UPDATE II: ‘The New Hunger Games: Empty Calories’

Film, Hollywood, Intelligence, Pop-Culture

I was unable to endure more than 15 minutes of the first, much-ballyhooed Hunger Games. Much to the consternation of the company present, I muttered about obedient America in-thrall to DC warfare propaganda. Writes Steve Sailer about the next installment: “Like the Twilight series, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games young-adult novels are aimed at 12-year-old female readers. This puts the movies squarely in the intellectual wheelhouse of average Americans, a sizable fraction of whom don’t read much at all”:

… Perhaps we might eventually see a smile from Jennifer Lawrence (no relation to Francis), the Oscar-winning (Silver Linings Playbook) actress who plays the PTSD-addled heroine Katniss Everdeen.

Much of Lawrence’s star appeal to teenagers comes from being a normal-looking pretty American girl, a Homecoming-Queen-second-runner-up type. Her apple-cheeked face is distinctive mostly for her wide, well-padded cheekbones.

Since she’s only 23, everybody predicts a great career for her. But she strikes me as a girl built more for comfort than for speed, one whom Hollywood will hound to keep her weight down, with unpredictable consequences. Already, they seem to be doing something strange with her face. Lighting? Makeup? Digital manipulation in postproduction? Collagen injections? Beats me, but ever since X-Men: First Class she hasn’t looked the same as she did in her early low-budget films Winter’s Bone and The Beaver.

… Perhaps The Hunger Games works best as an allegorical critique of poor dumb Red State Americans volunteering to serve in the Capitol’s wars without even getting a cut of the Beltway’s black-budget contracts.

Thus the heroine is never tempted to side with the rich and powerful, although you can’t really credit her for that considering their taste in couture. The Capitol denizens are addicted to godawful conspicuous consumption rather than to the current status system in which you show off what esoterica you notice (how much carbon was emitted bringing your carrots to market, for instance) and all the massive facts you ostentatiously fail to notice.

Conversely, the movie’s portrayal of West Virginians is straight out of a Works Progress Administration writers’ project. The mountaineers are all hardworking coal miners. Nobody is on disability due to morbid obesity. The working class isn’t trapped in a web of invisible debt, they aren’t having their heavy industry jobs outsourced, nor are they having new populations insourced. In other words, there’s little to unsettle contemporary viewers in The Hunger Games. …

MORE.

UPDATE I (11/29): Facebook thread. I hate allegories; libertarian, left or right. They’re cumbersome, inorganic, artificial—all the more so when done by dumb Hollywood types. A movie has to present a good script and story and be well acted and well-put together. I don’t want symbolism. Stay away from politics, Hollywood. Above all, to please my tastes, it has to resemble reality. That’s the general rule, although I have been known to lose myself in “Avatar” lately. Never watched it when it came out. I think it’s b/c the actual scenario is a possibility; man destroying other civilizations and animals has happened—still does. Kerry: You are right. I deserve a medal for watching the bit of Hunger foolishness I watched.

UPDATE II: Kerry Crowel, I was a kid when Ingmar Bergman was popular in Israel. I recall trying to read subtitles and figure out the agonized themes and plots. (And fiddle the bunny rabbit TV antenna to get a picture.) A lot like a Nordic Chekhov he was. Actually, whatever he did, Bergman was way too sophisticated to compare to “Hunger Games.” More in the league of Fellini, who also delivered plots that made you forget the symbolism behind it. It wasn’t labored. You could still get absorbed in the plot. The reason I like a straightforward plot these days (then I was able to watch Bergman starring Liv Ullmann) was b/c simple is all the current crop can manage. I do like thrillers. I confess.

Idiots Amplify Each Other

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Gender, Intelligence, Race, Racism, Reason, Republicans

Do you find yourself listening to TV talkers and trying to decipher word-salads that result from linguistic imprecision and irrational thought processes?

DANA DITZ PERINO stood in for Gretta Van Susteren (whose viewers detected ditz material). She chatted to an affiliate about the Knock-Out Game, or polar-bear hunting. This last term, devised by perps way cleverer than Perino, is wonderfully precise.

The ensuing conversation was one that could only have taken place between two ditzes. The idiot effect was exponential. Each woman, Dana and Fox affiliate fool, bounced stupid stuff off the other.

Soon the women were nodding over the apparent need to look into the Knock Out game, It warranted an investigation, repeated Dana’s buxom interlocutor, again and again. In order to help her think remotely logically, Danna needs smarter people around. In the absence of such a quantity, she just nodded and paraphrased her friend. The two rehashed the wisdom of investigation the attacks.

None mentioned that “polar-bear hunting” was played by black youth at the expense of Other, Paler People. I could be wrong (no video clip or transcript is available), but I believe the words, “boys behaving badly” were mouthed a few times too. (Only 5 or so deaths so far, so yeah, like, yeah, bad behavior, for sure.)

The New York ‘Slimes’ Stops Slumbering. But It’s Too Late.

Healthcare, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Political Economy, Propaganda, Socialism

Before their very eyes, millions of Americans are watching as Obama takes from them and gives to a favored constituency. Now the Johnny-Come-Latelies of the “New York Slimes” (the last is Mark Levin’s moniker) have discovered belatedly that entitlement programs are distribution programs, and that Obama care is a particularity glaring exampled of one:

Hiding in plain sight behind that pledge [“If you like your current insurance, you will keep your current insurance”]— visible to health policy experts but not the general public — was the redistribution required to extend health coverage to those who had been either locked out or priced out of the market.
Now some of that redistribution has come clearly into view.
The law, for example, banned rate discrimination against women, which insurance companies called “gender rating” to account for their higher health costs. But that raised the relative burden borne by men. The law also limited how much more insurers can charge older Americans, who use more health care over all. But that raised the relative burden on younger people.
And the law required insurers to offer coverage to Americans with pre-existing conditions, which eased costs for less healthy people but raised prices for others who had been charged lower rates because of their good health.
“The A.C.A. is very much about redistribution, whether or not its advocates acknowledge that this is the case,” wrote Reihan Salam on the website of the conservative National Review.

Only healthcare experts knew of this? What liars live at the NYT. Mitt Romney repeatedly told the stupid voters that the cost of their healthcare would rise under Obamacare by about $2000 to $3000 annually. (For people in the individual market it’s much more.) There were many like him. The morons refused to heed him. Americans, for the most, were bamboozled by Obama media sycophants like the “Slimes” and were smitten by BHO’s Svengali-style hypnotism.

Libertarians are the Truthers—the good ones cleave to natural justice and to the natural laws of economics. By so doing, we are able to predict what the fools at the New York Times have only just conceded. So it was that “Obama’s Politburo Of Proctologists” (June 26, 2009), one of many such columns, explained to the few who listened that,

The pit of perverse incentives Papa Obama is engineering includes leveling the insurance industry, which by definition must discern and discriminate between applicants based on their health status (largely under individual control). Under his benevolent rule, private insurers will be subjected to a host of new regulations, “including a requirement to insure all applicants and a prohibition on pricing premiums on the basis of risk …”

“Destroying Healthcare For The Few Uninsured” (August 7, 2009) attempted the same:

If the US wasn’t already insolvent, I’d say that Obama was bankrupting the country, and sending the health care we have to hell in a handcart, for the ostensible benefit of less than ten percent of the population. But the US is already in the red, courtesy of the current president and his predecessor.

On an on.

The Private, Online Alternative To Gov.Con.

Government, Healthcare, Private Property, Socialism, Technology, The State

If you’re going to let the government herd you into Gov.Con., go to HealthSherpa.com to “Instantly compare premiums for health exchange plans.”

No, this simple, working site is not a government stopgap. “Why Government ‘Care’ Will Never, Ever Work” explains why a command-and-control fix will always fail.

HealthSherpa.com was designed by “three 20-somethings.”

three young men from San Francisco, George Kalogeropoulos, Ning Liang, and Michael Wasser, did what the government has not been able to do: build an easy to use site where people across the country can get quotes and compare different health care plans through the federal exchange.

A couple of kids built the site the state could not build. It took them three days. It cost a few hundred dollars, while Gov.Con. contractors have conned the taxpayer out of half a billion dollars and counting. And the Gov.Con. site will likely never quite work. (What’s the incentive to get it to work? Close to none. Read why.)