[American Thinker] Netflix unveiled a movie last month called Leave the World Behind that was about as subtle as an Antifa-thrown brick through a windshield: societal chaos and global disaster are heading our way. Filled with Hollywood heavyweights (Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, and Kevin Bacon — with Ali apparently taking over a role originally meant for Denzel Washington) and directed by Sam Esmail (the auteur behind the award-winning Mr. Robot), the stylish production was certainly meant to get people’s attention. Speaking of production, Barack and Michelle Obama (executive producers) and their narcissistically-named Higher Ground Productions company helped to give the apocalyptic tale a global audience.
Since its release, the movie has sparked a fever pitch of commentary. Hated by some and loved by others, a recurring complaint is that the movie is all build-up without any pay-off. It crawls along with a Hitchcockian rhythm of rising suspense and then abruptly ends without any explanation. Between beginning and end, a tiny community outside of New York City is hit with an Internet blackout, an out-of-control oil tanker running aground, electric grid failures, unusual animal behavior, strange ear-piercing noises that appear to cause mental confusion and tooth-loss, self-driving Teslas blocking highway escape, and menacing drones dropping red leaflets purportedly from foreign powers claiming responsibility for all the craziness. Oh, and Julia Roberts utters a bunch of lines to make sure that every viewer in the world knows white people are racist.
The audience watches all this and expects a big reveal to come crashing through the screen before the credits roll, but instead, we are left with some "woke" sermonizing. The climax of the movie occurs when Ali and Hawke (well-off political "progressives") have a near-death standoff with distrusting neighbor Bacon (an American flag-waving, gun-toting "prepper" who inexplicably lives somewhere near the Hamptons). When the situation is finally defused (the unprepared leftists are desperately seeking medicine from a man they clearly believe is beneath them), Ali delivers a monologue about how his neighbor’s refusal to accede to their "we’re all in this together" demands confirms his worst fears — that all of these peculiar events are part of a relatively inexpensive hybrid warfare campaign meant to provoke the American people into fighting and killing each other.
In order to scare the bejesus out of Obama’s brain-dead, propaganda-susceptible, mask-wearing, "climate change"-bamboozled, sexually-confused, "We are the ones we’ve been waiting for" coalition of intolerant tyrants, there is even a scene depicting rogue members of the military (no doubt Trump voters!) bombing Manhattan to smithereens. I think that’s Obama’s way of encouraging his fellow Marxists to continue implementing George W. Bush’s "pre-emptive" war strategy here at home by attacking random Americans as if they have it coming.
You see, we are the real monsters in this movie. We are the ones to blame for the collapse of civilization. Our ultimate destruction won’t come from hostile foreigners, mysterious pandemics, cyber attacks, or the "Great Reset" plans of the World Economic Forum’s jackbooted "elites." Huh-uh, we will all die because conspiracy-spreading MAGA Americans are inherently selfish and just can’t get enough of the "patriarchy" and "white supremacy"!
If you speak "woke-stupid," the movie is a masterpiece indictment of "Trump’s America." If you are a psychologically stable person with a virtuous sense of duty to God, family, and country, you are left wondering, "Why didn’t those rich people plan ahead for a rainy day?"
To be sure, there was ample foreshadowing suggesting that Americans would ultimately be blamed for their own suffering. The oil tanker that crashes into the beach is the "White Lion," a reference to the early-seventeenth century privateer credited with delivering the first Africans to the colony of Virginia to be sold as indentured servants. We get it: oil and slavery are both really bad. In another please-hit-us-over-the-head-with-woke-history moment, a car radio frequency lands on 1619 as the camera lingers — a retch-inducing hat-tip to The New York Times’ propagandistic attempts to erase America’s 1776 foundations in liberty and rewrite the history of the United States as one irredeemably stained by slavery and "white supremacy."
[Washington Examiner] WILMERDING, Pennsylvania — By July of this year, the last man on the job here at the Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation will, in all likelihood, turn around as he reaches the threshold of the same front door hundreds of thousands of workers have passed through since the 1890s. For the last time, he will look out over the 300,000-square-foot plant that has provided this country with so much technology and innovation for nearly 140 years, and he will think about the men and women who went before, and then turn out the lights for the last time.
This is a solemn process that has happened across this country for the past 40 years and put into motion here on Christmas Eve when Wabtec filed a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification notice, which requires employers to let employees know of a scheduled plant closure. It is a move that will affect the remaining 94 employees — from a plant that once employed thousands — with the layoffs beginning next month and the closure expected to be complete by July.
#4
I agree with Grom in #2. However, scanning the article, I see -
Assembly lines, technology, computers, artificial intelligence, or cheaper labor overseas have all contributed to the devaluation of the skill sets of the men and women who have carved out the American dream working in manufacturing. Those same entities have enabled manufacturing output to soar as manufacturing employment has cratered.
Posted by: Bobby ||
01/04/2024 8:51 Comments ||
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#5
#3: LBJ. 'great society'. 'affirmative action'. the gifts that keep on giving.
#6
The coming dust up with China will bring much of it back home. Tennis shoes will end up in Vietnam, but the stuff that’s really needed will come back home when we are forced to do without it. At that point sanity will return.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
01/04/2024 15:57 Comments ||
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[Real Clear Investigationa] In a fiery exchange last month, CNN anchorwoman Abby Phillip told GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that there was "no evidence" to support his claim that federal agents abetted protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Ramaswamy shot back that the FBI conspicuously has never denied that law enforcement agents were on duty in the crowd. He argued that federal officials have repeatedly "lied" to the American people about not only that investigation but one that has gotten much less attention: the alleged failed plot to kidnap and kill Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan in 2020.
"It was entrapment," Ramaswamy said. "FBI agents putting them up to a kidnapping plot that we were told was true but wasn’t."
His zeroing in on the Michigan case highlighted an uncharacteristic development in contemporary politics, where progressives vigorously defend law enforcement power while conservatives view it with deep suspicion. Further, Ramaswamy’s linking of Jan. 6 and the Whitmer plot resonated with many on the right who want similarities between the two episodes exposed to the general public, especially the FBI’s reliance on informants and other paid operatives.
On Oct. 8, 2020, Whitmer announced the shocking arrests of several men accused of planning to kidnap and possibly assassinate her. The case produced alarming headlines just weeks before Election Day; Democrats, including Whitmer, used news of the plot to blame Trump for inciting violence.
[American Thinker] Harvard President Claudine Gay’s recent testimony before the U.S. Congress and subsequent exposure of her academic history have revealed much about the true nature and purpose of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) ideology.
The most significant "A-ha!" moment from le affair Gay is that DEI only "works" in noncompetitive environments such as government and academia. The principles of "diversity" and "equity" implicitly assume that entities and organizations will continue along their current trajectory regardless of who’s in charge. DEI discounts merit, ability, and leadership and assumes as a matter of ideological gospel that "diversity" will more than make up for their loss.
And although this might be true in glacial bureaucracies at Harvard University, the U.S. Department of Education, or Los Angeles City Hall where funding rolls in at the start of every fiscal year and there is virtually no accountability for poor performance, DEI cannot survive in competitive environments where outcomes truly matter.
[IsraelTimes] Wanted for years by Israel, terror orchestrator Saleh al-Arouri would have figured he was untouchable in Hezbollah’s Beirut stronghold. But no such assessments hold true anymore.
While the IDF has made gradual progress for almost three months in its mission to dismantle Hamas ...the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood,... ’s capacity to again slaughter Israelis, taking on Gazoo
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.