Oxford academic, Nigel Biggar, Professor of the Faculty of Theology and Religion, has likewise been on the receiving end of censorious and prejudiced students. His crime? A comment in the Times entitled Dont feel guilty about our colonial history in which he defended another academic, Bruce Gilley, a professor of political science at Portland State University, for making The Case for Colonialism. For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name, he wrote, and it is high time to question this orthodoxy.

Following its publication the knives came out for him.

Professor Biggar may have Trevor Phillips, the former chairman of the Equalities Commission who defended him against his critics, to thank for still being in situ, though no less besieged.

We salute all these heroes. And we will be looking out for more.

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Jordan Peterson and Co academic heroes who defied the PC brigade - The Conservative Woman

In the past decade or so, audiences have been devoured by hordes of zombie movies and TV-shows like The Walking Dead.

This subversive sub-genre that used to be defined by edgy indie productions has now received hundreds of millions of dollars in producing funds, casts and crews from the very tippy-top of the A-list, to quote the first installment. Most of the time, these gobs of cash do nothing but sterilize the gritty and zany aesthetic that were epitomized in inspiring films of the genre like Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later.

The original 2009 Zombieland marked the beginning of the popularization of the genre in general culture and was an incredibly fresh, funny and touching story that still holds up.

However, director Ruben Fleischer and actors Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin return to the genre after a ten-year hiatus. Unlike many others recently, they prove that even Academy Award-winning, and nominated, talents funded by millions of dollars can produce one of the funniest and most genuine zombie-films to date.

Ten years after Eisenbergs Columbus and Harrelsons Tallahassee saved Stones Wichita and Breslins Little Rock at the Pacific Playland theme park, the group has traversed the United States of Zombieland to arrive at the White House in Washington D. C.

This odd quartet of antisocial, zombie-slaying and meta punch-line delivering badasses become a battle-hardened family that cares for little more than each other. However, when their hardened personalities are forced to stay with each other in one location for an extended period of time without having to fight off a horde of the undead every day, they find a disease much worse than a modified form of Mad Cow disease: cabin fever and adolescence.

The group splits up, leaving all of the members dispersed throughout Zombieland to discover the familial bonds that end up uniting them more than their fears can divide them.

Zombieland: Doubletap is, ironically, one of the most life-filled films of the year.

Throughout their journey, Columbus, Wichita, Tallahassee and Little Rock come across other survivors who have figured out unique methods of survival in the apocalypse.The film wastes no potential for copious amounts of fun-filled and politically incorrect social commentary.

These new survivors introduce a whole new layer to the world of Zombieland and throw our returning characters into a series of riotously fun sequences that are sure to make fans of the original love this sequel, and are likely to win over more cautious viewers.

In the ten years that separated this sequel from the original, the cast has clearly done nothing but grow in ability and talent. All original cast members return, and it feels like they never left. If anything, the groups chemistry together is better than it was in the original.

Additionally, Harrelson, Eisenberg, Breslin and Stone maintain their character mannerisms and advance them all with the maturing of their characters over the course of a decade. As meta and funny as this film is, all of the main characters ground the film through their realistic responses to their unrealistic circumstances.

This film is certainly an improvement over its predecessor when it comes to the films set design, cinematography and visual effects; these zombies are some of the best-looking undead to ever stumble and snarl across the silver screen.

Cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung and Fleischer were clearly dedicated to advancing the quality of the cinematography in the sequel without sacrificing the indie-aesthetic that marks some of the most beloved films in the zombie-genre. No fancy editing or glossy camerawork is employed here. Instead, the careful viewer will notice the dedication to detail-oriented scene construction, especially in some thrilling one-shots.

However, where this film falters compared to the original is all in its writing. Zombieland was one of the most memorable films of the 2000s because of its then-unique focus on meta-humor in a story about totally different people making it work in a world overrun with the undead.

Now, audiences have grown somewhat accustomed to violent and meta movies like Deadpool and Cabin in the Woods. The formula used in Zombieland: Doubletap still works, it just isnt as fresh as its predecessor. This especially shows in some, albeit humorous, sequences that were obviously written to extend the runtime beyond what the movies main narrative could support on its own.

Despite its familiar feel and some conventional writing, the talented cast and crew return to Zombieland and deliver a film about family. Filled with heart, meta-humor, big guns, social commentary and lots of rotting corpses, the film is well worth the price of admission.

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Zombieland: Double Tap is worth the wait - University of Dallas University News

Yes, they are back: The crazy coven is once again hell bent on hexing and vexing the president of the United States. Believing they have the magical powers to oust Orange Man this go round with better recipe ingredients, members of #MagicResistance are cackling about the bonfire, tossing bird feathers, toads teeth, the old stand-by eye of newt, and flys beak into the stew pot, hoping for a binding spell major success a concept which has been just a tad out of reach in the years since Inauguration Day 2017.

The witches dusted off their Ouija boards on a different project a year past, hoping that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh might be an easier mark to slay than Trump. Alas, his honor is doing just fine. And possibly this is why the group is tweaking its magic mojo: Did they leave out a toads toenail or some other ingredient, and will 2019 prove to be the binding of a century?

Although past spells have, well, failed miserably not once or twice but a multitude of times it hasnt seemed to deter the witches from a continual and fruitless effort of making Trump disappear.

According to a few in-the-coven types, a binding spell is simply a metaphysical straight-jacket:

Typically, a magical binding is simply a spell or working that restrains someone metaphysically, preventing them from doing something. Binding should not be confused with banishing which is to send a person or thing away using magical methods.

In other worldly words, they hope to hobble the American president.

The enterprising group claims to have just the incantationto bind Donald Trump and all those who abet him, and they perform the 60 second bewitching exercise during every waning crescent moon. They plan to keep it up until Trump is removed from office likely 2025, unless they spellbind the Silent Majority, and those folks all are armed and have God on their side. As former President Obama pointed out, the Midwesterners like to cling to their guns and Bibles.

For those who follow the efforts of our American witches, one enterprising group has a book for sale: Magic for the Resistance: Rituals and Spells for Change. For $9 bucks and some change, folks can cast their own spells at home to support immigrants and refugees, reproductive rights, and anti-fascism, as well as protect the earth. More proof that President Trumps economy helps his detractors as well.

Will the witches overtake the administration? Probably not anytime soon, although the number of Americans claiming to be Wiccan or Pagan has grown or maybe people are just finally admitting they are witches on surveys. A small school in Connecticut not exactly the capital of all things witchy Trinity College has been tracking the movement. They have documented that in 1990, around 8,000 Wiccans lived in the United States. By 2008, that number grew to 340,000, and in 2014, even Pew Research reported that about a million people identified as Wiccan: Thats a lot of witches, but its still not a major voting or hexing demographic when compared to the total population.

So here we sit on year number three, the biding spell was cast Friday, October 25, at 11:59 p.m. and America waits with bated breath to see if altering the ingredients, and adding an unflattering photo of Trump, tarot card, an orange candle stub, a pin, and a feather was effective in ending his presidency once and for all.

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The Witches Are Back But Will Trump Fall Under Their Spell? - Liberty Nation