Imagine venturing to the beginning of time and space, exploring cosmic landscapes so vast and beautiful that they’ve remained unseen by human eyes until now. This is the promise of “Deep Sky,” an extraordinary IMAX presentation that brings the universe’s awe-inspiring mysteries closer than ever before. . . .
At the heart of “Deep Sky” is the story of human ambition and scientific achievement. The film chronicles the high-stakes global mission that brought the James Webb Space Telescope to life. From conception to the nail-biting launch that placed JWST into orbit a million miles from Earth, “Deep Sky” captures the collective effort of thousands of individuals across decades, aiming to answer some of humanity’s oldest questions: Where did we come from? How did the universe begin? Are we alone in the vastness of space?
I’ve seen “Deep Sky” and agree wholeheartedly: It’s a great film, and a joy to watch in IMAX. See it at a theater near you.
I know a little about Second Civil War fiction since I’ve written a best-selling series of novels about it. And you know what I focused on? How America gets into a Second Civil War and what happens when it does. How do things change? What expectations are upended? How would things work out in that situation? That’s what’s interesting about the concept. That’s what we want to know. And frankly, that’s what teaches us what to avoid so we never get into that situation again no matter how much the Democrats try to provoke Round Two.
But this movie ignores the civil war stuff and is all about journalists on a road trip. Despite the fact that most journalists today are loathsome communists, that’s not necessarily a bad way to show us around the Second Civil War. You could get lots of perspectives, and you can see and learn what happens and why through reporter characters. But the only perspectives we get are about the reporters themselves, and they’re annoying people – which is at least a taste of realism. But they never talk about the war itself. There’s no context to all the mayhem.
Remember, it’s the world-building that’s interesting to us, not these characters. I don’t care about the characters. You have a jaded war correspondent. And another jaded war correspondent. And a third jaded war correspondent. And a fourth war correspondent who’s young and isn’t quite jaded yet but who gets jaded at the end. That’s not interesting, and that’s not what I’m trying to buy when I throw down nearly 20 bucks for a ticket to a movie called “Civil War.”
Look, the actors are competent. They’re just playing boring people. And the movie is boring. That’s the crime. The lesson Andrew Breitbart always taught about political movies is to be good first. Be interesting. Make a good movie. Then you can get your message across. He didn’t object to the idea of a left-wing viewpoint. “JFK” is a left-wing movie with an idiotic message, but it was interesting. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, even though it was unbelievably stupid. I barely kept my eyes open here.
Alex Garland is not an untalented filmmaker. The Englishman has made a few vaguely interesting movies. The problem is he shoots this one like a movie-of-the-week. It is very workmanlike. What he wants to do is set up really interesting shots like helicopters flying around the Washington monument. That’s a pretty cool image. A gun battle at the White House? Yeah, that’s an interesting concept. But not the way he does it. You can see this was not a big-budget movie. All the battles have like 10 people.
America has collapsed. When you leave New York to drive to Washington on a circuitous route that takes you through Pittsburgh, everything is empty but there are a lot of cars burned out on the highways—a completely familiar trope by now, and understandable as a directorial choice since showing millions of corpses would be expensive.
Instead, it appears the entire Eastern seaboard has been depopulated, which would be quite the feat. We follow our crew of journalists as they wend their way south. They pass a gas station where gun-toting yahoos have strung up a couple of people they hated in high school for being looters. Later, they end up in a shootout in an office park and then in some kind of refugee camp in a high-school football stadium where people are warming their hands over a garbage-can fire and smile at each other pacifically. Then they’re in the middle of a gun battle between two warring forces. Who are they? We don’t know.
The movie seared the conscience of Manohla Dargis of the New York Times and made her profoundly uncomfortable. You’d think a movie critic who’s seen horror movies and war movies for decades wouldn’t be so seared and uncomfortable. I think she’s seared and uncomfortable because she wanted to be—wanted to find this depiction of an America literally at war a ripped-from-the-headlines unnerving thing. It’s fine, I guess, but rest assured (spoilers follow here) the only reason the movie exists is that, in the final moments, we see the Donald Trump stand-in pumped full of bullets.
That scene alone will so thrill Molly Jong-Fast that she might even dye her hair a normal color. You can stay home and watch a Walking Dead rerun.
Anyway, I promised to spoil the entire plot, so here it is…
First off, why are only two states fighting to remove President GreatHairRedTie after he basically declared himself dictator with an unelected third term? This makes zero sense, including historical sense. People from all over the country would form battalions and join a side. Then, we learn that the remaining 48 states broke apart into the Florida Alliance, the New People’s Army, and the Loyalist States. Okay, but what are they doing?
There are over two dozen Loyalist States, so why does it look like only 11 people are protecting the president at the White House?
There are over two dozen Loyalist States on the president’s side and only two states in the Western Forces against the president. Why is the president losing?
Why did that guy admit to the redneck he was from Hong Kong? Darwin demanded that the idiot get shot.
What happened to the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force?
Why doesn’t the president use low-level nukes to wipe out the Western Forces?
Why is there no air war or no one in command of the air?
Why is President GreatHairRedTie sitting in the Oval Office waiting to be killed instead of hiding deep in a bunker with the nuclear codes?
Finally, the Critical Drinker notes that Civil War is “a movie that says nothing, does nothing and ultimately accomplishes nothing. It’s a film so deathly afraid of sparking controversy and division that it remains neutral to the point of neutering itself.” Yet another reminder that the film isn’t the second coming of Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate or the aforementioned JFK, each full of leftist agitprop, that are all simultaneously extremely controversial — and great movies.
Gay resigned as the president of Harvard University in January over charges of plagiarism.
The university assured her she would remain employed for a salary of around $900,000 a year as an administrator. This week, Harvard announced Gay would assume the role of teaching a graduate-level “Reading and Research” course at Harvard.
Yes, you read that correctly.
A woman outed for serial plagiarism – or “inadequate citations,” the phrase that the school used to euphemize her misdeeds – will preside over a “research” course that emphasizes proper attribution.
How this is real-life and not a skit on “SNL” or a headline from the Babylon Bee is amusing.
Harvard says the course does not provide letter grades. Letter grades uphold a grading system that disproportionately favors white students, several Harvard administrators argue.
Grades are racist.
The school adds that the course requires “written work of sufficient quantity and quality so that the course is equivalent to a lecture course or a seminar.”
Got it.
Future employers can rest assured that students who pass the course will be well-equipped to publish adequately-cited work after learning from Dr. Gay…
ABOUT OUR ‘JUNK’ DNA: The more is learned about the junk, the less it looks like junk, according to another installment of “Long Story Short” on HillFaith.
“Because of his question, our son was disciplined and given THREE days OUT of school suspension for ‘racism,'” Leah McGhee said in the email, per the Carolina Journal. “He is devastated and concerned that the racism label on his school record will harm his future goal of receiving a track scholarship. We are concerned that he will fall behind in his classes due to being absent for three consecutive days.”
On Tuesday, Leah McGhee appeared on The Pete Kaliner Show, which airs on the radio station WBT, and discussed the matter in more detail. She said the family had once lived in England, and Christian mentioned how people from that country also need green cards to reside in the U.S.
McGhee said she and her husband met with the school’s assistant principal and told him “illegal alien” is a term their son can look up in the dictionary.
“It is a term used as federal code, and it is a term that is heard frequently on many news broadcasts,” she said. “I feel that if this was handled properly in the classroom, it could have easily been used as a teachable moment for everyone.”
The Carolina Journal reported that Republican state Senator Steve Jarvis contacted the school district’s superintendent for information on the incident. He told the newspaper he asked school officials to seek a fair outcome but declined to state a position without knowing more about what happened.
“I do not see [how] that would be an offensive statement, just in getting clarification,” Jarvis said to the Journal. “But there again, I don’t know. I don’t know the situation of this particular incident.”
How bipartisan was Newsweek’s reporting?
Thank you, Newsweek, for using our reporting, but couldn't help doing the "Republicans pounce" headline thing huh? But I'm sure you checked the party registration of everyone who thought that suspension was ridiculous. #ncpolhttps://t.co/Pj2FQOz5zF
On Tuesday, pro-Palestinian protesters occupied offices in New York, California, and Washington demanding that Google cancel Project Nimbus, a joint contract with Amazon that provides cloud-computing and artificial-intelligence services to the Israeli government and military. Notably, one of the occupied offices belonged to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian; his office is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. Police arrested nine protesters across the country after the coordinated sit-in lasted ten hours.
It was unclear if the nine detained demonstrators were among those who were fired.
“Behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it. It clearly violates multiple policies that all employees must adhere to – including our Code of Conduct and Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, Retaliation, Standards of Conduct, and Workplace Concerns,” Rackow said.
The companywide memo adds that Google “takes this extremely seriously” and will continue enforcing its “longstanding policies to take action against disruptive behavior – up to and including termination.”
Tuesday’s protests were organized by a group of tech workers known as No Tech for Apartheid, which boasts over 200 members. Though it has protested against Project Nimbus since the contract was announced three years ago, the group’s criticisms of the Google-Amazon contract with Israel have ratcheted up since October 7.
Yesterday, we told you about Google employees who were forcibly removed from Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office after staging a ‘protest’ demanding the company end business with Israel.
One of those employees had an interesting take on Israeli women who said they were raped by the terrorists (and the many witnesses who said the same):
Exit question: “If I decided to protest any cause by occupying my employer’s office, I would be fired. Most employers would do the same. How is this remotely close to ‘McCarthyism?'”
Andrea Ye was clearly a fan of Audrey Hale and referenced her in her writings. She had been researching instructions for bombmaking and fantasized about murdering elementary school students because she “might get tackled” if she shot up a high school. This sounds like a textbook definition of a monster if I’ve ever heard one.
Plenty of outlets picked up the news of the arrest, but there was one curious commonality among many of them. The majority of headlines I came across completely failed to mention the fact that she was trans. The BBC only described the aspiring shooter as a “teen.” The Independent similarly went with “teenager.” WTOP News in Washington described Ye as a “Montgomery County Student.” WHIO News in Ohio went with “Maryland Teen.”
Back in Montgomery County, officials didn’t seem to want to talk about the suspect’s trans identity either. Watch as County Executive Marc Elrich explodes when being asked why the trans angle is being covered up and why he is “burying the lede.”
They’re devoted to the narrative, under which only white males and conservatives can be demonized based on their identity.
Trump — and RFK, Jr. — would be well-advised to rely on their own private security anyway, given the Secret Service’s record over the last couple of decades, and the general corruption and weaponization of the federal bureaucracy.
WE WERE SOMEWHERE AROUND CAPITOL HILL ON THE EDGE OF THE SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE WHEN THE DRUGS BEGAN TO TAKE HOLD: Mark Judge: A Hallucinogenic and Unrepentant Rant.
While reading One Way Back, the new “memoir” by Christine Blasey Ford, the accuser of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during the 2018 confirmation hearings, I was reminded of a frequently reoccurring scene on the show Cops: A perpetrator has been caught red-handed doing something wrong—let us say he’s got drugs in his car. As the police question and arrest him, the suspect proceeds to talk about everything in the world except the drugs. He was at his brother’s house. His dog is missing. He works afternoons at his job. He talks, incessantly, about absolutely anything but the bag of cocaine in his trunk.
So, it is with One Way Back. Christine Blasey Ford is an expert at not answering basic questions about the singular thing that made her famous while going on mindlessly about other things: surfing, her family, and what it’s like to stay in Oprah’s house.
Of course, how could Ford respond to basic questions regarding her attempted upheaval of the American political system? Doing so would require her to unmask herself and the plot in which she was involved.
Ford is, of course, the woman behind the allegations that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a high school party in 1982. Ford also claimed that I was in the room when it happened. Brett was confirmed, but the allegation upended Washington and caused serious trauma to many of us involved. As Kathleen Parker recently noted in the Washington Post of all places, Ford couldn’t care less about the lives she has damaged. So it’s no surprise that One Way Back and her ongoing book tour reveal Ford to be a petulant narcissist.
Ford mentions me only once in this new book, and this time it is cautiously and only in the context of official government transcripts and records. The reason for her caution is obvious. As my lawyer put it, “liberals don’t want Mark Judge owning St. Martin’s Press.” Ford already ran over me, a private citizen, once. To do so again would be not only indecent, but enough to risk her reputation and litigation.
Iran’s only hope is to get a bomb and, with it, nuclear deterrence to prevent retaliation when it increases its terrorist surrogate attacks on Israel, the West, and international commerce.
Yet now Iran may have jumped the shark by attacking the Israeli homeland for the first time. It is learning that it has almost no sympathetic allies.
Does even the Lebanese Hezbollah really want to take revenge against Israel on behalf of Persian Iran, only to see its Shiite neighborhoods in Lebanon reduced to rubble?
Do all the pro-Hamas protestors on American campuses and in the streets really want to show Americans they celebrate Iranian attacks and a potential Iranian war against the United States?
Does Iran really believe 99 percent of any future Israel barrage against Iranian targets would fail to hit targets in the fashion that its own recent launches failed?
Does Iran really believe that its sheer incompetence in attacking Israel warrants them a pardon — as if they should be excused for trying, but not succeeding, to kill thousands of Jews?
In sum, by unleashing a terrorist war in the Middle East and targeting the Israeli homeland, Iran may wake up soon and learn Israel, or America, or both might retaliate for a half-century of its terrorist aggression — and mostly to the indifference or even the delight of most of the world.
Iran’s air force is a particularly weak point in any potential conflict with Israel. Tehran is believed to only have a few dozen working strike aircraft, including Russian jets and US-made F-4s and F-5s that were acquired before the 1979 revolution.
[The International Institute for Strategic Studies] has reported that it has a squadron of nine F-4 and F-5 fighter jets, one squadron of Russian-made Sukhoi-24 jets, and some MiG-29s, F7 and F14 aircraft.
The Sukhoi-24 jets were first developed in the 1960s. Amir Vahedi, Iran’s air force commander, said this week they were in their “best state of preparedness” to counter any Israeli strikes.
Israel has hundreds of F-15, F-16 and F-35 jets, which all played a role in counter-mining Iranian drones.
At least half of the missiles that Iran fired at the weekend were said to have failed before reaching Israel, raising doubts over the claimed ability of its domestically built air defenses.
No wonder the Iranian mullahs lust after owning the bomb: The Growing Biden Incentive to Go Nuclear. “Everyone who watched that 2011 operation understood that the US and EU would have never attacked Qaddafi if he had nukes. That includes Iran.”
And they could be very close to getting it: “Iran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% purity and has enough material enriched to that level, if enriched further, for two nuclear weapons, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s theoretical definition. That means Iran’s so-called ‘breakout time’ — the time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb — is close to zero, likely a matter of weeks or days,” Reuters reported on Thursday.
