Two apologies: 1, I knocked The King's Speech as some sort of trivial royal afterschool special, based on my general dislike of this kind of movie.

Not so, everyone who's seen it has told me. In fact, they say it's pretty great (and sort of conservative in theme).

2, I snarked that "The Way Back" would win some other award (best make-up) just because it has a good title. I shouldn't have been so snarky -- it's a pretty important movie, and an example of real balls and truth-telling about truths people don't want to hear.

I haven't found any reviews, so far, that hail this as Hollywood's first Gulag movie, perhaps because hardly anyone noticed that there weren't any before. Weir told me that many in Hollywood were surprised by the story: They'd never heard of Soviet concentration camps, only German ones. "If you need to explain what a film is about," the film is in trouble - and this one almost was. Weir had difficulties getting it distributed and some problems explaining the final scene to his financial backers.

Yet that final scene is exactly what makes this movie "real": Instead of returning home at the end of his harrowing journey, the hero is shown "walking" across time - across the Soviet occupation of Central Europe, across the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968 - finally returning home to Poland only after communism collapses. The absence of an instant happy ending also bothered some of the film's reviewers, even though, in "real life," there were no happy endings for anyone who lived in the eastern half of Europe after the end of the Second World War. People who escaped from the Gulag, survived the war or evaded the Holocaust didn't necessarily live happily ever after. Perhaps that's a truth too difficult to learn from a movie.

They don't know what they don't know, as they are fond of saying of others.

Incidentally, the escape route is depicted as it actually happened (except, I think, the author of the books claims he escaped this way, but really it was three other people who told him about it), and makes for a hell of a movie, I think: They escaped Siberia by trekking south through the Himalayas into British controlled India.

That movie's out in theaters now, by the way. Directed by heavy-hitter Peter Weir and with some A-list actors (Colin Ferrel, Ed Harris), it sounds like it's good.

Awwww, Nuts: A review of the movie, stating its gripping and horrifying with no "triumph-of-the-human-spirit comfort." That is, just a long, hard slog.

But the "aww" gets at what I was picking up in Anne Applebaum's defense of the movie: Apparently much of it is untrue. Not the Gulag stuff, but the escape stuff. The original account (published in 1956) includes what seems to be an encounter in the Himalayas with... yeti, for example. (That is not in the movie.)

That's a shame. Because mixing fiction with fact will just give leftists reason to do what they were probably going to do anyway, ignore the fact.

Posted by: Ace at 07:44 AM | Comments (147)
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Multiculturalism, I love it. Where would we be without awesome ideas like fathers murdering their children?

I don't understand that defense -- if I'm understanding the implications here, they seem to be claiming that the father did intend to kill his daughter, but killing the other woman he ran over was just an accident:

20-year-old Noor Almaleki was run over in the middle of a Peoria parking lot back in 2009. Prosecutors say her dad intentionally drove into his daughter, and another woman, and sped off. The defense said Monday Faleh Almaleki intended only to spit out the window at the other woman as he drove by, but miscalculated.

Probably I'm overreading a poorly-written article, and they mean the man didn't intend to run anyone over, just to spit at the other woman.

Counting against this claim is a witness, who testified the man revved his engines before plowing over the women (horribly mangling them), and then stopped to look down at the carnage. Asked about how the man's face looked when he looked out the window, the witness said, "Angry." Probably, I guess, it was all an accident, but he was angry at the women for scratching his undercoating.

Posted by: Ace at 07:34 AM | Comments (83)
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Bear in mind, they did this a few months ago, and wound up announcing something that turned out to seem not-very-big at first, and then, when details were released, people began challenging their conclusions and the quality of their tests.

Cynics proposed their own theory: NASA knows the budget-cutters are eyeing them up and are attempting to make a public case for continued funding at current levels, and are rushing out big (?) stories to let the public know they're still Very Important.

They are making a fresh announcement, hyped as a window into the beginnings of the universe, but it seems it's just the discovery of the oldest galaxy ever seen, which is cool, certainly, but one of the galaxies we find has to be the oldest, right? So it's this one; it beats the old record.

But the old one was seriously old --

NASA hasn't revealed anything else about the discovery, but late last year Hubble sighted a galaxy scientists say dates back to when the earth was only 600 million years old.

So the new winner will be, well, even older than that. (It could just be they've decided that a particular star in that galaxy is the oldest star.)

This is cool stuff and I do like the Hubble and Kepler telescopes. (The Kepler has spotted like 400 exosolar planets in its short life -- pretty cool.)

It's not so much that I'm against any of this, but I am feeling annoyed that (it seems to me) they are deliberately trying to make headlines and I have to think the actual science is coming in a distant second to politics.

Posted by: Ace at 06:45 AM | Comments (202)
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Maybe Sanchez didn't hear: Giffords lived, so she could just ask her, rather than guestimating.

The proposal sparked an outrage, according to those in the room — including from those in Sanchez’s own party.

“It’s not appropriate,” Texas Democratic Rep. Silvestre Reyes told The Daily Caller, adding that there was outrage among some members in the room when Sanchez made the suggestion. “It’s bad for morale during her recovery period.”

...

“From a woman who memorialized her cat, you’d think she’d show a little more compassion for a woman shot in the face,” said one GOP aide, referring to Sanchez’s 2010 Christmas card that paid tribute to her late cat, Gretzky.

Sanchez claims she's only doing this because every vote is critical and Giffords would understand that. Trouble is, every vote is not, in fact, critical, as other Democrats pointed out -- every vote in committee is completely non-critical, pretty much, as the outcome is always pre-ordained. Republicans win, Democrats lose. Whether Giffords casts the vote with the doomed-to-lose minority is moot.

Sanchez is actually on that committee, so she wasn't looking to promote herself there. But I'm sure she has some liberal buddy who would like to be on high-fundraising-potential committee.

Posted by: Ace at 06:27 AM | Comments (89)
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Since the OP was farkled factually (yea, that means I blew it), here's a good question. Obama claimed:.

...And because the American people deserve to know that special interests arenÂ’t larding up legislation with pet projects, both parties in Congress should know this: if a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it...

Is this another promise with an expiration date?

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 03:23 AM | Comments (282)
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Shorter SOTU: We will win the future by investing in trains.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:20 AM | Comments (124)
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When I was reading the speech, I grew worried, because the first third of it was all feel-goodery and obvious-problem cathartic-shoutery. I worried that people, being dumb, as they are, would here a bunch of standard-issue complaints -- it's harder to find work now than it used to be; our factories are closing -- and some boilerplate uplift about needing to do better and say "Hey, I agree with those very obvious observations."

Then I read on, and saw that Obama then basically said, "I get what the American people said about spending too much in November. To that end, here are my top six priorities for new spending."

I thought that would then turn the public off.

But... what if this was smartly calculated so that people would tune out before then?

Now, I have to check, but I thought that SOTU's started at 8 pm, usually. This one? Nine. Nine? Most of America is asleep by 10.

So... did he start late and just yammer about obvious stuff ("twirling, twirling ever forwards") to put people to sleep?

I don't know. I'm having trouble understanding how the most listless, incoherent and transparently deceptive SOTU I've heard managed to please 92% of its audience.

Posted by: Ace at 08:05 PM | Comments (219)
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Since I figure everyone is pretty burned out on the SOTU, tonight's ONT is going to be 99.97% pure politics and gluten free.

So What Does Your State Suck At?

Every state is 'special' in its own way. And let's just say that well Washington, South Dakota, and Maine are very special.

And Arizona, Utah, and Idaho are damn near poster-childs for the Moron way of life.

The Mathematics of Beauty

Okay actually the math of getting messages from guys on online dating sites. It turns out that as a woman it's better to have a oddly variant kind of attractiveness that just be sorta cute:

So this is our paradox: when some men think you're ugly, other men are more likely to message you. And when some men think you're cute, other men become less interested.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:50 PM | Comments (611)
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Full Speech Leaked: The beginning of the speech is crowd-pleasing stuff, as he basically talks a conservative-sounding tune about achievement and so on -- stuff no one can disagree with.

Then he gets into storytime, telling stories of the California Institute of Technology finding ways to make fuel from "sunlight and water," and Race to the Top, and etc. Basically he's selling government, and selling it hard, talking up sci-fi possibilities (discounting the possibility that such advances don't need a government patron, or haven't, in the past) and stuff people deem precious (education of their children) as his method of pushing his foot in the door for continuing, expanding big government.

More: My Lord, this is long. Really long. I think this is going to be more than a 100 minutes.

Important! I repeat again, when you comment on the liveblog, your comments don't post! What happens is your comments appear in a queue, and the cobloggers see them, and pick and choose which to then post out in the liveblog.

We can't have 10,000 people commenting multiple times every minute -- you couldn't even follow it. And the software doesn't permit that anyway.

So please, no "my comments aren't posting" stuff. They're not comments; they're sort of statements to the moderators.

As far as what gets posted and what doesn't: Bear in mind, in many cases, people notice the same point at the same time. For example, Obama will undoubtedly turn up his chin into what a reader called his "Mussolini profile." Now, if ten people say, "Lifting his chin again," obviously, we're not going to post all ten people saying that. We'll post one person saying that. There's no point in posting ten people saying the same thing.

Generally we look for stuff that's inobvious factual stuff (not just like, "he's so full of shit") or funny stuff.

Stuff which is true but obvious/universally believed -- like "God I hate watching this guy" -- probably won't get published, just because, well, Join the club, dude.

If you want a place where your comment definitely will be published and be part of the, ahem, permanent record, hey, the actual comments still work too of course.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:42 PM | Comments (968)
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The GOP is sending out a trial balloon tonight by sending Ryan out there. It puts the "Roadmap" front and center. If it goes over well, if not...Plan B. Or something.

From Ryan's speech.

FISCAL CHALLENGE AHEAD: “Our nation is approaching a tipping point. We are at a moment, where if government’s growth is left unchecked and unchallenged, America’s best century will be considered our past century. This is a future in which we will transform our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency. Depending on bureaucracy to foster innovation, competitiveness, and wise consumer choices has never worked – and it won’t work now. We need to chart a new course.”

**********

ROLE OF GOVERNMENT: “We believe government’s role is both vital and limited – to defend the nation from attack and provide for the common defense … to secure our borders… to protect innocent life… to uphold our laws and Constitutional rights … to ensure domestic tranquility and equal opportunity … and to help provide a safety net for those who cannot provide for themselves. We believe that the government has an important role to create the conditions that promote entrepreneurship, upward mobility, and individual responsibility. We believe, as our founders did, that ‘the pursuit of happiness’ depends upon individual liberty; and individual liberty requires limited government. Limited government also means effective government. When government takes on too many tasks, it usually doesn’t do any of them very well. It’s no coincidence that trust in government is at an all-time low now that the size of government is at an all-time high.”

**********

LIMITED GOVERNMENT: “We need to reclaim our American system of limited government, low taxes, reasonable regulations, and sound money, which has blessed us with unprecedented prosperity. And it has done more to help the poor than any other economic system ever designed. That’s the real secret to job creation – not borrowing and spending more money in Washington. Limited government and free enterprise have helped make America the greatest nation on earth.”

More at the link.

Obama's giving a speech at some point as well. Something about more spending, er, "investments", a fake spending freeze and Sputnik.

Rumor on the street is we'll be live-blogging this thing tonight, so be sure to stick around for that.

Oh an good news/bad news thing...

Bad news, a cable network will carry Michelle Bachmann's "Tea Party Express" fundraiser response.

Good news, it's CNN so no one will see it.

Seriously, Ryan is a star on this stuff. He should be the face of the GOP tonight. Not only do we not need a divided message, we don't need a whole "GOP/tea party split" storyline.

Posted by: DrewM at 02:48 PM | Comments (296)
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