Thursday, April 24, 2014

12 Political Notes (Seavey/Perry video on ScarJo!)


1. Is the West so much better than Russia? Mark Steyn thinks free speech is dwindling here, too.

2. I’ve had the author of a book about Ukraine complain to me that Ron and Rand Paul don’t seem to be onboard with Western military intervention over there, but -- much as I dislike Putin -- I honestly have a hard time seeing how Eastern-Ukrainian governance founded on a Russia-influenced referendum is so much worse than Western-Ukrainian governance founded on a Western-backed, EU-encouraged coup that it warrants us ending up in World War III.

3. Regardless, I admire this Ukrainian parkour dog (h/t Franc Pohole).

4. The dog’s skills are not so unlike those of Batroc the Leaper, one of the villains in the new Captain America movie.  And I just learned that someone I knew in college writes for the show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. -- maybe she should reuse Batroc in that series.  And was Hydra haphazardly controlling the weather for the past few weeks, by the way?

5. That question is not addressed in this (short) new YouTube video of Gerard Perry and me discussing three new things with Scarlett Johansson in them: the aforementioned Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the eerie indie sci-fi film Under the Skin (in which ScarJo is at long last completely naked), and...

6. ...the trailer for her upcoming superhero-ish action film Lucy.  Is there anything ScarJo can't do?  And she was already the voice of an A.I. program last year in Her (a much better film than Transcendence, with Johnny Depp as a less friendly A.I. program).


8. Maybe the closest thing in the real world lately to a villainous organization as destructive as Hydra is those anti-technology, anti-prosperity, anti-Google protesters out in San Francisco lately, one of whom has even vowed “gun down six of us” and more will rise to take their place (h/t Virginia Postrel).  Hail Hydra!  Chop off one head, two shall take its place!  #OccupySHIELD!

9. Muppet liberation is at hand, at least: Kermit is Morpheus to Fozzie’s Neo in this disturbing, ad libbed outtake from the production of one of my favorite films, The Muppet Movie (h/t Alicina Memar and Perry Metzger).

10. That actual communist they keep putting on The Independents was of course, like many of his leftist brethren, recently praising Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but this piece does a nice job of taking it down a notch (h/t David Friedman -- but not that David Friedman).

11. Would that more leftists spent time worrying, as Scott Kaufman does in this Raw Story piece, about things like the FDA hiking beer prices.

12. Econ isn’t all about stats, but stats can be a helpful reality check: Despite me constantly feeling I’ve neglected my blog, the numbers say I’ve apparently posted roughly 2 days out of 3 since late 2006(!). 

But as I keep promising, it probably is time to mostly-exit the Web (including about four anarcho-capitalist Facebook pages I love dearly but have lost too much time to) and attend to other things (for now).  This video critique may even give us a new reason to be wary of Facebook. 

And what fresh hell is this wherein many popular publications’ links don’t work if you click on them on someone’s personal Facebook page but do if you click on them in your newsfeed?  You know what, for once, instead of worrying about it, I’m gonna do the efficient thing and give up so I can attend to more important projects.

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