Prediction on the Downfall of the MCU Coming To Pass

Disney/Pixar just laid a pretty big turd this weekend, so it seems like a good time to revisit my answer to a Quora question a year ago. It has garnered 75 likes in that time, and so I am kind of proud of that. Honestly I just rushed my answer out with a lot less work that I generally put into blog posts. The reason people like it is obviously not because of brilliant writing but because the message resonates with fans of stories of all sorts. Here's the text:

Will Marvel Studios’ “woke” stance backfire like the comics did?

If the storytelling goes downhill, then the MCU will fall. “Wokeness” seems to erect artificial barriers to good storytelling. For example, look at the Charlie’s Angels movie. All the women are Mary Sues and can all do just about everything. All the men are awful and easy for the women to beat. The old white guy turns out to be the villain and this surprises no one. The movie tanked and was deservedly mocked.

“Batwoman” is another recent cringeworthy example. Good storytelling takes a back seat to woke button-pushing, and it is one of the lowest rated things in the DC realm.

Having said all this, there are many macho-crap films, stuff as far from “woke” as possible, out there that suck as badly as Batwoman. They feature one-dimensional, steroid-jacked heroes and hot women posing merely damsels in distress. I have just never heard anyone insist that those examples of film-making are great. Not in the way people insist that Last Jedi or Rise of Skywalker is great storytelling when the plot holes in those films are gaping and their characters demonstrably less realistic.

The best of the older, cheesy action films didn’t suffer from macho or woke posturing. Commando didn’t take itself very seriously, but neither of the females comes across as a fearful damsel-y character, but rather tough characters with courage. Rae-Dawn Chong actually uses a rocket launcher to free Schwarzenegger from a paddy wagon. But if Chong was shown beating all these military guys up with Arnold sitting there cheering her on that would have ruined the story. I feel like there are a bunch of woke fans that want that, i.e., ruin the story for the sake of a narrative that shows that men need to take a back seat to women, not that men and women can work together, using different talents, to beat the bad guys. “Edge of Tomorrow” is a good example of a more recent example of this, along with the first “Avengers” film of course.

“Falcon and the Winter Soldier” is a good example of the latest MCU project which was not sure what it wanted to be. Quirky action romp or preachy geopolitical / racial statement? Fortunately, the great action scenes provided enough cover for fans like me to ignore the cringe-worthy monologuing and confusion about who really is the “bad guy”. But here’s the thing: I’m a hardcore comic movie fan. If the MCU takes the wrong message from its decent ratings and injects more statement and less fun into their products, they are going to lose a lot of audience. You have got to get normal people to see your movies. If you are just able to count people like me coming through to door then woke or not, you’ll go broke.

I added a number of comments over the months about new MCU movies. I noted that Spiderman did really well and was missing all the SJW virtue signaling. A guy whose first name was Mohammad showed up in the comments and agreed with me numerous times, providing his own insights and examples that I appreciated very much. Unfortunately he deleted all his comments. He may have been scared that people might see them and decide he is a _______phobe, so I do not blame him one bit.

There are many people out there calling this stuff out now and pointing out that political messaging destroys stories. So many in fact that a list would be sort of hard to make, but here is a partial one: Critical Drinker, Nerdrotic, Ryan Kinal, Infinity Girl, The Quartering, Clownfish TV, Geeks and Gamers and Odin's Movie Blog. A lot of these folks are great fellow travelers for traditional Christians and conservatives to follow and check out.

Not evil, just awful

Kotkin sums up exactly the way I want to respond every time I hear a Trump supporter/defender say "he's not racist". Okay; walking like a duck is something our intelligent species can do without becoming ducks, but why would we do it? Maybe to get some really gullible ducks to follow us around.

In reality, Trump is not a classic racist, but rather an ugly opportunist willing to use ethnic divides for his own benefit. He’s been compared to Adolph Hitler, a monster whose philosophy revolved around race, but Trump has no real theory that extends beyond self-glorification, resentment, and attracting the fetching female; “The Art of the Deal” is not “Mein Kampf.”

Trump will play the race card as a way to satisfy his narcissistic need for enthusiastic admirers. This does not mean his approach does not echo the racism of the past. His claim of bias by a U.S.-born judge of Mexican descent, as well as his suggestions that Muslim jurists are incapable of ruling independently, recall the worst of the pre-Civil Rights South. His proposals to ban Muslim immigrants in general recall approaches in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which targeted Chinese, Japanese and, ultimately eastern and southern Europeans.

In short, you don't have to be Hitler to be awful, or to have bad intentions, or to be a wrecking ball for your own movement. When people were calling Obama a communist back in 2008 I was cringing because I knew it would be pretty easy to dismiss the charge. After all, what communist would save General Motors? Barack Obama had to have been secretly smiling every time someone tossed that accusation at him or its even stupider twin sister—the charge that he was born in Kenya. Leave the fact that it wouldn't have mattered if he had been (his mother is an American citizen), it just made everyone making it seem like an instant racist to the general populace.

Yes, Virginia—that general populace. The one which elects Presidents. Not the subsection of critical thinkers or people with degrees in the hard sciences.

So when I heard people saying Trump could be the next Hitler I cringed as well knowing that a few black and Jewish friends will effectively dismiss that charge while a host of others would point at the media, shout "See they call us all racist!" and reflexively support Trump even though his rhetoric is incendiary.

I am not the only person who sees it this way. Larry Elder had been more generous to Donald Trump than many of the other Salem Radio hosts, but boy, did he about lose it when the whole thing about the "Mexican" Judge came out. This all happened shortly after Trump had all but secured the GOP nomination. Elder's conclusion is worth noting: "As found as people are of Donald Trump, if you give him a pass on this it means you have no integrity."

I should probably just accept my new status as politically homeless. Get out the cardboard and lets light a barrel fire.

Freedom's Safest Place

A safer world means a place where the bad guys are scared and the good guys aren't. Unfortunately, liberals in government do the opposite, enacting policies which empower the "demons" and making the good folks second guess themselves. They limit the freedom of the good guys in ways the bad guys don't care about.



On talk radio the other day, I heard a woman wisely recommend an alternative to the ridiculous "Gun Free Zone" signs you see in commercial buildings. Did she suggest that a sign be posted that reads "A lot of us carry guns here, so watch out?" No, she said the signs should read "This building is under surveillance." A good person doesn't care about surveillance because they are in the building to obtain products or services, to make a deposit, to do their job, etc. But a bad person fears getting caught for what they are about to do.

If I owned commercial property there is only one way I'd post those no guns allowed signs. That's if I had a full walk-through metal detector to go along with them. The idea that these signs are any kind of deterrent is a very dangerous one.

How's that working out for you?

I was wondering when we'd here about this in some kind of anniversary "Where is he now?" thing. But it turns out that it has only taken three months for the idealistic Dan Price and his credit card processing company, Gravity Payments, to reap the "benefits" of over-paying staff members. Excerpt:

Gravity Payments financial manager Maisey McMaster didn’t pull any punches in her critique of her former boss:

“He gave raises to people who have the least skills and are the least equipped to do the job, and the ones who were taking on the most didn’t get much of a bump,” she said.

Another former employee, Grant Moran, echoed a similar sentiment:

“Now the people who were just clocking in and out were making the same as me,” he said. “It shackles high performers to less motivated team members.”

Dan Price’s own brother Lucas, who owns 30 percent of the company, even filed a lawsuit, seeking millions of dollars in damages.

According to Dan Price, his experiment in wage distribution has made him ill-equipped to handle it:

“We don’t have a margin of error to pay those legal fees,” he said.

The company has also lost customers, who were displeased with the decision. Price finally relented, admitting that, perhaps, raising the minimum wage at his company to $70,000 wasn’t the best idea:

“There’s no perfect way to do this and no way to handle complex workplace issues that doesn’t have any downsides or trade-offs,” he said.

I skipped the part about his reducing his "salary" from $1 million to $70,000 because that is a silly red herring of a thing to say about a business owner. But these problems shouldn't surprise anyone who understands economics. When I first heard about this on Limbaugh's show my initial thought was "$70,000? Why not $80,000?? What a cheapskate."

If the world was perfect, these kinds of company problems would never happen. But if the world was perfect we wouldn't need credit card processing either, would we.

*NSFW* Lou Reed: I wanna be black

Every since the whole Racial Dolezal thing came out this song has been going through my head and I've been laughing.

If you are offended by, say, The Jerk, please do not listen to this song.

You've been warned.



Hey, KAJ is down with Rachel Dolezal identifying as black, so give it a rest all you tight-assed whi' people.

Liberals always get a pass for saying racial stuff. Lenny Bruce is lionized by NPR at least once a year, Ted Danson is famously defended by Whoopi Goldberg, etc. It's all very clever, you know, social commentary when liberals get racial. It's not insensitive at all.

Speak and remove all doubt

I was reviewing this post from August 19, 2014 a little bit, especially looking at the comments. Most of the commenters—other than Chad, Peggy and Benjamin 2.0—look pretty foolish now.

For example, Mike Blackadder appeals to the authority of South Park to make his point.

That Brown would rush Wilson through a stream of gunfire because Wilson was maybe accusing him of committing a crime that he had just committed? It sounds like the South Park 'it's coming right for us' explanation for shooting him down. I'm not saying that I know it didn't happen, just wouldn't bet on it.

Yes; it's best not to bet either way with regards to a straw man scenario which you've concocted. Then we have Jroberts548, the most prolific commenter on the thread, explaining things in terms of unique dumbness

For it to be self-defense, and the cops not to have said anything yet would require the cops in Ferguson to be uniquely dumb. It is a clear case of murder, unless the cops are literally the dumbest cops in America.

...and the fact that the Ferguson Police Department is "just ran by morons".

With each day, the possibility that the killing was justified and the ferguson PD is just ran by morons does seem slightly more plausible.

Finally cmfe—of whose gender I'm not certain since his/her avatar is Bugs Bunny in drag—chimes in with this piece of brilliance:

Yes, by all means, let's get back to business as usual long as we don't have to worry about our own children getting gunned down.

Well, if business as usual for your children is smoking weed, robbing small businesses and attacking cops, then they will most likely get gunned down at some point. Sorry.

And I feel sorry for everyone who commented on the case in a prejudicial manner since they will be taken less seriously now that we have the facts in the case alongside their incredibly bad guesses as to what might have happened.

Tamir Rice Made A Fatal Mistake

Here's my take on the sad Tamir Rice shooting at the Cudell Rec Center. Excerpt from the report:

Police saw Tamir take what they believed was a pistol from a picnic table under a gazebo where he was sitting with a group and stuff the weapon in his waistband.

A first-year officer, who officials have not named, got out of his car and told the boy to raise his hands. Instead, police said he reached for what later proved to be an airsoft-type gun, a replica of a semi-automatic handgun that shoots pellets.

The officer fired two shots from less than 10 feet away. A least one of the bullets hit Tamir in the stomach. He was rushed to MetroHelath Medical Center in serious condition and died early Sunday.

Questions about the shooting arose when police revealed that the man who called 9-1-1 before the boy was shot told dispatchers "the gun was probably fake."

The caller told the dispatcher he saw "a guy with a pistol" on the swing set pulling a weapon from his pants and "scaring the s—t out of everyone."

Listening to a local Saturday call-in show on WTAM-1100, it would seem that almost everybody who can speak proper English and form an argument agrees that the primary reason that Tamir Rice is now dead is his own stupidity. There were blacks as well as whites calling in to lament the kid's stupidity, and most people mentioned that if you're a cop and you get called to Cudell no one should blame you for being ready to use your sidearm. It's a crime-ridden place.

I don't have much to add except to say two things. One, maybe the cop could have done something else. I'm sure that in hindsight he wishes he used a taser, or maybe used he x-ray bionic vision to determine that the Rice's pistol was only an airsoft gun. As Christopher Johnson from MCJ recently noted:

....You’ve got one second to decide what to do an a life-threatening situation. Well, I guess I should…time’s up. You’re dead.

But come to think of it, I don't know if the officer has a bionic eye. (Sounds like a question Don Lemon might ask, though.)

The second thing is that Tamir Rice's father should be absolutely ashamed of himself for not teaching his son that playing with guns (which have been doctored to look real) in public and not listening to policemen with real weapons will get you killed. I realize that his father, Leonard Warner, has a criminal history, but that should only make him more ashamed that he hadn't taught his son simple survival skills, and what a mistake it is to play chicken with the cops.

Someone should do a quick anecdotal study about how many of these kids involved in these high-profile shootings (Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, etc.) have the same last name as their father and mother. It seems like they all come from broken homes, which would seem to be a much stronger indicator than race.

Charles M. Blow, Race-hustler and Professinal Whiner

I could post a commentary on Charles M. Blow's latest three articles which are even worse in the race-hustling and black victimhood department than normal. But it would actually just make everybody stupider to read them. So I'm going to post something much more intelligent and uplifting which my kids recently showed me.

Ed FitzGerald for Governor Update

First, Ed FitzGerald goes for the absolute kook vote by attacking Chief Wahoo. No, really.

Next, the rats are leaving the sinking ship; headline FitzGerald's top aides leave campaign. WVXU actually provides a good summary of how the Fitz campaign has done so far.

Buis, McElhatton and Hitt were all brought in from out of state to work with the campaign, and Buis and McElhatton made the choice to leave. It’s unclear whether the Democrats will spend what little money FitzGerald has left on an ad blitz or turn their attention to the downticket races.

There are still a lot of questions about why FitzGerald didn’t have a permanent driver’s license for a decade, which was discovered after a 2012 police report showing he was found in a dark parking lot in the early morning hours with a woman who was a member of a visiting Irish delegation.

Then last week, there came reports that FitzGerald disciplined employees in his office who didn’t have valid drivers’ licenses. FitzGerald’s campaign had stumbled early when it was revealed that his first choice for his running mate, Senator Eric Kearney of Cincinnati, owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes.

FitzGerald has struggled with fundraising since the beginning - as of the last reporting period a few weeks ago, incumbent Republican John Kasich holds a 5-1 money advantage over FitzGerald with more than $11 million on hand compared to FitzGerald’s nearly $2.5 million, and the latest Quinnipiac poll has FitzGerald down 12 points. Early voting starts in 50 days.

I really hope the man crashes and burns. He's a disgrace, and as out-of-touch as any elite leftist. And my desire to see him crash hard is not based on any great love of Kasich.

He read the tea leaves...

...and he doesn't even drink tea. Romney from 2007:



On the other hand, we have Joe Biden's, uh, "prophecy" from 2010:



If Mitt Romney was President, do you think he'd be fundraising and golfing at a time like this?

H/T IJ Review.

How can the Obamacare Individual Mandate possibly work?

I've wondered this for awhile and James Capretta wonders too.

ObamaCare’s architects were always ambivalent about the mandate. They knew compulsion was necessary to make their system work — but, fearing a backlash, opted for a fairly weak penalty for those who didn’t obey. Oops: They wound up with a mandate that still provokes resentment, yet probably won’t work.

The US Supreme Court weakened the mandate even as it was saving ObamaCare. The law’s authors hoped that the mandate would create the perception that insurance enrollment is now obligatory, but the high court made it clear that Congress has no authority to institute such a requirement. The justices ruled that the mandate could stand only as an optional tax, not as a fine for noncompliance.

So you’re not breaking the law by not buying (overpriced) ObamaCare-compliant insurance; you’re just making the legal choice to pay the tax instead.

I normally love the idea of an "optional tax". But my guess is that the money collected from this "tax" will be a fraction of what it will cost to pay those administering the tax. The regular non-optional tax payers—you and I—will pick up the tab as usual.

So, for instance, a 31-year-old single man making $30,000 in Columbus, Ohio faces a tax of $198.50, more than $2,000 less than the cheapest option in Ohio’s ObamaCare exchange, even including his taxpayer-funded subsidy. For a 36-year-old San Diego woman making $40,000, the tax is $298.50, or nearly $2,400 less than the cheapest policy on the California exchange. She’s not eligible for a subsidy.

ObamaCare can’t work if the young and healthy don’t sign up in large numbers — yet the law creates a clear incentive for them to opt out.

There’s more: The law also guarantees that you can always choose to buy during the next annual enrollment period — so if you fall seriously ill and find that ObamaCare has become a better investment, you can buy it then.

Which leads to my favorite pull-quote:

The ObamaCare law thus made insurance a less valuable product for most people, even as it pushed up the cost of buying it.

Classic. He has another good article about what Republicans can and should be doing about Obamacare which I hope the good guys in congress will take to heart.

Thirty caliber.... no wait... Thirty magazine clip in half a second

Thirty somethings worth of some kind of rifle gun bullets....



My kids say this kind of stuff all the time. "I got a nuclear bomb missile gun with infinity firepower and a force field." But it doesn't bother me since none of them are 12 years old yet, let alone senators.

Was he trying to get a viral video? Spewing this kind of nonsense is one way.

Jimmy Kimmel takes out Kanye... again....

From the Mirror. This is too funny.

Overhead in overdrive in the stupid college savings boondoggle

Yet another reason to not vote for Ed FitzGerald for Governor of Ohio.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald's college savings account program will cost taxpayers $522,000 in annual overhead, about one-quarter of the program's $2 million budget, county records show.

That percentage is significantly more than the vast majority of large charities spend to administer their programs, according to Charity Navigator, a non-profit watchdog that tracks budgets of $1 million or more.

"I think that it does seem high," Charity Navigator spokeswoman Sandra Miniutti told Northeast Ohio Media Group on Friday.

Of the 7,000 philanthropic agencies Charity Navigator tracks, less than 4 percent spend a quarter or more of their budgets on administrative costs, Miniutti said. Most spend 15 percent or less, she said.

This whole savings account thing is a perfect example of Democrat boondoggling. Tax the parents, funnel money to kids, buy votes, raise the cost of education. Then repeat as often as possible and if anyone attacks the plan, tell them they must hate the children.

The program's likely overhead is drawing criticism from County Councilman Dave Greenspan, a Republican who has frequently questioned initiatives by FitzGerald since the Democratic county executive announced he is running for governor.

"Would you as a taxpayer give to a charity that had at least a [25 percent] administrative burden on the giving?" Greenspan said. "The answer is no. I believe it's no. I wouldn't do it."

But the FitzGerald administration objected Friday to comparing the savings account program's administrative expenses to those of charities.

"This program cannot be easily compared to this broad set of non-profit organizations. It has to be judged on its own merits," said Matt Carroll, chief of staff to FitzGerald.

The "merits" are easy to identify. This government program will give money to kids who will flunk out much more often than private charities will. Also accounts will be opened for everybody, and not everybody goes to college.

A similar program in San Francisco only had a 12 percent participation rate within its first three years. FitzGerald hopes to improve on those results by marketing his version of the program.

The county council's budget and finance committee will debate the request Monday.

The FitzGerald administration had hoped to launch the savings account this month. But concerns from county council over the program's details have delayed it.

The whole culture of savings argument is just dopey. You can't really encourage saving by giving people money they didn't earn. I hope this thing dies an appropriate death and the money is somehow returned to the taxpayer. Why do I live here again?

So "tolerance" is a genetic trait?

This is why we need the Catholic League. Bill Donohue represents boldness, balance and common sense in defense of the truth.

Bill Donohue comments on the reaction of a gay group, the New Civil Rights Movement, to a Chicago eatery that is featuring a hamburger topped with a Communion wafer:

Five years ago we protested the desecration of a Communion Host by P.Z. Myers, an anti-Catholic atheist professor. Yesterday, I decided not to protest the antics of Kuma's Corner, a Chicago restaurant, for serving a burger with a Communion wafer. The difference: Myers secured a consecrated Host and drove a nail through it; the sandwich shop played games with an unconsecrated wafer. While Kuma's showed disrespect, what Myers did was despicable.

Now I have learned that the New Civil Rights Movement, a homosexual outfit that is ever so sensitive about gay issues, is taking utter delight in the burger spoof. The guys who work there predicted that I would be "stroking out." Sorry to disappoint, boys. In fact, the only angst I feel is toward people like them. They say that what Kuma's Corner did risks the wrath of "every Christian born without a tolerance gene or a sense of humor." I'll remember that the next time they complain about one of my gay quips.

By the way, I thought tolerance was a function of nurture, not nature. So what is it? A preference or an orientation? Please advise as this is very confusing to a straight guy.

"Please advise as this is very confusing to a straight guy." Donohue is a messaging genius.

I've read that some gays are afraid that if a "gay gene" is ever discovered then there will be orientation-based abortions. I suppose if these same gays realized how intolerant they are of people who have a Christian sense of morality, they would be even more scared at the notion of a tolerance gene actually existing. But I'm sure they don't really believe there is a tolerance gene and they have shown time again that they cannot see any intolerance in the mirror.

Ignore any malware warnings

Some people have gotten an intermittent warning about malware when accessing this blog. This is because Catholic Culture's website was hacked awhile back, and the goofballs put some bad stuff there. They've fixed it since, but just to be safe I removed any reference to their site for now. The only thing was the little liturgical calendar reminder. But I don't think this was really any type of threat.

FREAKING IDIOTS!

This is just so stupid

And I apologize in advance for posting it.



But can you believe it got 56 million hits! The Harlem Shake, my gosh....

Cruel and Unusual? Or Right and Just?

We report. 

A woman who was caught on camera passing a Cleveland school bus on the sidewalk, while the bus was loading and unloading kids, was ordered by a judge to stand at the intersection and wear an "idiot" sign.

Shena Hardin, 32, appeared in Cleveland Municipal court Monday after being cited for driving along the sidewalk to avoid a school bus.

The judge sentenced Hardin to pay $250 in court costs and suspended her license for 30 days and more.

Hardin must also stand at the intersection of E. 38th Street and Payne Avenue wearing a sign next Tuesday and Wednesday that says "Only an idiot drives on the sidewalk to avoid a school bus." She has been ordered to wear the sign from 7:45 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. both days.

You decide.

Note that this was not a one-time occurrence. Amazing.

Yeah, that's breaking and entering, dummy

Just plain weird.



I suppose she'll send them another bill with late charges once she gets out of jail.

They don't really care about the victims

Juan Williams starts off his sensible piece about the Trayvon Martin over-reaction like this:

The shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida has sparked national outrage, with civil rights leaders from San Francisco to Baltimore leading protests calling for a new investigation and the arrest of the shooter.

But what about all the other young black murder victims? Nationally, nearly half of all murder victims are black. And the overwhelming majority of those black people are killed by other black people. Where is the march for them?

Where is the march against the drug dealers who prey on young black people? Where is the march against bad schools, with their 50% dropout rate for black teenaged boys? Those failed schools are certainly guilty of creating the shameful 40% unemployment rate for black teens.

Well, it's just like the SNAP people. Bill Donohue has shown time and time again that they don't really care about the victims of child abuse. They are just going after priests. Or else SNAP would stand for Survivors Network of Abused by Perverts and they'd be targeting dozens of public school teachers in big cities like New York.

And it's the same thing with the Black Panthers and the other race-baiters trying to score points with this case. They don't care about the kid who lost his life. That kid is purely symbolic. They just want to get the honky and make an example of him. It's all about portraying the non-black as the aggressor. And you can see why a sensible black man like Williams is appalled by it.

Listen to Williams here:

The race-baiters argue this case deserves special attention because it fits the mold of white-on-black violence that fills the history books. Some have drawn a comparison to the murder of Emmett Till, a black boy who was killed in 1955 by white racists for whistling at a white woman.

The Martin case is very different from the Emmett Till case, in which a white segregationist Mississippi society approved of the murder of a black child. Black America needs to get out of the rut of replaying racial injustices of the past.

It's very different. Juan Williams is saying "stop it" to the Black Panthers and others who want to paint our society of approving of white on black violence. This Zimmerman guy seems a little trigger happy to me, and if he is found guilty and does time then I'm going to shrug and continue cutting the lawn along with most other white people. There's a huge difference between our time and 70 years ago and to ignore it is to play the white racist culture card in a deadly way. They are setting the stage for LA Riots part II if Zimmerman gets less of a sentence than the race piranhas are hoping for.