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1930 Rudge Whitworth Ulster Grand Prix 500cc
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| Entrevias, Season 3, Episode 7, around the 4 minute mark |
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| KIO Towers Madrid Spain |
The unsolved murders of several tourists in Croatia's second city become the pretext for a spirited, mercurial tour of the former Yugoslav state's relationship to fascism.
By Jessica Kiang
The city of Split has long been a tourist magnet, famous for the churches and flagstones of its picturesque Old Town, and for the beauty of the rocky, sparkling Croatian coastline. But not all visitors come for the culture. Some seek the trashier pleasures of rowdy bars and cheap drinks, and all they know of the area’s history is that the spectacular medieval fortress clinging to a nearby cliffside was a “Game of Thrones” location.
Split is also where US filmmaker Travis Wilkerson (“Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?”) recently lived for a stretch, having resolved — and then failing — to make a movie about the dissolution of Yugoslavia. This he tells us on camera, at the beginning of “Through the Graves the Wind is Blowing,” the film he made instead of that one, and it’s an admission of compromise that somehow never compromises the integrity of what follows: a witty, dismayed, eccentric and fascinating outsider’s-eye tribute to a deeply split Split.
Wilkerson starts by introducing local homicide detective Ivan Peric, a character who could have walked straight out of a deconstructed neo-noir: a hangdog Sam Spade as written by Paul Auster channeling Franz Kafka. Peric, who only joined the force to avoid working in tourism, is on the political outs with his bosses and finds himself somewhat “working in tourism anyway,” when he’s assigned to several cases no one else wants, namely the murders of several holidaymakers in the area. It’s a sensationalist slant that Wilkerson is quick to puncture: this movie is not some true-crime serial-killer exposé. In fact, the rather absurd deaths, five of which are recounted in Peric’s lugubrious police-jotter manner on the spots where they occurred, are unconnected. Except that each is further evidence of the intense dislike the locals have for the shrieking, vomiting, urinating hordes that treat their town with such disrespect.
Peric faces insurmountable apathy and possibly actual obstruction in investigating his rapidly cooling cases. The spear (probably a “Game of Thrones” replica) used in one murder disappears. The authorities will not allow him access to another crime scene because it’s a local attraction at which the victim was allegedly killed for taking too many selfies, and they can’t afford to shut it down during high season. But even while he’s discussing the killings, the film’s other main character starts vying for our attention: Split itself is crowding in from the edge of Wilkerson’s gorgeously high-contrast black-and-white frames.
This is not the Split of any tourist brochure. Wilkerson’s camera is trained on the suburbs, the derelict malls, the abandoned motels, the once-futuristic plazas grown scrubby with weeds and angry with graffiti. Over striking dystopian cityscapes, often mirrored in the perfectly silver standing water of a permanent puddle or two, Wilkerson narrates his idiosyncratic 20th century history of Split. He makes particular reference to the shameful relationship to fascism. Croatia as an independent state first existed under the Ustaše, the local fascist party installed as a puppet regime in 1941 by the Nazis, and so the story of Croatian nationalism is inextricably entwined with its far-right past.
It’s an association Wilkerson finds written across the city today in horribly prevalent swastika and Ustaše-symbol graffiti, deeply knitted into the local football scene and given its most awful expression further inland at the Jasenovac concentration camp, which had the grim distinction of being the largest such European extermination factory not to have been built by the Germans. And yet the town has another history too, of resistance and resilience and heroic acts of self-sacrifice which Wilkerson also relates in his low, frank, warm narration. Most satisfyingly, for a film titled after a line in the Leonard Cohen song “Partisan,” he tells the story of Rade Koncar, the WWII partisan whose statue, in 2018, fell onto the drunken neo-fascist who was trying to deface it. “Rade Koncar,” says Wilkerson with something like joy, “Still fucking up fascists 70 years after they killed him.”
The irreverent, intimate voiceover is one way he saps the potential pretension or self-seriousness out of this dynamically entertaining film, but he also achieves a lovely conspiracy with the viewer by showing his work, its rough edges, its errata and false starts. It is ironic and a little subversive that the punchy imagery — hyperreal photography, text on screen, blood-spatter overlays, CCTV footage — should be so agitprop in its aesthetic. Wilkerson has the very opposite of propaganda’s agenda, questioning dogmas and doubting certainties and making “Through the Graves the Wind is Blowing” a beautifully monochromatic meditation on how nothing is actually black and white.
Looked up the fortress in Split Croatia. It's quite the place. Google Maps has good 3D View of the place, and Chrome now has a video capture function, so I thought I'd give it a try. Not as smooth as I would have liked, but good enough for this post.
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| Entrevias, Madrid, Spain |
The Stranglers are an English rock band who emerged via the punk rock scene. Scoring 23 UK top 40 singles and 19 UK top 40 albums to date in a career spanning five decades, the Stranglers are one of the longest-surviving bands to have originated in the UK punk scene.
Really? That's weird, so I listen to some of their other tunes and while they might have been big sellers, they didn't do anything for me. In fact, some of them were downright awful. And then I found this line:
Summing up their contribution to popular music, critic Dave Thompson later wrote: "From bad-mannered yobs to purveyors of supreme pop delicacies, the group was responsible for music that may have been ugly and might have been crude – but it was never, ever boring."
Well, that kind of explains it. The video came out in 1981.
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| Lockheed F-16 Fighting Falcon (J062) |
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| F-16 tail feathers |
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| Mošnov, Ostrava Airport Note the mountains along the northern border of Czechia and all over Slovakia |
* F-16.net calls it the RNIAF which Google translates to RNLAF, not to be confused with RNAF, the Royal Norwegian Air Force. Funny how all those European countries are hanging on to their royalty.
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| I watched this three or four times and could not figure out what it was. Is it a man in a wingsuit? Some kind of weird bug inching along on the snow? What is it? |
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| Former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) speaks at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, February 22, 2024. © Global Look Press / Ron Sachs / CNP |
Former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii has denounced her former party as enemies of democracy driven by a lust for power, while praising the Republican favorite for the presidential nomination, Donald Trump.Gabbard was once the vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee, but resigned in 2016 to protest the “rigging” of the party primaries against Bernie Sanders and in favor of Hillary Clinton. On Thursday, she spoke at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), held just outside the US capital.In her speech, Gabbard denounced the “Democrat elite and the swamp creatures in Washington” as having no respect for Americans and their rights, and being “driven by their insatiable hunger for power.”Democrats claim that Trump will “destroy our democracy” if elected, she argued.“They say he will be the dictator-in-chief, that if he’s elected it will be the last election this country sees. It’s laughable. This is so crazy, it’s laughable. They’re justifying their actions by telling themselves that they need to destroy our democracy in order to save it. It’s lunacy and it’s the mindset and mentality of dictators,” said Gabbard. “They are waging a multi-front battle and they will stop at nothing until they’re successful.”She praised Trump as “a fighter” whose strength and resilience come from “a sincere love and concern for the future of our country and his care for the American people.” Meanwhile, President Joe Biden, whom she endorsed in 2020, would “crumble” under a fraction of the pressure and attacks currently directed against Trump, she said.Gabbard denounced attempts by multiple US states to take Trump off the ballot, as well as prosecutions intended to convict him of anything ahead of the November vote. The most recent judgment against Trump’s business in New York, she said, was “very clearly a politically motivated hit job.”The speech “sounded like an audition for the vice-presidency,” according to the Guardian, which disapproved of Gabbard’s message. The British outlet noted that she was met with “a standing ovation and cheers” and “notably more enthusiasm” than former British PM Liz Truss, who also addressed the gathering.Trump is seeking a rematch with Biden, who officially won the 2020 election with the most votes in US history. Earlier this week, he reportedly mentioned Gabbard as a possible running mate.The 42-year-old lieutenant-colonel in the US Army Reserve served in the House of Representatives from 2013 to 2021. She left the Democrats in 2022, denouncing them as elitist warmongers driven by “cowardly wokeness” who sought to divide Americans by “racializing every issue.”
Resarch paper:
Car Seats as Contraception by Jordan Nickerson and David H. Solomon, July 31, 2020
Abstract
Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points. Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.
Feb 16, 2024 7:20pm PT
A young journalist struggles to expose the truth about a forest fire in a news ecosystem riven with corruption and fake news in Roman Bondarchuk’s meaty follow up to “Volcano.”
By Catherine Bray
In the grasslands of Southern Ukraine, between Crimea and mainland Ukraine, a natural history researcher named Yura (Dmytro Bahnenko) is hoping to track down and photograph a groundhog. If he succeeds, the land can be protected as a European reserve. This apparently simple premise — the kernel at the outset of “The Editorial Office” — can’t begin to hint at the rugged tapestry of thematic and topical threads that Roman Bondarchuk’s second narrative feature proceeds to weave together, the unique product of both the director’s vision and ambition, and also of the circumstances under which it gestated.
Set and shot just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and completed during the war, the film closes with a dedication to editor Viktor Onysko, who lost his life in the conflict during a combat mission (his job was completed by Nikon Romanchenko, with contributions from Heike Parplies, who also worked with Bondarchuk on his 2018 debut, “Volcano”).
While attempting to track his groundhog target, Yura catches some arsonists on camera as they set a forest fire. Such a journalistic scoop ought to be an open-and-shut case: publish, expose, let the authorities take action. Unfortunately, life in the Ukrainian provinces doesn’t work that way. As Yura attempts to interest various people in the story, most of them respond with a version of one editor’s blunt assessment that “no-one gives a shit about facts,” and a broader picture begins to unfold of a civilization collapsing into absurdity.
Corrupt politicians learn fashionable dances and attempt to go viral. A violent but wealthy man keeps his girlfriend chained by the ankle on a swimming pool float; she is liberated, then returns to him. Yura’s mother, an unemployed 50-year-old tourism manager enamored by the get-rich-quick promises of an American snake oil salesman, ploughs money she doesn’t have into cryptocurrency. There are hints of cult activity culminating in a sequence that wouldn’t look out of place cut into an Ari Aster movie.
Richard Bach’s “Jonathan Livingstone Seagull” pops up throughout as a reference, and it’s easy to see how that wildly successful allegorical novella applies here: Yura is Jonathan, the seagull that lives to fly, while the rest of his kind are petty and small-minded, surviving rather than living. As the paper’s editor (and Yura’s new boss) puts it, “People won’t think about the war until they see the Moscow tanks rolling in. They want to eat, drink, fuck, pray.” Yura is told that if he wants to succeed as a journalist, he needs to prioritize fabricated human-interest stories (ideally with a morbid or sexual element) and money-spinners (for example, fraudulent political puff pieces hyping the installation of a nonexistent pipeline).
The film may come as a surprise to consumers of Western media, accustomed to seeing Ukraine presented in relatively straightforward terms as the plucky underdog resisting the might of Moscow. Bondarchuk has written neither a love letter to Ukraine nor a full-on indictment. Rather, it’s perhaps best viewed as a complicated elegy for the country’s potential, a surrealist expression of mourning for an endangered worldview based on faith in the value of truth.
While the events depicted in the film often have a larger-than-life feel to them, an effect amplified by their cumulative impact, they are not flights of fancy plucked from the ether, but bear plausible relationships to past, present and future events, as you might expect from someone with Bondarchuk’s documentary background. At one point, a political rival is shot and Yura finds himself taking photographs of the bullet wound in the man’s forehead, to disprove the official line that he has died of COVID.
The film’s critique isn’t targeted at a particular government, but leveled at anyone who collaborates in disrupting the idea that truth matters. Yura’s mother talks at one point about how “people of his kind are neither good nor bad. They’re different. More complicated.” So in a post-truth world, we’re also post-morality. But where George Orwell’s “1984” saw the Party insist that “two plus two equals five” if they said so, the nightmare here is not that one single authority dictates truth, but that anybody can do so, resulting in a fracturing of reality into infinite competing narratives. In Yura’s world, if a lie is proven to be a lie, firstly, no one cares, and secondly, there will be 1,000 more lies ready and waiting to drown out the truth. Part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that they suggest that at least somebody knows what’s going on. Here, the villain is entropy.
The choice of a groundhog as a motif feels apt, since the little rodent is primarily associated in pop culture with repetition to the point of madness, thanks to the Bill Murray comedy. “The Editorial Office” captures the feeling of being trapped in an absurdist cycle of corruption, where there is no possibility of a satisfying cathartic moment of victory, merely an endless struggle in which all sense of meaning has been eroded. There can be no heroes in such a battle, Bondarchuk is bold enough to suggest, because the battleground itself is such a shape-shifting swamp.
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| 2016 Maserati Mostro |
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| Phantom Legion |
Excerpt from The "Phantom Legion" Problem by Charles Hugh Smith
Of the many signs of systemic decay in the late Roman Empire, one of particular relevance to our era is the Phantom Legion, military units that on paper were at full strength--and paid accordingly--but which were in reality no longer there: the paymaster collected the silver wages and recorded the unit's roll of officers and soldiers, but it was all make-believe.
When the Empire's wealth seems limitless, graft, embezzlement and fraud all seem harmless to those skimming the wealth. Look, the Empire is forever, what harm is there in my little self-interested skim?
This rot starts at the top, of course, and then seeps into every nook and cranny of the system. When those at the top are getting fabulously wealthy on modest salaries while claiming to serve the public, the signal is clear: go ahead and maximize your own private gain at the expense of the public and the state. Civic virtue--the backbone of the Empire--decayed into self-interest, incompetence and indulgence.
Golly gee, does that sound familiar?
"Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty,” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them. No matter how “pure” their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best." - Notebooks of Lazarus Long by Robert A. Heinlein
'does not work too well at best'. Never heard a more apt description of society.
Via My Daily Kona
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| National Debt of the United States |
The biggest problem facing our country is the huge amount of debt we are carrying. We keep adding to it every year because Congress keeps voting to spend more money. Much of that money goes to the military and the defense industry. The defense industry likes this because it means more business for them. All the people who work in the defense industry like it because it means they get to keep their jobs.
I don't know if we can stop this constant overspending, but we should try. One way that might work is if we get Congress critters a bonus if they manage to reduce the debt. Say, through some miracle, they manage to reduce the debt by one trillion dollars. One percent of that would be $10 billion dollars. Divide that among the 500 Congressmen would be $20 million dollars for each Congressman. That might motivate them to do something.
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| Kachhi Canal Project The Red Line is the Canal |
I started watching a video about this project, but while it was entertaining it wasn't showing any maps, so I traced the canal out on Google Maps and here we are.
The canal was started in 2002 and is 500 kilometers long. It provides water to irrigate 100,000 acres of crop land.
Adaptive Curmudgeon waxes philosophical:
[First, a complaint. I tried to write a post earlier. Sadly, it veered into politics. Regardless of good intentions, my post went off the rails. It’s not my fault. Nor is it your fault. Current politics is a black hole of mental ruin and we didn’t do it.
It’s impossible to wisely consider what is reason free. Are we to discuss adult things, like stoic philosophy or the calculus of economy, in a world of hyperventilating toddlers? The clownworld ass-rodeo of current politics is decrepit, debased, degraded, demented, corrupt, and weird. It behaves in blindingly illogical ways. It’s so extreme that it’s hard to assemble words to address the true form of the world.
I wish to ponder in depth, not merely point and shriek. Yet politics is shielded by walls of emotional incontinence. A tsunami of childlike thinking leaves no room for adults. I’m rendered (temporarily) speechless. It’s amazing really! I have a decent imagination, I ought to be able to bridge the gap between the unicorn dipshits and the solid earth. Fer crissake, I write about talking squirrels with disco based mind control! Yet I can’t do it. The unreality event horizon that is politics in 2024 (or if you will 2020 part 4) cannot be breached.
I drafted a post. I deep sixed it. I tried again. It too was inadequate. Rationality in an irrational environment is elusive.
Finally, I gave up. I wrote this post about tractors and snowplows. What can I say? If you gaze long into an abyss of dipshits, the abyss of dipshits will gaze into you.]
He goes to talk at length about snow plowing, plow trucks and the whole snow plowing culture of some place that needs such things. The whole thing is pretty great. And that's why we have a video of a tractor plowing snow at the top.
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| Tally Man |
Whoa, that's a bunch of bananas! But where have I heard that phrase before? Oh yeah:
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| Lisbon, Portugal |
After I put this puzzle together I wondered if I could get a similar view from Google Maps. It was a little difficult, but I eventually found the square that is illuminated in the foreground and the row of buildings along the side:
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| Praca Martim Moniz |
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| Water Resevoir, Monte de Caparica |
Wikimapia was created in Russia by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev in May 2006. The data, a crowdsourced collection of places marked by registered users and guests, has grown to just under 28,000,000 objects as of November 2017, and is released under the Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA). Although the project's name is reminiscent of that of Wikipedia, and the creators share parts of the "wiki" philosophy, it is not a part of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation family of wikis.
Joseph Moore is talking about Catholic schools and education. He starts by quoting from a papal letter to bishops in 1890, wherein I found this line:
If in their early years they find within the walls of their homes the rule of an upright life and the discipline of Christian virtues, the future welfare of society will in great measure be guaranteed. - Sapientiae Christianae (1890), article 42
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| The Joe Rogan Experience |
Very cool and encouraging article about the fringe media, like me:
Joe Rogan Gets New Spotify Deal Worth Up to $250 Million by Anne Steele February 2, 2024
Hit show to be distributed broadly, including on YouTube, rather than exclusively on audio-streaming service
I especially liked this bit:
My friend Phil Bak casually asked me on Friday what I thought the marketing budget was for big media corporations.
“Like fifty million a year or something,” I guessed.
“Exactly,” Phil replied to me. “Fifty million fucking dollars. And they can’t find a single interesting thing to say.”
Via ZeroHedge
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| Volunteers at the Khalsa Diwan Sikh Temple in Manila prepare chapatis for the evening crowd [Sonny Thakur/Al Jazeera] |
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| First Ball and Socket Replaced in Second Surgery |
Just got a statement from UnitedHealthcare. It has my total medical expenses from last year, which means it includes my hip joint replacement surgery.
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| Consolidated B-24 Liberator (25-2534) |
The history of “Witchcraft” is a story that legends are made from. The original “Witchcraft” was produced as a B-24H, built by Ford at the famous Willow Run, MI plant in 1944. It was delivered to the 467th in Wendover, Utah and initially assigned to Second Lieutenant George W. Reed and his crew who flew the aircraft to England. “Witchcraft” safely arrived with her crew at Station 145 in Rackheath, England on March 19th, 1944, after a 20-day flight over the Atlantic. The aircraft and crew began their combat service on April 10th, 1944, flying the first combat mission of the 467th Bomb Group. Over the next year “Witchcraft” flew an incredible 130 combat missions with various crews. “Witchcraft” was never once turned back while on a mission, and never had any crewmen injured or killed. Her last mission was flown on April 25th, 1945 which also was the last mission flown by the 467th Bomb Group. “…Witchcraft” was there at the beginning and at the end.” After the war, she was returned to the United States and like many other B-24’s, was scrapped on October 3rd, 1945 at the surplus depot in Altus, Oklahoma.
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| Gerrymander - Elkanah Tisdale |
Schneier on Security posts a new solution for the gerrymander problem. Sounds like it might work, which means no one will like it, and even if they do they will fight over who goes first. Still, it's nice to see someone applying logic to a previously intractable problem.
