All the firehose of political scandals, and very little of it will leak through to the general public, of whatever politics.
Doesn't mean I'm above it all, I was totally caught up last night.
It's like you're deciding on dinner, and three people vote for trying to drink from a firehose, and two say Kill and Eat You. Nobody gets pizza.
From the thread this is continuing:
Nuzzi, I don't recall many specifics of her writing just a vague sense of her being a minor league sloppy, gossipy reporter with a bit of a young Maureen Dowd vibe.
I'd say more of a Maggie Haberman vibe. A good example of her gullibility (or complicity) is this piece gullibly taking on Mike Cernovich saying he was moderating.
To OP.2: Where Racism Goes to Become Rhetoric.
Apparently Trump has been telling people at his events about the threat of criminals from the Congo and beyond for months. The Washington Post put it into a fact-check roundup in March ("no such decline in Congo's prison population is shown in the data"); critic at large A.O. Scott of the New York Times, in a "Critic's Notebook" item reviewing Trump's speech after his criminal conviction, wrote about it knowingly, as if it were old news: "A citizen looking for campaign issues might find some boilerplate in a peroration that conjured images of Venezuela and Congo emptying their prisons and asylums onto America's streets."
To OP.2: Where Racism Goes to Become Rhetoric.
Apparently Trump has been telling people at his events about the threat of criminals from the Congo and beyond for months. The Washington Post put it into a fact-check roundup in March ("no such decline in Congo's prison population is shown in the data"); critic at large A.O. Scott of the New York Times, in a "Critic's Notebook" item reviewing Trump's speech after his criminal conviction, wrote about it knowingly, as if it were old news: "A citizen looking for campaign issues might find some boilerplate in a peroration that conjured images of Venezuela and Congo emptying their prisons and asylums onto America's streets."
Mr Trump has things backwards.
Mistah Kurz--he dead.
I don't see any method at all, sir.
To be fair Trump would probably approve of the vaccination bit:
they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn't know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it... I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God... the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure...
On Nuzzi, my view is that this was a mostly imaginary relationship with a mostly imaginary candidate.
People are free to make judgments about her character, I suppose, and people close to her can and should be disappointed in her. But acting like things brings her ridiculously thin claim to objectivity in political reporting into serious question cheapens everything.
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Reopening Three Mile Island to run AI?
I think having the immigrants eating cats and dogs in Homer Simpson's home town was a cry for help from the writers, but this is a step beyond.
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critic at large A.O. Scott of the New York Times, in a "Critic's Notebook" item reviewing Trump's speech after his criminal conviction
Wait, what? Isn't A. O. Scott a film critic?
Reopening Three Mile Island to run AI?
Three Mile Island Unit 1 was operational from 1985 to 2019. (The one that melted down was Unit 2 which never reopened.) But yes, Microsoft is probably going to regret this deal as by 2028 AI will not have nearly the massive systemwide applications that would justify this expenditure for them.
I feel a bit like gswift when he became a cop and started thinking more like a cop, in that I've been thinking "why don't they spin up nuclear reactors for these tech data centers?" and here we are!
Trump stock down another 4 percent at this writing, hovering around $14 a share. And today is the day that Trump and his cronies can start selling shares.
Trump's stake is still worth something like $1.7 billion, but it would be impossible for him to liquidate at anything resembling that value. And I don't know who would loan him money with that stock as collateral.
If I were one of his share-holding cronies, though, I'd be getting out at the earliest opportunity.
Are you in the nuclear industry now?
No, but there's a thought!
And I don't know who would loan him money with that stock as collateral.
Plenty of foreign governments if he looks like he might win.
12 he retired from that role sometime last year
Someone should explain to the NYT that "political coverage as theater criticism" was supposed to be derogatory.
Reopening Three Mile Island to run AI?
For her job, my sister was trying to source substations, switch gear and transformers to install charging stations for heavy duty electric vehicles. The demand from AI and crypto is so high that should you need to build a substation, you'd have a two year wait for the equipment.
I don't appreciate Trump disrespecting Elvis like that.
I vaguely remember an ancient SNL skit -- I think it was supposed to be the Kennedy teens during Spring Break at the beach, and they had a contest - how long could they hit on a girl without telling her that that they are a Kennedy. The point being that as soon as the girl found that he was a Kennedy, she would swoon and fall into his arms.
Does that still work in 2024 for 70-year-old RFK Jr?
More from peep's archive of vaguely remembered tidbits- an article by a woman reporter that was pals with Milo Yiannopoulos -- how she thought he was just a harmless clown and was such a fun guy, and then expressing vague regrets when she realized how genuinely evil he was - was that Olivia Nuzzi? It seems not, although Twitter reveals that 2014 Nuzzi was president of the Ann Coulter fan club.
Olivia Nuzzi
@Olivianuzzi
leave
@AnnCoulter
alone! except don't because then she won't sell books/will fade into obscurity and i will be sad because i love her
3:26 PM · Jun 26, 2014
People are free to make judgments about her character, I suppose, and people close to her can and should be disappointed in her.
Can't speak for anyone else but I just thought it was hilarious to be associated (allegedly) with someone so ridiculous. It doesn't change my view of her journalism. As I said in the previous thread, I've filed that away as "don't read"* for years.
*Unless it's your job, or you want to engage in a conversation with someone who's read it, etc.
She was put on leave. No word since, it's been less than 24 hours.
an article by a woman reporter that was pals with Milo Yiannopoulos
That might have been Laurie Penny: https://medium.com/welcome-to-the-scream-room/im-with-the-banned-8d1b6e0b2932
Milo Yiannopoulos is a charming devil and one of the worst people I know. I have seen the death of political discourse reflected in his designer sunglasses. It chills me. We met four years ago, before he was the self-styled "most fabulous supervillain on the internet," when he was just another floppy-haired right-wing pundit and we were guests on opposing sides of a panel show whose topic I don't remember and can't be bothered to look up. Afterwards we got hammered in the green room and ran around the BBC talking about boys. It was fun.
Since that day, there is absolutely nothing I have been able to say to Milo to persuade him that we are not friends. The more famous he gets off the back of extravagantly abusing women and minorities, the more I tell him I hate him and everything he stands for, the more he laughs and asks when we're drinking. I'm a radical queer feminist leftist writer burdened with actual principles. He thinks that's funny and invites me to his parties.
32: are you asking if that was a factor in the decision not to endorse Kamala? It doesn't seem that way to me. If we can remember that far back, the head of the Teamsters spoke at the Republican Convention back when the apparent nominee of the Democratic party was some guy named Joe.
33: That specifically, but also the longer pattern of behavior described in the other thread.
In my mind is the very smart idea from someone here (Upetgi? Can't remember) that the core of Trumpism isn't racism but machismo.
This paywalled article apparently says the Nuzzi sexting featured "'demure'" nudes (TikTok just discovered this word), that it started earlier than the parties said, and that they did not only meet the one time. https://puck.news/we-need-to-talk-about-olivia-nuzzi/
Oh, and that despite the implications of the meeting-in-person not being just once, the intimate aspects were indeed remote (the source says "remotus" for no clear reason).
(the source says "remotus" for no clear reason)
I'd guess either to make perfectly clear that they're Americans, by [banned] analogy to POTUS and SCOTUS, or to hint, slyly or otherwise, that it ended abruptly, i.e., remotus interruptus.
cyberdildonics
That's a word that reminds me of the 90s (or, the term I remember: https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/teledildonics )
It's a better word because it would work with pre-internet long distance communication technology.
that it ended abruptly, i.e., remotus interruptus.
That would work better if remotus interruptus were an actual term. As it, the only commonality is the -us in coitus. I think it's just some insufferable person who learned Latin in prep school.
29 is infuriatingly un self aware (or maybe it's deliberate) because, well, look at you, woman. Yes he keeps on inviting you to parties etc despite your supposed disapproval of his politics, *and you keep going*. That is what being friends *means* - you voluntarily hang out with someone. If you hated the guy, you just wouldn't want to spend time with him.
Ah, apparently an earlier paragraph coined the phrase "sexus remotus" so later when they said "it was truly remotus" they were calling back to that. A creaky load-bearing structure of insufferability.
43 it's the Nazi bar thing only worse because she kept accepting invitations to hang out at the Nazi bar
Canvassing is becoming too real life. Someone just indirectly let me know they went to Yale.
45: A former bouncer of my acquaintance was complaining about his troubles with Nazis back in the early 2000s.
My phone now contains digital proof that I am markedly less photogenic than the governor of Michigan.
It doesn't change my view of her journalism. As I said in the previous thread, I've filed that away as "don't read"* for years.
Yep. She's on my automatic "click away!" list
45: Exactly.
48: Congrats Moby! Hope you got to tell her that you are doing more for the election than some other readers of an eclectic weblog (ahem).
There was a long line so I just said hello.
I think I've shaken hands with three sitting governors, only one of which was Ben Nelson.
I guess using set theory, Ben Nelson can't be more than one of them.
Someone is playing "Friends in low places," which is the only song I ever danced to that the woman I was dancing with said afterwards that I didn't know how to dance.
Now is "All my rowdy friends have settled down." Which is a really sedate song, considering.
Finally got round to watching "Oppenheimer". It's really not good. Terrible script and weirdly clumsy editing. And it feels.... cheap. Like it has the budget of a BBC dramatised documentary about Oppenheimer. But supposedly you're looking at $100 million.
If you just got around to seeing it, it was at home on a small screen? I didn't actually enjoy it much myself, but it was definitely one of those movies where sitting in dark theater being overwhelmed by the pacing and the soundtrack was a significant part of the intended experience.
At home, but projected on a fairly large screen - about ten foot by six. So It wasn't the full cinema experience, but not far off.
And it's the script that I really had trouble with. Almost every line was an 'As you know, your father, the king...'
You could do a good biopic of Oppenheimer. You could do a good film about the Manhattan Project. You can't do both, not in three hours, and particularly not if you spend vast amounts of runtime on the confirmation hearings of Lewis bloody Strauss, who is a supporting character for Oppie and irrelevant to the Project!
Another retrospective, including some episodes I hadn't known of.
One of the tweets that apparently made Bloomberg release her show without a PR campaign. I'd forgive it of a comedian in 2012, but not a journalist in 2016.
58.last: Is that who Florence Pugh played? I haven't seen the movie yet.
59: That's actually about the best thing of hers I've ever read.. Poor judgment, of course, and not funny, but not better than her usual drivel.
58: My trivial geography beef. They filmed the town on Ghost Ranch, which is nearby and incredibly scenic (you can see Cerro Pedernal in the background, an iconic mountain that Georgia O'Keefe painted many times. But Ghost Ranch is open and deserty* while Los Alamos itself is on the high plateau near the rim of the impressive Valles Caldera right about where the ponderosa pines become abundant. It has much more of a mountain feel with these crazy steep canyons cutting through it.
More substantively found it pretty forgettable, and agree the drama was often misplaced and confusing.
*The Trinity Site is very open and barren, on the aptly named Jornado del Muerta.
59 How can anyone be trusted to analyze politics anywhere in the Anglosphere if they're not familiar with the War of Jenkins Ear?
I liked Oppenheimer. Once again, famously low standards for the win.
57: I saw it in an IMAX. I think that made a difference.
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since we have gone off topic, have people gotten their annual COVID shot. If not, when do you plan on getting it - if at all. I have to get my flu by10/25, but I don't have to get COVID, so I want to optimize the timing.
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I just got my covid shot as soon as I could. Haven't gotten the flu one yet, but I'm going to the doctor this week, so I'll try to get it then.
66: Me too. I wouldn't argue against any of Ajay's criticisms, but I mostly judge movies as subjective experiences.
I'm not supposed to get a covid shot for a couple of months, right? Since, I had Covid last month?
Right, but technically, you aren't supposed to get covid.
Dang it. I just slept for an hour on a plane to discover we're still on the tarmac.
Oh man. We're pulling back into the gate to switch planes.
They would have tagged off, but they didn't want to wake you.
Peep: I think you could get the shot a month from now.
I got my last COVID shot 2 weeks before Thanksgiving but have been worried about waiting that long this time.
Google maps has fucked me over once too often. Is there an alternative to Waze, without buying an iPhone?
78: I actually find Apple Maps kind of confusing.
Boarding a new plane. Stop worrying about me, everyone.
I got my COVID and flu shot from the same nurse after waiting in a combined line, earlier this month. They even showed me the vial so I could confirm it was the 2024-25 version that had just become available. But this was Kaiser so probably not applicable to you.
So, I just saw a pickup going very slowly down the street with a man walking behind. It turned out the truck was pulling a dolly with a stone step or lintel on it. Maybe five feet long, 9" by 9". The guy walking was stabilizing the back with a strap.
81: I'll go to the pharmacy for COVID. For the flu, I'm likely enough to go to an employee flu clinic, since it's mandatory, and I have to document it. MA law required hospitals to provide flu shots for free to employees even if you aren't on their insurance. Not so with COVID.
They are mostly getting out of having immunizations available for adults, because they lose money on them.
We're still on the ground, waiting for Catering.
55-58 was exactly my experience of the movie, except I saw it on IMAX 70 mm, and was deeply impressed by how visually unimpressive it was. It was a Christopher Nolan movie about New Mexico and the atomic bomb -- why was it not more beautiful?
I did three hours of precinct walking today, and I'm so amazed that anyone answers their door and talks to strangers at all. I mean, I would never.
I don't know which is worse, phonebanking or door-to-door canvassing. I go back and forth, depending on which one I've done last.
Phone banking is worse. In canvassing you get to see people hauling stones around.
87: I'd go pretty far for bischoff cookies dunked in coffee. But even this was excessive.
I heard you aren't supposed to drink the coffee on airplanes because they never clean the coffeemaker. I guess me cleaning my coffee maker every eight years is crucial.
86. I did outdoor canvassing in N Philly for 2 days earlier this week. Vast majority of people were registered, I didn't knock on doors but talked to people out and about. Pretty much everyone was appreciative and friendly. I registered 5 people on each day.
Positive experience, low number because for real people in Philly know to register.
91 sounds like germ-fear inflation. I reject it on principle.
Yes. Airplanes get sterilized by the cosmic rays anyway.
Its the burnt floor sweepings from the jungle shanties where they dessicate the coffee into instant crystals. Actually not unhealthy. The unique smell is residue of a curse, Schiphol and Atlanta airports both displaced powerful folk healers when they were built.
They are mostly getting out of having immunizations available for adults, because they lose money on them.
Does that accounting include the cost of caring for people who get sick from diseases for which vaccines are available?
I would complain in detail about Oppenheimer but the reality is I'd basically forgotten it had been made and that eventually I watched it (via streaming). It was about what I expected from Nolan: bloated and seething with hatred for linear narrative. I swear that linear time must have killed Nolan's entire family when he was a kid and his entire oeuvre is series of attempts to exact revenge.
96: Which is why, if you die in the South, it doesn't matter if you're going up or going down, you still have to change in Atlanta.
92: Much better than it was looking six weeks ago! Woidke, who has been state premier for 11 years, closed the campaign season by going all-in on personal standing. Of the AfD he said it's them or me, and fortunately Brandenburg's voters (turount was something like 75%) chose him.
The AfD came in second, which is still gross but much better than them coming in first. I haven't yet seen any charts on whose votes came from where, but I have to think that the rise of the AfD is mainly a problem for the CDU to solve. (I kinda wonder that they have not tried to paint the AfD as Russia's pawn in the eastern states and take on the mantle of local patriotism. "We had 40 years of Russian domination and now the AfD wants to bring that back? Nein, danke.")
It looks like SPD-CDU is one seat short of a majority, so the SPD will have to try to govern with the Sahra Wagenknecht party. Which is also gross. Now that the execrable Roland Koch is off the stage, she is, to my mind, the single most contemptible person in German politics, and I don't really know what to think about people who hitch their wagon to her star. On the one hand, power-hungry people with few principles will accept a lot to get into government. On the other, you're stuck governing with power-hungry people who have few principles. I wonder if the SPD or CDU might not be able to bribe provide enough incentives for a couple or three of the Wagenknechter to cross the aisle and set up an SPD/CDU coalition.
Woidke will also have to work up a succession plan, because you can only go all-in on the them-or-me strategy for one election. After 16 years voters are likely to want a change, no matter what kind. Still, this is a victory, and people of goodwill should enjoy it.
Lange Rede, kurzer Sinn: The AfD will not be in government, and does not have enough seats to block the formation of a government, yay!
I did appreciate the thoughtfulness of letting the audience get unsettled for three hours by Cillian Murphy, whose eyes are slightly too far apart, and then bringing in Rami Malek, whose eyes are about two feet too far apart. That's foreshadowing right there.
"I swear that linear time must have killed Nolan's entire family when he was a kid and his entire oeuvre is series of attempts to exact revenge."
Hello. My name used to have been going to be Christopher Nolan. You were about to have killed my family. Prepare to have already been dying.
97: They tell people to go to the pharmacy. That's an interesting question. I don't kznow if they have different policies for the patients whose insurance has entered into a risk contract with the hospital.this would be similar to Minivet's situation where Kaiser is on the hook for the bill. But to answer your question, it does not. The primary care clinics who have to stock the shots and manage the nurse time to administer them are not financially responsible for the cost of the hospitalizations.
The only way I see around that would be for the state, e.g the Dept of public health, to buy all the vaccines (maybe negotiate a bulk wholesale price (basically what they do for kids).. AND have a insurance pay more for administration. It makes me angry, tbh.
101 sadly Anya Taylor-Joy, whose eyes are somehow simultaneously about three feet too far apart but also exactly right, was not available.
You guys are so mean.
The only way to continue this trend any further would be to have an actor with two heads, each bearing one eye, like a Pierson's puppeteer.
102: Speaking of being all in on non-linear time, we just finished the first season of Netflix's German production Dark and found it quite well done. It explicitly revolves around time travel and is subject to many of the flaws of that genre, but at least dives into them head on. I do wonder if season 2 and 3 will hold up as I find that the attempts to tie up such plotlines are generally much more contrived than the process of setting them up-- and quite unsurprisingly so.
It goes off the rails a bit in season 3 but it's worth it until then .
I heard you aren't supposed to drink the coffee on airplanes because they never clean the coffeemaker.
Ugh, that's nasty. At least they could run some boiling water through it from time to time to sterilise it.
My trivial geography beef. They filmed the town on Ghost Ranch, which is nearby and incredibly scenic (you can see Cerro Pedernal in the background, an iconic mountain that Georgia O'Keefe painted many times.
Also I remember the huge fuss that was made by the movie's publicists about how Nolan (the DEMANDING GENIUS DIRECTOR) had INSISTED on filming a real explosion for the Trinity test, rather than using a CGI explosion.
This was an incredibly bad choice. We all know what a nuclear explosion looks like - we've all seen the archive footage. We all know what a big petrol explosion looks like because we've seen 80s action films. We know that they look very different. Nolan didn't care.
Loving the Nolan hate. As a director I think he's vastly overrated (I did like Memento though). I mostly appreciate that he insists on shooting on film and having at least some screenings of his films projected so he's one of a few heavy hitters keeping film alive so good on him for that but I've never bought into the hype surrounding him and I never feel I have to see his movies - I've yet to see either Oppenheimer or Tenet and am in no rush to either.
Tenet was incomprehensible, but very watchable.
re: 111
Yeah, I'm with you and the others on Nolan.
That said, I did enjoy Tenet (which I watched recently on a plane and then again later with my wife) and didn't mind Oppenheimer.
The central McGuffin/conceit in Tenet makes almost no coherent sense and the plot has holes all over the place. But it does allow him to do some really nice set pieces, some of which are really great cinematic moments of action, even if the whole thing is much dumber than Nolan would like us to think. I do like Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki in it, although Branagh is rubbish.
Oppenheimer, I agree with the criticisms above. I found it opaque and overlong. I've read quite a lot about the Manhattan Project and interwar physics, so it wasn't opaque in the sense that I didn't know what the narrative context was, it was just not very good at propelling the story forward or making the motivations of the characters make sense within the narrative of the film. I know that one of the central themes of the film is around the flimsiness of Strauss's motivation, but still ...
Is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich less processed than a deli turkey sandwich? The former would involve Jif and the latter Hellmann's.
In defence of Nolan, most of what he did up to about ten years ago was great. Memento was great. The Prestige is splendid even if the plot has a huge hole in it. Inception is very good, as is The Dark Knight. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises are competent.
It's really just with Interstellar that the rot starts to set in.
I'm not a massive fan of his Batman movies. There are some good moments, again--he's brilliant at set-pieces--but they feel mis-paced to me, like the action climax to a film that should be the last ten minutes, but bloated up to 2 hours. Tenet, for all its problems, feels more cleverly paced.
Although one thing that made me laugh about Tenet, is the big final climactic action sequence does feel like one of those 1970s Dr Who episodes from that period when Dr Who couldn't leave Earth, which was an excuse for the BBC to film every scene in a quarry in Wales.
Fun fact: I have not watched Dr Who since the 1970s version, and I always picture the guy with the extra long scarf, and the K9 robot with the antenna tail when anyone mentions the show.
Are the Nolan Batman movies the ones filmed in Pittsburgh? I haven't seen them.
The third one blew up your football stadium.
re: 118
Yeah. I watched those 70s ones at the time and was an avid reader of the novelisations when I was about 8, but didn't watch it again until they rebooted it, when I enjoyed the first couple of seasons of the reboot and then lost interest again. It's perfectly fine, I'm just not the audience for it.
Yeah. That happens. I walked out of church into the filming of a scene. A guy was saying everyone had to leave but it didn't work because there were dozens of people coming out all at once, we were standing on a public sidewalk outside of the barriers, and it was just one guy who was eating takeout food while he yelled.
"You're under arrest for murdering Mr Angier!"
"What? Why?"
"Duh, we found you under the stage of his theatre next to a big water tank with a drowned guy in it who looks exactly like Angier. The conclusion is fairly easy to draw."
"Right. And meanwhile, in that exact theatre at that exact moment with a big spotlight on him and 500 witnesses looking at him, was another guy who looks exactly like Angier, entirely alive and undrowned."
"Well, if he's alive and well that's no concern of ours. Off to court with you!"
"What if I bring up this, you must admit, fairly weird circumstance during my murder trial?"
"Are you going to?"
"Well, no, I think I'll just keep it quiet for reasons never exactly made clear."
"Fair enough then."
"And then I'll probably forget all about it, to the point where I am absolutely gobsmacked to meet a guy who looks exactly like Angier, entirely alive and undrowned."
"cool. cool cool cool."
While (as I've said ad nauseam) I think my tastes are usually pretty different from the modal commenter here, I'm just going to take the Oppenheimer criticism as vindication of my prejudices and redouble my efforts to finally read that Ray Monk bio instead.
121 is my experience with it too (we got Tom Baker era on PBS when I was a kid) but I think I only read one or two novelizations.
I'd forgotten about the Prestige, that was excellent. Inception was pretty good too.
122: Redfoxtail and I were in a coffeeshop in Believeland watching them filming a scene from CHERK Cherry across the street, take after take after take of cops piling out of their car to arrest Tom Holland who was sitting under a stop sign holding a prop gun.
He's always been suspicious to me.
I liked the depiction of thinking about the physics in Oppenheimer also the memories of his girlfriend during the bureaucratic kneecapping. Not a great movie, agreed about that, but neither the physics nor the facts of his life and his post-NM life were mangled in stereotypically hollywood style, also I saw it on a big screen which plays to Nolan's strenghs for good short intervals of film.
Agreed also that his films are worse recently.
during the bureaucratic kneecapping
Is that what the kids were calling it back then?
I liked Oppenheimer but I do agree with most of the criticisms here, especially Stormcrow's comment on the geography (which hadn't quite clicked for me at the time but is totally right).
I think they also kind of imply that the Trinity site is closer to Los Alamos than it really is. It's actually hundreds of miles away and in a completely different kind of environment.
Nolan is both great and overrated.
Great films: Memento, Dunkirk.
Delightful hot mess: The Prestige
Good: Inception.
Okay but overrated: Openheimer, The Dark Knight, Dark Knight Rises
Not very good and properly rated: Batman Begins, Tenet.
Massively overrated and terrible: Intersteller.
Haven't seen: Insomnia.
He's awful at writing women, obviously in Openheimer but Tenet is even worse. The whole dark comic book thing was a terrible trend. But at the end of the day very very few directors have made two movies as good as Memento and Dunkirk, and even something like Openheimer has really impressive pacing to stay engrossing for 3 hours.
The Dark Knight Rises is the only one of his Batman films I actually like, but Anne Hathaway as Catwoman is basically impossible to mess up.
My main Oppenheimer take is that Matt Damon is a delight and is my favorite performance of the whole film.
I think I like Nolan a lot more than everyone here, but I like puzzle box movies. I also liked Oppenheimer a lot, and agreed on Damon, who looked like he was having a ball.
I got a group text from my mother in law this morning grieving the end of RFK Jr's candidacy. Now she doesn't know who to vote for.
All this time I had been wondering, what kind of nutcase would support the brainworm guy? Oops.
The 2023 best picture crowd was kinda underwhelming. Oppenheimer, Barbie, and Poor Things are all at best average films for their (excellent) directors. Killers of the Flower Moon was incredibly boring, despite the great actors. Anatomy of a Fall was good in some ways, but it was hard for me to suspend belief with the implausible legal scenes. I liked The Holdovers and especially American Fiction. I'm not mad Oppenheimer won, and at least it's a bunch of decent movies (and Maestro), but not many great ones.
124: The Making of the Atomic Bomb is just so, so good that I felt no need at all to watch Oppenheimer. Like, good on levels that you totally don't expect from a non-fiction book, things like the pacing and atmosphere matching the themes of the major section.
"Here was no Faustian bargain, as movie directors and other naifs still find it intellectually challenging to imagine. Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might have hidden from the politicians and the generals. To the contrary, here was a new insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coax forth." (pp. 3-4)
Also reading that the movie had Stimson taking Kyoto off the target list because he honeymooned there rather than it being of immense cultural significance and we had to think of the peace afterwards kind of pissed me off and made me reluctant to see it
140: The line from the movie addresses both points:
"Sorry, eleven. I've taken Kyoto off the list due to its cultural significance to the Japanese people. Also, my wife and I honeymooned there. It's a magnificent city."
Stimson argued that it had immense cultural significance which he knew (and the other people in the process didn't know) because he had travelled there. Whether this travel was specifically a "honeymoon" is disputed, it was described that way in a number of books but there doesn't seem to be compelling evidence that it was specifically a honeymoon but many books characterize it that way. At any rate, it's certainly not saying that's why "rather than it being of immense cultural significance" the movie clearly says that the cultural significance was the main reason.
Deep dive here:
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2023/07/24/henry-stimson-didnt-go-to-kyoto-on-his-honeymoon/
135 yes! Damon made Groves seem like a far more interesting character than Oppenheimer. And it's interesting how Richard Rhodes seems to share that opinion. He starts his book with Szilard, then Bohr, then Rutherford... all more interesting characters, I think, and I think he thinks, than Oppenheimer. Same could be said for Fermi and Teller and even Kistiakowsky. Oppie and Strauss are just rather self centred and charmless by comparison.
To be fair, Oppenheimer's dullness and lack of charm do come through pretty clearly in the movie. Not clear if that was intentional though.
We thought that was just Cillian Murphy playing the same dude he always plays.
re: 143
Yeah. Seconding the opinions on the Rhodes book, which is one of my absolute favourites.
I think the thing that Rhodes really gets across well is the sheer complexity, scale, speed and competence of the logistical operation. Building massive industrial plants using technologies that no-one had ever used before, with cities of many tens of thousands of people, in a matter of months, complete with power stations, and so on.* I came away really wanting to understand more about the specifics of how they did that, on an administrative level, but it's definitely pretty clear that Groves was a genius.
Rhodes absolutely has much more admiration, affection and interest in Szilard, Bohr** and Groves than Oppenheimer for exactly the reasons you say.
* Hanford, Oak Ridge, etc
** I think Rhodes pretty clearly thinks of Bohr as by far the most interesting and important figure from that period of physics: scientifically, ethically, philosophically and politically.
I liked Memento and Prestige and thought Following was interesting. Batman Begins wasn't bad. I was very disappointed in Inception but chalked that up to my lack of interest in dreams. Over time, I realized I just don't particularly like Nolan's work, aside from the few early ones that had me thinking otherwise.
Incidentally, it's worth watching the non-Nolan Scandinavian Insomnia.
I think Rhodes pretty clearly thinks of Bohr as by far the most interesting and important figure from that period of physics: scientifically, ethically, philosophically and politically.
Oh, without a doubt.
I'd also recommend "Alsos" by Samuel Goudsmit - he was a Dutch-Jewish physicist who wasn't on the Project, so they sent him into Italy and then into Western Europe, immediately behind the advancing allied armies, to find out how far the Germans had got. He was accompanied by Boris Pash (who featured briefly in "Oppenheimer"). A much more limited account, inherently, than Rhodes, but some very memorable moments. His parents hadn't made it out of Amsterdam in time; he only found out what happened to them when the Allies liberated the city.
It was not until some time after Strasbourg that the full significance of our discovery [that the Germans had not cracked uranium enrichment] dawned on me. "Isn't it wonderful that the Germans have no atom bomb?" I said to [Robert Furman, head of intelligence for the Manhattan Project]. "Now we won't have to use ours."
His answer, so utterly correct, took me by surprise. "Of course you understand, Sam," he said, "if we have such a weapon, we are going to use it."
That was early in 1945.
I'd forgotten that Nolan directed Insomnia. I do quite like that, and I also like that it's a relatively recent performance by Pacino that isn't utterly embarrassing. Robin Williams as bad-guy is also quite inspired casting.
the sheer complexity, scale, speed and competence of the logistical operation
I particularly like his anecdote of someone at Oak Ridge going "we need loads of copper for electromagnet windings for the calutrons, but copper's a strategic metal and in very short supply - they need it for things like shell casings. Is there anything else we could use?" and someone else goes "well, silver's a good conductor. Give the Treasury a call."
And they did and said "hello, we're a top priority project, can we borrow some silver? You'll get it all back after the war is over" and the Treasury said "sure, how much do you need?"
"Oh, about twenty tons or so should be enough, I reckon."
Icy pause.
"We are the United States Treasury and the unit in which we measure our silver is the troy ounce."
But they got their silver...
148: I have lost some sympathy with this argument over time, I think as I have learned more about China and Japan. It's completely not true that Japan was somehow not really a proper enemy. They produced about as much coal and steel during WW2 as the Soviet Union did ex-lend lease aid; that's a lot. The difference is they used it for ships and aircraft rather than tanks and artillery, but of course they did, obviously, it's the Pacific. They actually did have a nuclear research project and made some progress (there was a reason their physicists were able to prove that it was an atomic bomb that had exploded over Hiroshima the same day). Of course the Manhattan Project exiles had excellent reasons to be eurocentric; it was Europe they were exiled from, and other Europeans who had done it, and they knew very well who was responsible. But it is still a eurocentric view that kind of ignores millions of dead Chinese and Koreans.
... Filipinos, Vietnamese, Indonesians, Burmese,...
...Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Brits, Americans...
Countries that for whatever reasons chose not to found their postwar identities on Nippophobia.
151: I think Goudsmit would agree with you - notice that he says that Furman's response was "utterly correct". Goudsmit's whole focus had been on the bomb as a deterrent against a German bomb, but when Furman points out that it's a weapon to be used, Goudsmit immediately agrees.
And also note the time; Goudsmit is talking "early in 1945" (Strasbourg fell in late November 1944) so it's still plausible to him that the bomb, if it's ready, will be used on Germany. Goudsmit doesn't know how close Los Alamos is to a test and he doesn't know how long it'll take the Allies to get to Berlin - they aren't even over the Rhine at this point.
So I'd interpret that exchange, not as Goudsmit saying " I thought we only needed the bomb to deter Germany's bomb, I never conceived we would use it on Japan because Japan wasn't really a threat", but as him saying "I thought we only needed the bomb to deter Germany's bomb but as soon as Furman mentioned it I realised that we could and should use it against Germany to win the war in Europe as soon as possible".
Having read Giangreco "Hell to Pay" recently I am actually tempted by the point of view that the bombing of Hiroshima didn't just hasten victory, it ensured it. A US invasion of Japan would have been truly horrific and I am really not sure whether it would have succeeded - the US already expected very heavy losses, and the Japanese defences were far stronger than the US thought, its air forces were in far better shape, and a typhoon hit the invasion beaches on what would have been D+15. It is extremely questionable whether, after a failed invasion of Japan, the US would have had enough troops left to try again the next year. And by 1947 we're into high Cold War territory which changes the calculus further.
And the Japanese had succcessfully predicted the US landing areas and/or stolen a copy of the plans from Mcarthur's sloppy Manila headquarters.*
OTOH I don't buy cold war 1947 in the alt-timeline. Truman was dull, Stalin wasn't: I think Stalin would have played nice, taken the Lend-Lease, and continued pushing into northern China as long as the war continued .
*I read this in a paper forever ago and there's no way I'll ever find it now, but I found it persuasive.
133, 134: I'd rate Batman Begins higher and The Dark Knight lower than you two would. TDK felt like a standard sequel to me, no really new ideas, just finality and higher stakes for no apparent reason than the fact that it was the third act of a trilogy. BB, though, amazed me. I realize that the phrase "serious superhero story" is inherently contradictory, but even so I was impressed by how seriously it took the character and plot of a grim and gritty live-action superhero and how well it delivered. Here is Scott Erik Kaufman's scholarly dissection of something related to what I'm talking about. Nolan made Batman more of a heroic character than in most of the Burton/Schumacher movies, while at the same time using the scene-by-scene directing to present him as a horror movie monster.
156: I was amused by this comment on the Batman post.
I might as well add to my own tangent here: I wonder how many superheroes have as part of their origin stories that they were once grad students? Advanced degrees are usually a supervillain thing. And when superheroes get training, they like to get it from mystic Tibetan monks or masters of the psionic arts or something like that.
I sometimes joke that some people overthink rather than acting, and others act without thinking. I hadn't considered that Supervillains are closer to the former and Superheroes the latter.
150: I wonder if you all would agree with my sense that this shows that only the US could have made the atom bomb during WW2 -- that is, even if Heisenberg & Co. had gotten the science right, they couldn't have gotten all the resources together.
One of the huge advantages the US had was a vast area that wasn't under the threat of being bombed (this is based on having read The Making of the Atom Bomb -- a book that had many parts that I don't really have the technical/scientific capacity to understand).
159: also a lot of energy to play with thanks to big hydroelectric
I wonder if you all would agree with my sense that this shows that only the US could have made the atom bomb during WW2 -- that is, even if Heisenberg & Co. had gotten the science right, they couldn't have gotten all the resources together.
Maybe not, would be my sense. And here are a few arguments why:
1. The Manhattan Project was significantly big but it was by no means the biggest thing the US did in WW2. It cost $2 billion in 1945 dollars. The B-29 programme - building the bomber that dropped the bomb - cost $3 billion. A single B-24 bomber cost $215,000 and the US built eighteen thousand of them (total cost $3.9 billion). An Iowa-class battleship cost $100 million.
2. The Manhattan Project could have been much cheaper, but speed was considered more important. For example, they developed two completely different bombs and dropped one of each - the Fat Man plutonium-implosion bomb, which needed nuclear reactors and spent fuel processing at Hanford, and the Little Boy enriched uranium-gun bomb, which needed calutrons at Oak Ridge. They did that because they weren't sure which would work, but if they'd taken the risk from the start of saying "we are building Fat Man only" then the cost would have been significantly reduced.
3. It's really a question of priorities. As a matter of historical fact, the USSR did make a bomb by 1949, and the UK by 1954. So they provably had the material resources and the know-how in the late 40s and early 50s, so I think you can assume they had them in the early 40s as well.
As for funding, the UK military budget in 1944 was about £10 billion, or $40 billion. The Avro Lancaster fleet cost £350 million ($1.4 billion) alone, and it was by no means the only bomber the RAF had.
It's just a case of what they would have been prepared to give up to bet on the bomb. The opportunity cost for the US was far less than for the other allied powers.
Re:Nolan and the fractured time thing, it would have been interesting to me if after Memento he had said to himself. "Nailed that sucker, what next?" Probably a bit precious of me to even have that thought give the incentives to dive back in again. But recently caught Dr. Strangelove for the umpteenth time on the tube (really cherishing the James Earl Jones part), and it really brought home to me how much Kubrick did not do the repeat motif thing. Am not that knowledgeable on films compared to many here, is there anyone else who compares to Kubrick on nailing it on one go in such a variety of genres?
Steven Spielberg? (though he did do more than one Indiana Jones film, admittedly)
Further to 165, Britain and Canada continued atomic weapon research outside the Manhattan project until the end of the war and beyond. The Chalk River pile in Canada went critical in September 1945, less than three years after CP-1 in Chicago - if the Manhattan project hadn't existed, it would presumably have happened earlier.
Echoing folks above, the logistical aspects of the Manhattan Project are just something else again (as it is for the whole of US WWII response). The first real appreciation I got for it was from reading Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon as a young teenager. Heinlein gives Oppenheimer/Groves an explicit shoutout, and I do think a lot of the strength of the novella is how (rare for SciFi its time--1949) it depicted the massive enterprise of doing something like going to the moon versus the lone scientist trope
People take longer to criticize in Canada.
166: Further to 165: Thread merge with baffling and opaque time travel reference.
Speaking of military projects from WW2, I'm thinking of going to an old army artillery test ground.
162.last Robert Bresson immediately comes to mind, Fritz Lang too, at least before he made the move to Hollywood. Part of the problem with that framing is it would exclude a number of very talented directors who worked in the old studio system, they generally didn't have much choice in what to direct.
And relatively speaking Kubrick didn't direct as many films as a lot of his contemporaries did
I might as well add to my own tangent here: I wonder how many superheroes have as part of their origin stories that they were once grad students? Advanced degrees are usually a supervillain thing.
Golden Age villains tend to be evil scientists, but by the Silver Age you also get superheroes using science for good (I think Grant Morrison goes into this in "Supergods"). Reed Richards has a PhD, Dr Strange presumably has postgraduate medical degrees of some sort, Charles Xavier has a DPhil, Hank (Beast) McCoy has a PhD.
Werner Herzog maybe. Soderbergh and Claire Denis both manage a huge dynamic range. Milos Forman.
Don't forget Bruce Banner, who in the MCU has seven PhDs and that's supposed to be impressive rather than concerning (rich dilettante? dysfunctional relationship with academia?).
Superhero students
Of course, Arjuna was a student as well as a musician before becoming Krishna's charioteer.
174.1 is Klaus Kinski goes stark raving mad in the jungle a genre? Because I count at least three of those in his filmography.
Agree on Denis and Soderbergh.
His documentaries are varied and pretty good. Also the best Nic Cage movie.
pushing into northern China
Everyone's all heated up about an invasion of Taiwan-- nobody talks about the Amur oblast, also the Jewish autonomous oblast is over there.
178 I was half joking. Herzog's got range.
Arthur Penn maybe. And as noir is not really a genre I'd like to see Nicholas Ray there too.
Ann Hui has a lot of range.
167: (as it is for the whole of US WWII response)
"Six copies of the USS We Built This Yesterday."
And as I've probably said here before, it's good to be the original new and improved giant economy-sized economy.
The best Batman movie is Lego Batman.
I am loving the Eric Adams indictment news. The last time I woke up to news this good is when Trump lost the election.
Don't forget Bruce Banner, who in the MCU has seven PhDs and that's supposed to be impressive rather than concerning
Non-academic: what's the highest number of doctorates that wouldn't be concerning? (Not counting honorary doctorates, obviously). I've come across MD-PhDs and JD-MDs, and that makes sense because you could have a doctor who went into research or a specialist in forensic medicine. But I am not sure I've ever met a PhD-PhD, let alone a PhD-PhD-PhD.
That's a German thing. Dr. Dr. or Prof. Dr. So-and-So
183: His "Into,d you they would go after me" is so very Trumpy. Lapparently the NYPD overtime budget went from 5 million to 100 million during his time in office.
But are many Germans actually Dr. Dr.? Or even Dr. Dr. Dr.?
Prof. Dr. is a bit different - I mean, probably every professor I've ever met would be a Prof. Dr., it's just that we only use the highest title in the UK. But of course you can use two titles if they're in different categories - so you could be Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, but not Professor Doctor Sir Lawrence Freedman, and had someone knighted Bertrand Russell he would still only have been Professor the Earl Russell, not Professor Sir Bertrand the Earl Russell. Military ranks seem to fit in the same category as academic ones, so you wouldn't have Colonel Dr Smith, but you could have Colonel Sir Martin Smith.
Hope that's clear.
re: 184
I've met a couple of people in the UK with more than one PhD. One guy was someone who was doing his MA at the same time as I was doing mine in Glasgow, and he was retired and collecting degrees was his hobby. If I recall correctly, once he'd accrued a certain number of years of fees at the university, more courses were essentially free or near-free, so he had done a PhD in something and also a doctor of divinity, plus a couple of masters.
A couple of philosophers of physics I knew also did doctoral level research in physics, but I don't think they submitted theses for both subjects, although they had masters level degrees--M.Phil/M.Sc. etc.--in both subjects. I guess there's no real advantage. You get the PhD in one subject, but you publish in journals for both/either without the hassle of having a separate viva/examination process for the second discipline.
184: Depends on the system! More than 2 is definitely concerning, but my understanding is a UK PhD takes about 3-4 years, where the US, 5 is normal and more is common. I could see rare circumstances where 2 PhDs might be practical (eg a major career change), and I wouldn't think that holding two UK PhDs was all that strange. Two in the US, though - I'd be extremely curious what drove that kind of time investment!
How many years to play all of gta then assassins creed?
re: 189
As per my 188, I think being at something roughly like US style "ABD" level in two disciplines is not that unusual. But it'd be quite unusual to submit a thesis for more than one.
Within academia if you're making a relatively small shift, you should be able to do that without a second PhD. Like you can do a PhD in logic and then get a postdoc in computer languages and then end up in CS department. If you're shifting outside of academia you don't need a PhD, you could just get a masters in the second subject or learn on the job if someone will hire you. If you're making a huge shift within academia (say Chemistry to Asian Literature, which is a field shift I knew someone who did mid-PhD) you would probably need a second PhD, but that's really rare and could make the job market difficult, and usually people would figure that out before they actually finished a thesis.
One scenario I wouldn't be shocked to see this is someone who graduated highschool while still a teenager and finished a first PhD at an age where people usually finish college.
I knew someone who had multiple PhDs, in fairly closely-related disciplines -- I don't remember exactly, but it was like, Political Science, Economics and International Relations, or something similar. I wondered why my university (or any university) would accept him as a student, since it was surely clear at that point that collecting additional degrees wasn't doing him any good. On the other hand I didn't know him well and don't remember his name, so maybe he's put his qualifications to use since then. At the time he was just some middle-aged guy who lived in my dormitory and spent his Friday evenings hitting on twenty-something women in the downstairs lounge.
I knew someone in grad school who had a cockamamie plan to get a philosophy PhD after his English PhD, but since his "English" dissertation project was already about German idealism since Hegel, it ended up being easier to just get the philosophy degree. I looked him up and apparently he went on to become a swami in a monastic order in India.
193: Are there Germans with mire than one PhD? I thought Blume had a job tracking that at one point. The ones with two doctorates were very particular about being addressed as "Herr Doktor Doktor"
There was a physician who finished his physics doctorate at Brown in 2021 (age 89). He'd been a hematologist at Brown and taught at thr medical school. He died 2 years later, so it wasn't exactly career preparation. I wonder how the funding worked.
193: Was he funded? There are schools that are pretty lax about accepting anyone who is willing to pay.
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South Asians reiterate that they know how to democracy.
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My 14-year-old self thought that getting a Ph.D. or M.D. LL.D. meant "knowing all the stuff" and I wanted all of them. My older self realized that you definitely don't know all the stuff when you get the degree but it punches your ticket to keep doing the stuff. And that ticket usually allows you to change to a connecting line so you don't need any more tickets usually. I am not friends with a lot of M.D.'s - I get the impression that some of them really do feel that the degree means they know the stuff (and don't need to learn more) but probably that's a stereotype of older physicians.
198: That's what I wondered. Tuition during the dissertation would be pretty low. I guess that paying even 90k/ year is less than memory care at assisted living. What would full tuition be for somebody to do the first part of the coursework?
Don't science labs need to show that their students are going to become the next generation great researchers in their field when they apply for grants?
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Apple Mail took three years of deleted emails and moved them to my inbox and marked them as "unread" this morning, but I have now defeated it (found a way to sort on unread emails, and delete just those). Important because I use a floating buffer of about 50-100 emails in my inbox as saved reminders of things I want to address later, so burying those 100 in 3200 other emails is bad. I should probably use some other mechanism to organize my tasks than my inbox, but I yam what I yam.
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I finally understand "Bad case of loving you." The object of the singer's affection is a MD-PhD.
195: The director of the institute where I worked when I first came to Germany was a Herr Prof. Dr. Dr., but the second Dr. was honorary so he was actually Herr Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. -- another case of each title indicating something different rather than multiple doctorates.
Academics typically do a Habilitation, a much bigger monograph than the dissertation, before they can be considered for a position as a professor. This entitles them to change their title to Dr. habil., but I can't recall seeing it in addition to the Dr. from the PhD degree. I guess my institute's director might have been a Herr Prof. Dr. habil. Dr. h.c., though he spent some years in politics so he may not have done the habil part and gotten the university chair for being close to practice, or something like that. In short biographical paragraphs (About the Author, or similar), I have seen "Dr. h.c. (mult.)" to indicate that the person has received more than one honorary doctorate.
Then there are strange beasts like Dr. rer. pol. or Dr. oec. that European standards have mostly prevented from multiplying in modern times, but which can still be found on older CVs and lists of program participants.
Aren't you glad you asked?
There are schools that are pretty lax about accepting anyone who is willing to pay.
There was someone in my PhD program going for a second doctorate along with previously acquired MD and JD degrees. Somewhere along the way, maybe before some degrees but after others, was a huge windfall from selling a company (or an IPO, or something like that) that meant no need to apply for funding for any future educational endeavors at essentially any university at any cost. But I don't know if that actually factored into admissions.
205: Sifu was in grad school with somebody like that who was self-pay.
re: 204
Czechs always clarify what kind of Dr someone is in their title. So you'll see people on TV as "MUDr." (medical doctor), etc but confusingly some of the "Dr" titles correspond to what would be lower degrees elsewhere.
183: can someone explain to me why the Turkish government thought it was worth the trouble to bribe Eric Adam's? This seems to have started well before he was mayor. And what did they get out of this? Do they really care so much whether NYC has an Armenian Genocide Day?
208: One of the concrete benefits was getting that building approved for occupancy. Monetary in that if a skyscraper is substandard, fixing it is probably super-expensive; it may have also had reputational importance for the bribers because there was an event they apparently really needed it to be open in time for.
But, you know, he was there for whatever they might have needed. Who knows what it adds up to.
209: I suppose. Maybe they listen to Nate Silver, so they thought he was a possible future President.
There was a department chair at my undergrad university who had two PhDs, one in philosophy and the other in physics but he was also a Jesuit so I always figured that's what explained that.
210 and 211 seem plausible - why assume he's the only one? Why not assume the more logical scenario in which the Turks are trying to bribe, let's say, thirty of the most promising Democratic and Republican politicians? Most of them won't get anywhere, but some of them will become senators or governors or even presidential candidates, and the outlay is minimal by national-budget standards compared with the payoff.
I totally reject such aspersions.