Soul

[4.0 stars] [IMDb Link]

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Pixar's latest, brought to us via our shiny new Disney+ subscription. (Yes, I know: Gina Carano.)

After the movie, Mrs. Salad echoed what I was thinking: Gee, this really isn't a kid's movie. The protagonist is an adult, confronting subtle adult issues. The meaning of life, for example. It's madly entertaining, full of visual treats and gags, but I can imagine a 12-year-old puzzled by what's going on underneath all that.

Joe is a middle-school music teacher, confronted every day with indifferent talent-free kids. Out of the blue, he gets a chance to divert his life onto its dream path: an audition playing piano with a famed jazz combo. He aces the audition, is on his way home in oblivious ecstasy, when…

He falls into a manhole and (apparently) dies. Whoa.

But then it's off to the afterlife. Which is much less heavenly than I've been led to expect. It's more like a university, with bureaucrats and well-meaning counselors. Joe's reluctance to follow the newly-expired crowd accidently finds him in the pre-life area, where souls are awaiting download into newborns down on Earth. There, he runs into "22", a soul who's actively resisting the normal flow there. She's OK with never moving into a human. Joe hatches a scheme to hitch onto her credentials in order to reanimate his (as it turns out) mostly dead body.

And there's a lot of merry mixups following that. But also some Lessons Learned. Which (I was kind of surprised by this) are not actually stupidly sentimental.


Last Modified 2024-01-23 6:46 AM EDT

URLs du Jour

2021-03-28

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  • Specifically, She Persisted in Demonstrating What a Menace She Is To America. Robby Soave reports the unsurprising news: be "snotty" to Elizabeth Warren at your peril. Because Elizabeth Warren Wants To Break Up Amazon So It’s ‘Not Powerful Enough To Heckle Senators With Snotty Tweets’.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) accused Amazon of not paying its fair share in taxes during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Thursday, which prompted the company to respond that it merely follows the tax laws created by Congress.

    "If you don't like the laws you've created, by all means, change them," reads a tweet from Amazon's account.

    Warren did not appreciate the remark:

    This is a classic example of saying the quiet part out loud. Warren inadvertently revealed that her crusade to hurt major tech companies is partly driven by personal animus: She wants to reduce the power of corporations so that they are no longer "powerful enough to heckle senators."

    A "loophole", in Warrenese, is any feature of the law that allows people and businesses to keep more of their own money and make their own decisions. Because $3.9 trillion sent to Uncle Stupid (FY 2021) just isn't enough.


  • The Guy Who Wrote Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg, apparently can't find a more recent historical example. Elizabeth Warren: Senator From Massachusetts—or the Roman Empire?

    A U.S. senator says she wants to break up Amazon so that it won’t be “powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets.”

    That would require a lot of breaking up. Amazon could still heckle Warren at half its size—even at one-100th its size. Jeff Bezos could give away all his shares and open a frozen banana stand and he could still heckle Elizabeth Warren. You see, as Milton Berle never said, size doesn’t matter.

    Pretty much anyone can heckle senators on Twitter—and in person! It happens, like, 10,000 times a day. Businesses can heckle them too, and not just big ones. The owners of the Love Muffin Café or Four Seasons Landscaping are welcome to get involved.

    The interesting—and disturbing—thing about Warren’s far snottier rejoinder is that she seems to think this shouldn’t be the case. Indeed, she seems to think mere disagreement amounts to heckling. Still worse, she thinks businesses—nay, whole sectors—should be broken up so that they won’t have the temerity to disagree with a bloviating and demagogic senator. I wonder if Warren is offended when NARAL “heckles” Ted Cruz. I’m kidding of course, I don’t wonder about that at all.

    Well, Jonah's been watching Rome on HBO, so I guess that's what came to mind. Still.


  • But the Real Problem Is … pointed out by Patterico at his Substack presence: Elizabeth Warren Violates the First Amendment with a Tweet. Yes, the tweet is narcissistic and thuggish. But:

    It disturbs me for another reason: Warren’s tweet itself is a violation of the First Amendment. It is an abuse of power, all on its own — and as such is reminiscent of similar actions by Donald Trump.

    Before I get into the Twitter controversy that has arisen as a result of my criticism of Warren, I want to explain how Warren’s tweet alone — even if unaccompanied by any further action — is itself a violation of the First Amendment. I explained the general concept underlying this conclusion in detail at my blog when Donald Trump did the same thing last year, so I will borrow generously from the post I wrote then: Trump Violates First Amendment with a Tweet. It started when Twitter did a fact check of Trump comments, and Trump responded by threatening government action:

    Twitter has now shown that everything we have been saying about them (and their other compatriots) is correct. Big action to follow! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)

    Needless to say, a large number of folks who were horrified by Trump's tweet are cheering Warren's. This calls for a Mark J. Perry Venn Diagram! I'll keep my eyes open.


  • Biden's Lips Moved. So of course brazen lies were emitted. Jim Geraghty wonders: What Happened to the Disinformation Police?.

    Yet yesterday, President Joe Biden stood before the American public and insisted that “nothing has changed,” and that everything we were seeing — to the extent the Biden administration is allowing the public to see it — was normal: “Truth of the matter is nothing has changed. As many people came, 28 percent increase in children to the border in my administration. 31 percent in the last year of — in 2019, before the pandemic, in the Trump administration. It happens every single solitary year. There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March.”

    Biden went on to say that the “vast majority, the overwhelming majority of people coming to the border and crossing are being sent back.” That’s not true at all. “Just 13 percent of nearly 13,000 family members attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border were returned to Mexico between March 14 and March 21 using the public health order.

    Much more at the link, of course. Geraghty points out that we're on track to catch 16,000 unaccompanied kids this month, which is 45% higher than the previous high in May 2019.

    In other Orwellian news: Associated Press won't use 'crisis' to describe migrant surge at border. Following the White House lead, apparently.


  • When An Investigation Will Reveal Facts Not Supporting the Narrative. Haley Byrd Wilt reports: January 6 Investigations Stall.

    When Senate Democrats decided not to seek witness testimony during former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, they said important unanswered questions surrounding the Capitol attack could be investigated later by congressional committees or an independent commission. 

    Nearly three months after the January 6 mobbing of the building, and a month after the Senate voted to acquit Trump of inciting insurrection, the congressional effort to learn more about the circumstances leading up to and during that day has been lackluster at best. Senate committees have held a couple of hearings, but with mixed success. And in the House, negotiations for a bipartisan commission have come to a standstill.

    We still don't know exactly how Officer Sicknick died.


  • Our Google LFOD News Alert led us to a tweet from intrepid Sgt Steve Koopman of the Kingston Ontario Police. Whose sharp eyes detected something non-kosher:

    Impressive! In related news, The Ultimate List of Canada Driving Statistics for 2021 contains this tidbit:

    It is estimated that in Canada, motorcyclists are 15 times as likely to be involved in a crash as car drivers are. Motorcyclists are 13.5 times as likely to be killed in a crash as car drivers are.

    So you can "live fre" and die.


Last Modified 2024-01-20 7:25 AM EDT