Gru is OK WIth Me (and not Despicable)

Did anyone ask the actor what was going on?

You may have seen the story, and I actually hope that you haven't: Gru get fired for symbol.

I have so much to say, but am too lazy to type it all out here. Let's start with 4chan, shall we? As has been documented, some 4chan trolls punked the media by suggesting that the OK symbol has white supremacist meaning. The media believed it (as did some white power guys), but most of us didn't even hear about it because we have lives.

A story or two appeared and they were debunked.

Not for this one couple, though, who after apparently NOT PAYING ATTENTION TO THEIR KIDS during a photo opp with Gru and a Minion, didn't notice the Circle game was being played. Later, months later, they saw the "offensive gesture" and did what anyone would do: alerted the media, somehow.

Seriously, I know people that work for local media, and it would never have occurred to me to call them.

Universal fired the character actor, and I have to wonder if they even asked him or her what was up? "Hey, we got this complaint, uh, what was that about? Are you a stupid racist ruining photos, or?" "Wait, what's the circle game? You mean "made you look?"?" "Who would believe a playful cartoon character would play a kids game with some kids...that's ridiculous!"

I mean, Occam's Razor, right?

The best part is the edited photo that doesn't show the little toddler brother also making the circle. Because, narrative, right?

And just in time the trailer for Richard Jewell dropped. Perfect timing.

Seriously, What Is The Matter With These People?

You know the people I mean, right?

The media!

This morning, on my local AM Talk Radio favorite, which uses NBC news for the top of the hour bits, a story of the impending Presidential funeral was about....the seating chart.

Yes, the Hot Take was that Obama and Trump might only be one seat away from each other. Blah blah blah tradition blah blah blah GW with family blah blah blah and they haven't been getting along blah blah blah. It's the funeral of a former President and this is what you are thinking about, and you actually decide that it's worth saying out loud IN A NEWS REPORT?

OHMYGOODNESSWHATISTHEMATTERWITHYOURBRAIN?

Well, the answer is easy, it's Trump Derangement Syndrome. I mean, like when the Mayor of London was asked about Trump after a terrorist event, they can't help themselves because EVERYTHING IS ABOUT TRUMP (or, as the twitter hashtag goes, #OrangeManBad).

Seriously, people, you need a break. Maybe a job handing out pennies to kids at Wal-Mart so they can ride the penny pony (or rocket or whatever). Step away.

***Just an update, my FB feed had a few people that fit this description. Step away, people, step away. You really need to let go the TrumpHate, it's poisoning your brain and your soul.

Trump Is In Their Brains

So, this gets retweeted or liked into my twitter stream:

He gave a very reasonable answer, that he was a little busy to be bothered with Twitter in light of the bombing.

My response was this:

That's the thing, isn't it? The media is obsessed with Trump and has been for some time. As they say, he's living in their head, rent-free. It's why he won the primaries against better conservatives and Republicans.

Now, don't get me wrong, I know they had no choice but to cover him and his, uhm, antics during the campaign, because they had to as he was running for President. See how smart he was? Free coverage because the media had no choice but to cover him. They couldn't ignore him, as critics wished they would (which would work with, say, Westboro Baptist, to make them go away), because that would be negligent as he already was news worthy. Brilliant manipulation on his part.

BTW, if you aren't aware of Scott Adams' ongoing dissection of the rhetorical and persuasion tools that the Trump Team has been using, you're missing an education on what's been going on. I don't even agree with him on all his points, but he isn't a Trump fan or defender (as the folks who hate Trump are painting him), and he is seeing the manipulation for what it is. (of course, this could be me in a moment of confirmation bias because I also thing Trump is playing the media like a fiddle).

Back to the point (and there is one).

I have long held the belief that when we've experienced something, we tend to adopt that (or those, if it's plural) experience into our lens, our perspective through which we interact with the world. A simple example of this bias I think about is the old red car metaphor. It's not just red cars, per se, it's the familiarity bias and observational selection bias working in tandem to make you think that "now that I have a red car, I see them every where. There must be more red cars being made then before." Nope, you're just paying attention to them. Indeed, what we attend to creates our reality.

Another version is the sudden appearance of pregnant women everywhere when your wife becomes pregnant. (hint: they were already there). A more serious example I think about is racism. If you are black in America, you have experienced it, and that makes you see it everywhere, even in situations where it isn't present.

All of this is to say that Trump as so successfully implanted himself into the minds of his detractors that they can't refrain from checking his Twitter feed, because, well, they have to because he's already newsworthy because he's the US President. Note: I don't follow him on twitter. I don't have to (or want to), mostly because he gets retweeted into my timeline so much. Argh.

So, we have "Trump-Glasses" wearing idiots like the reporter that thought that (because the lens/perspective through which he or she sees everything is smeared with Trump) asking the London Mayor his thoughts on a Trump tweet was a reasonable, worthy, or necessary question.

I have written and talked about my Trump thoughts, feelings, and impressions. I don't like the guy, but I have enjoyed how he has played the press, driven the leftists insane (literally, in some cases), and shone a light on our electoral processes like the primary system and electoral college. I think he's a progressive and crony capitalist at heart and that scares me. But what really scares me is the way his detractors and enemies (which includes the majority of our media types) have become so consumed by their hatred/fear/disgust that they are literally blind to their own obsession with him and things like his tweets that it's literally all they appear to think about.

I think he should keep tweeting, seriously. It's how he talks to his base without the media filter, and I guess that's why they can't help report on it, to try to control it, to shape his message like they would if they were the quote-conduit. If would serve them better to ignore the tweets and not make them into news stories, frankly, but I'm not giving them that good piece of advice. It's too much fun watching them lose their minds.

What? Media Writes Crappy Headlines, Film At Eleven!

It's been particularly frustrating lately, especially here at home with the race-baiting headlines and the stark manipulations from the press.

I'll start with the national news, one that I think is pretty demonstrative of the typical way these things happen, and one that #1 has elucidated very effectively today (8/10/15).

Donald Trump said yet another stupid thing after the Republican Presidential Candidate's debate last Thursday, expressing his feelings about the moderator, Megyn Kelly pretty inarticulately (shocking!) and I have to tell you, that based on the tweets, FB posts, and headlines, for three days, until this morning, I thought he said this:

"She had blood coming out of her whatever"

Because of quotes like this from this CNN article: "Donald Trump's feud with Megyn Kelly escalated Friday night when he said the Fox News host had "blood coming out of her wherever" at this week's Republican debate, resulting in swift condemnation from conservatives and a major political event pulling its invitation to him." 


When, in fact, he said ""You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes," Trump told CNN's Don Lemon on Friday night. "Blood coming out of her wherever." (same article as above)

Watch the link and you'll see he was just struggling to get some words out and move on to the next topic. Trump is a personality, a loud, brash, self-aggrandizing creature of the American culture. I have no regard for him, never have, he's the type of Cait-kardashian-Kanye-honey boo boo-reality ilk that is a scourge upon our species, much less our culture, but he's getting totally hosed on this.

Sorta.

His poll numbers are up, so who gets the last word on this?

He has defended his remarks specifically that it's the hearers that implied something he didn't infer. Good for him.

Other stuff.

Ok, our local Fox affiliate has used this headline about a "19 year old college football player that was black and was shot by a police trainee": 

Trainee officer shoots unarmed college football player

The AP article begins: "An unarmed college football player was shot dead at a suburban Dallas car dealership by a trainee police officer during a middle-of-the-night burglary call. The death of 19-year-old Christian Taylor has raised some of the same questions as other recent police shootings involving unarmed suspects."

The article is so bad that I can't stand to read it, but it never explicitly states that the "victim" was committing a crime at the time (allegedly) but is sure to get some speculation from his father. This CNN article is better, using the AP story as its basis (or did the Fox affiliate edit it down to garbage? good question) getting around to the things he did that attracted police attention, but needlessly linking the Ferguson shooting of a year ago in attempt to paint it as racial (even though the Justice Dept came to the opposite conclusion).

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!


Lastly, a University of Cincinnati cop killed a guy the other week, and he's being dragged through the mud. I'm not going to defend him, because he had no reason to shoot the guy. I have a couple of observations, of course.

If you watch the video, he wasn't being confrontational, or jerky in any way to the guy he stopped. The guy was being a little low-grade difficult, but it escalated in a flash when he told the guy he wanted him to get out of the car. We had just seen both of the officer's hands, so the speed at which he ended up pulling his gun and shooting it is shocking.

Why? I have an answer for that, I think with all the anti-police media attention over the last year especially (thanks to the drive-by media's Ferguson fiasco) coupled with the targeting and killing of cops including one here in Cincinnati, cops are on edge. It's causing the rate of cops killing people to spike rather than decrease because they are rightly SCARED.

Now, to the specifics of the case, I think that he's going to get off on the murder charge because the tape doesn't show what he may or may not have suspected, smelled, or seen in the car as he talked to the victim who was, as it turns out, in addition to the legitimate reasons for the stop and questioning (no front plate, no driver's license on him), had a bottle of "air freshener" to cover the scent of the drugs and cash that was in the car.... Which is why the guy was a little evasive, didn't want to get out of the car, and did, in fact start to attempt to flee before he was needlessly shot. 

Let me repeat that: needlessly shot. He was a guy doing bad things, but the officer should not have shot him. 

His family placed flowers as a memorial on the campus of my alma mater, which is interesting as I don't think he was ever a student there, so why memorialize him there? Because the officer that killed him was a UC cop? I just think the location is weird, that's all, clearly the family should so something to memorialize him regardless of the the circumstances of his death. Allowing it on the campus, though, I think is an error as he was in possession of pot and cash; driving without a license in his possession; driving without a front plate at the time of his shooting. If that makes me some kind of monster, I can live with that.

Drive-by Media Strikes Again and Again and....

So, this is making the rounds today: Gay activist faked own kidnapping.

Let me say but one thing: the fact that he is a "gay activist" has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE STORY as far as we can tell at this time. That, however, is the headline.

Like the 3 students killed at UNC over a parking space, the media grabs the most sellable part of the story, even if it's not a part of the story, to entice the idiots.

Chris Rock on Race in Hollywood Is Epic

If you haven't seen it, Chris Rock (who I disagree with on stuff, but still like a lot!) has been writing and talking a lot lately with a new movie coming out, Ferguson, etc. This new essay is epic for several reasons, but I'd like to point out that he says something I have been saying for years (cue: confirmation bias). Our media is liberal but racist. Pretty white females as victims or perps get stories on 20/20 or Dateline while thousands upon thousands of black males get killed and it's not even noticed other than to scare white people from "going downtown" all across the county. The media (and they are all liberals, folks) portray black Americans in the context of crime almost exclusively.

The term "drive-by media" popularized by Rush Limbaugh is so fricking accurate.  This couples with my constant criticisms of sweeps month sensationalism and the ever popular "summer of" series, be it shark attacks, abductions, or West Nile Virus. Ask anyone who has had a reason to be on the news and they will tell you: they got important details completely wrong, or omitted details to create the narrative as they saw it, truth be damned.

Chris Rock isn't the first to make this observation, but he'll at least bring it to the forefront. The people who make our movies are led by scumbags (to allude to Charles Barkley!) molesting children, doing drugs, and excluding everyone that doesn't look or think like them.

We cut it out in Top Five, but there had been a scene where Kevin Hart, who plays my character’s agent, is in his office talking to me, and he finds out that “Zoolander” (Ben Stiller) is down the hall and he’s mad because none of the agents called him. He’s the only black agent at the agency, and there was a line in the movie like, “I’m the only black agent here. They never invite me to anything, and these people are liberals. This isn’t the Klan.

But forget whether Hollywood is black enough. A better question is: Is Hollywood Mexican enough? You’re in L.A, you’ve got to try not to hire Mexicans. It’s the most liberal town in the world, and there’s a part of it that’s kind of racist — not racist like “F— you, n——-” racist, but just an acceptance that there’s a slave state in L.A. There’s this acceptance that Mexicans are going to take care of white people in L.A. that doesn’t exist anywhere else. I remember I was renting a house in Beverly Park while doing some movie, and you just see all of the Mexican people at 8 o’clock in the morning in a line driving into Beverly Park like it’s General Motors. It’s this weird town.

You’re telling me no Mexicans are qualified to do anything at a studio? Really? Nothing but mop up? What are the odds that that’s true? The odds are, because people are people, that there’s probably a Mexican David Geffen mopping up for somebody’s company right now. The odds are that there’s probably a Mexican who’s that smart who’s never going to be given a shot. And it’s not about being given a shot to greenlight a movie because nobody is going to give you that — you’ve got to take that. The shot is that a Mexican guy or a black guy is qualified to go and give his opinion about how loud the boings are inDodgeball or whether it’s the right s—- sound you hear when Jeff Daniels is on the toilet in Dumb and Dumber. It’s like, “We only let white people do that.” This is a system where only white people can chime in on that. There would be a little naivete to sitting around and going, “Oh, no black person has ever greenlighted a movie,” but those other jobs? You’re kidding me, right? They don’t even require education. When you’re on the lower levels, they’re just about taste, nothing else. And you don’t have to go to Harvard to have taste.

Also, this should sting:

But if we’re going to just be honest and count dollars and seats and not look at skin color, Kevin Hart is the biggest comedian in the world. If Kevin Hart is playing 40,000 seats in a night and Jon Stewart is playing 3,000, the fact that Jon Stewart’s 3,000 are white means Kevin has to cross over? That makes no sense. If anybody needs to cross over, it’s the guy who’s selling 3,000 seats.

Awesome. And remember, this country is 67% white and 12% black. Suck it Stewart, you aren't that popular.

More epic talk:

I couldn’t have made Top Five at a studio. First of all, no one’s going to make a movie with a premise so little and artsy: a star putting out a movie and getting interviewed by a woman from The New York Times. I would have had to have three two-hour meetings explaining that black people also read The New York Times. A studio would’ve made it like Malibu’s Most Wanted. And never in a million years would they have allowed a scene where the rich guy comes back to the projects and actually gets along with everybody. No way. In most black movies — and in most black TV shows and even in most black plays — anyone with money or an education is evil, even movies made by black directors. They have to be saved by the poor people. This goes back to Good Times andWhat’s Happening!!

Go read the whole thing, but here's my parting shot: I remember when Ellen's sitcom tanked and people blamed homophobia. I disagreed, I thought it was because the show went from being about the characters to being about the character being gay, and it wasn't funny anymore. People clearly love Ellen, it seems, and trust me, we knew she was gay anyway.

I'll also throw in that several conservative types I follow say that if we want to win the culture back, just go make good art and the conservative message that may or may not be a part of it will follow. the problem with most "conservative" art right now is that it's conservative first and it isn't good quality art! Anyway, here's Chris Rock:

But there’s been progress. When I was on Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago, we did a sketch where I was Sasheer Zamata's dad and she had an Internet show. Twenty years ago when I was on Saturday Night Live, anything with black people on the show had to deal with race, and that sketch we did didn’t have anything to do with race. That was the beauty: The sketch is funny because it’s funny, and that’s the progress.

Yes, it is.

 

Useful Idiots and Willful Ignorance

I had to say something about all the US political news, didn't I?

The media sux.

People are stupid.

Politicians lie.

Bureaucrats are people and they can be petty, or nice, or trustworthy, or slimy.

Irony lives! Say "don't listen to people saying beware of tyranny" on Saturday, have your IRS apologize for acting tyrannical on Friday.

***Update***

It just keeps geting better, doesn't it? This, my friends, is why guys like me believe in limited government.

"Drive-By Media" defined by Jon Stewart: didn't know he agreed with Rush!

In this New York Times article, the writer quotes Jon Stewart and observes:

“ 'The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous, flaming ant epidemic,' he said, to roars of approval from the crowd."


This, my esteemed readers, is EXACTLY what Rush Limbaugh means when he refers to the drive-by media, and it warms the cockles of my heart to see that both the speaker and the audience seem to agree whole-heartedly.