We all know that Mondays are absolutely miserable, and they are about 20x more miserable when you have to spend an hour on hold with your bank – as I did, today. Honestly, one of the best things about the whole “FinTech revolution” is that the “challenger banks” pose a real threat to the entrenched incumbents, simply by not being completely and totally functionally retarded when it comes to customer service. There is A LOT of nonsense out there among the FinTechs – trust me on this one, I’ve seen quite a lot of it firsthand – but the fact is that they are forcing the existing legacy banks to up their game. Just not nearly fast enough, obviously.
Anyway, let us leave all of that misery and annoyance aside, for it is, of course, Monday, and that inevitably means the Great Mondaydact Browser Blitzer is here to make life better for everyone.
This week, we start with one of the more interesting cult-classic sci-fi movies from the past 20 years – Equilibrium, from 2002, starring none other than BatBale himself. Christian Bale has always been an interesting character in terms of his acting choices and role selections. He evidently believes quite strongly in “method acting”, whatever that is, and spends a tremendous amount of time “in character”. The result is that his performances have a level of depth and nuance to them that you just don’t see with most other actors. In my view, he has always been a heavily underrated actor in terms of his ability to make a role really work for him.
If you watch him in Equilibrium, and compare that performance with his work in American Psycho and then Batman Begins, you will quickly see that he is quite a complex and capable character actor. You can see this further in the kinds of roles that he has taken on. I am definitely a fan of his acting – though his personality, and some of the things that he has said in public concerning God, show that he is NOT on our side and never has been.
Nonetheless, Equilibrium is one of those movies that you can watch at least twice – once for the action sequences, and once for the thought-provoking plot. I mean, yeah, it’s a pastiche of Brave New World and Farenheit 451, of course, I get that. And its overall “look” is quite… dated, to be sure. But there is simply no getting past the fact that it is a stylish, slick, and very well-made (for its budget) movie.
Of particular note within the film is the concept of gun-kata, a fictional martial art that claims to use rote mastery of various poses and stances to maximise the firing capabilities of the shooter while avoiding return fire.
To anyone with even an hour of pistol training, the whole thing is absurd on its face. The entire “art” consists of dual-wielding guns while pulling off cool poses. Anyone who knows anything on the subject, knows that dual-wielding is ridiculously impractical – never mind what you see in HALO 2, it is IMPOSSIBLE to get sight-picture with two weapons simultaneously without electronic gadgetry imposing some kind of aim assist in your head. You CANNOT dual-wield successfully and accurately. The human brain and vision system just does not work that way.
But… you have to admit, it DOES look BADASS.
Here’s a music video by James Labrie that uses these scenes as their backdrop, and it is of one of his best songs, too:
And here is gun-kata, explained:
You kind of have to read the full bullshido spiel from that clip to get the true impact of it:
Through analysis of thousands of recorded gun-fights, the cleric has determined that the geometric distribution of antagonists in any gun battle is a statistically predictable element. The gun-kata treats the gun as a total weapon, each fluid position representinag a maximum kill zone, inflicting maximum damage on the maximum number of opponents, while keeping the defender clear of the statistically traditional trajectories of return fire.
By the rote mastery of this art, your firing efficiency will rise by no less than 120%, the difference of a 63% increase to lethal proficiency, makes the master of the gun-katas, an adversary NOT to be taken lightly.
Uh… yeah. That’s nonsense. All the fancy poses in the world will not save you from someone with a gun who knows how to shoot a moving target in centre-mass, or simply says, “f**k it” and lobs an area-effect weapon (like a grenade) into the mix. Things explode faster than people run, after all.
Still and all, it’s a fun topic and a fun movie. Too bad that similar movies from around that same time period – Ultraviolet, anyone? – were so… AWFUL.
#BasedTucker is Based
May 16, 2022
May 17, 2022
May 18, 2022
May 19, 2022
May 20, 2022
#BasedTucker was off on holiday, or something, and some fresh-faced kid took his place. I’m not going to bother showing that, because there is only one #BasedTucker.
Dawn of Battle
The Male Brain has a compilation of excellence to keep us busy today. We start with a video from SideQuest about how PommieBastardLande nearly converted to the Fake Religion of Peace once upon a time:
It could still happen. Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the UK. Large parts of London, Manchester, Rotherham, Bolton, Bradford, and countless other British cities no longer feel like Britain – they feel like Pakistan and Bangladesh, i.e. shitholes.
Jake Tran explains why Nestle is downright dangerous:
As our Israeli friend puts it, correctly: “Stop buying junk masquerading as food. Starve (pun intended) the bad guys.”
Amen to that, brother.
The recipe for good health is really simple – the way that people ate before 1970, made sense. Anything after that – the year in which Ancel Keyes published his much-ballyhooed, and outright fraudulent, “Seven Countries Study” in support of the “Lipid Hypothesis” – is designed to make you sick and weak.
Cut the artificial shit out of your diet. You’ll feel VASTLY better within just a few weeks.
The Science Elf clearly has far too much time on his hands, but it allows him to do some very cool stuff:
JP Sears explains (satirically) why your planned move to Floriduh is a bad idea:
Felix Rex explains what we’ve all come to realise over the past few years:
Apparently this song has been a big TikTok hit for a while now:
LRFotS Randale6 wrote in with some deeply politically incorrect videos from Flashgitz, so you know what to expect from there:
Poli-ticking Off
Mark Dice takes a page out of Alex Stein 99‘s book and trolls the hell out of a city council:
China Uncensored reckons that the CCP has betrayed the Great Leader:
Lord Razor of the Fist Clan explores the Console Wars, and is deeply unimpressed by the sturm und drang over it all:
Дед Сварилвый Говорит!
Grandpa Grumpuss grumps, grumpily about the current situation in the Banderastan War (well, as of May 20th, anyway):
It’s All Greek To Us
The dynamic duo of The Duran has had a very busy week. First up, Alexander Mercouris talks about the impact of the Azovstal surrenders on the morale of Ukrop forces in the rest of the country, and notes that we are watching a slow-slow-slow-SUDDEN collapse of the Banderite fighting forces in Donbas:
His good friend and colleauge Alex Christoforou reckons that this latest monkeypox nonsense is just the Next Current Thing being floated and tested on the general population:
Belgium has already imposed mandatory monkeypox quarantines for anyone who tests positive. The key question is: how exactly are they testing for it? The PCR test? If so, be worried – be VERY worried. Because that test is EXTREMELY prone to failure – the technique itself is fine, but the way it is used is terrifying.
Righteous Rantery
Paul Ramsey inflicts true horror upon his own eyeballs, so that you don’t have to:
PJW is quite amused by the rise and complete fall of Nina “Poppins” Jankowicz, whom as I pointed out earlier is DEFINITELY NOT related to “Weird” Al Yankovic:
The lovely and charming Dr. Sam Bailey takes on one of the nastier STDs:
Warriors of Faith
The Dizzle and Dr. Robert Spencer take a look back at the shenanigans of the Fake Religion of Peace over the past week:
Dr. Jay Smith from PfanderFilms works with his good friend Mel from Sneaker’s Corner to unravel a curious mystery about the Dome of the Rock:
Al-Fadi from CIRA International and Dr. Jay Smith examine whether the original Koran was actually written in Aramaic:
This theory is actually quite plausible. If you read the Koran in Aramaic, as Christoph Luxemburg and Guenter Lueling have pointed out, almost all of the “dark passages” – up to 25% of the nonsense book – become very clear. And they show that the original Koran was almost certainly a collection of Aramaic lectionaries, praising and praying to Jesus.
Manly Men of Manliness
Terrence Popp is not impressed by Amber Turd‘s testimony – and neither are the rest of us:
Joker from Better Bachelor notes that women are their own worst enemies:
Burn Paedowood to the Ground
Midnight’s Edge notes that Queen Karen Kennedy is being rewarded for failure:
Overlord Dicktor Van Doomcock reckons that the new Obi-Wan Kenobi show will be a woketard disaster – YOU DON’T SAY?!?!?:
Gary from Nerdrotic is quite pleased about the fact that Amazog is terrified of what fans will think when it drops its LotRRoP turd:
The Drinker laughs his drunken arse off at the She-Hulk trailer:
Yeah, it’s going to be awful.
Reading Too Much Into Things
Your “Science is F***ING WEIRD” moment of the week is from Dawn Pine, and it is all about how LITERALLY EVERYTHING bad happens because of man-made global warming – going all the way back to the ancient Romans and Greeks, who as we all know rocked up to battle in big petrol-burning polar-bear-killing baby-seal-clubbing Hummers and Jeeps:
The famed ancient herb, known to the Romans as silphium (Greek silphion), is widely regarded as the first recorded instance of human-induced species extinction. Modern scholars have largely credited direct exploitation (e.g., over-harvesting; over-grazing) as the primary cause of silphium’s extinction, due to an overwhelming demand for the plant in ancient times. Recent research has revealed strict cold-stratification requirements for the germination of silphium’s closest living relatives, revealing the likelihood that silphium shared these same germination requirements. Documented environmental changes in ancient Cyrenaica (e.g., widespread deforestation; cropland expansion) likely resulted in accelerated rates of desertification throughout the region as well as the direct disturbance of silphium’s habitat, effectively eliminating the necessary conditions for silphium’s successful germination and growth within its native range. Contrary to previous conclusions, this evidence suggests that anthropogenic environmental change was instead the dominant factor in silphium’s extinction, marking silphium as the first recorded instance of human-induced climate-based extinction.
Climate scientists: making themselves look stupid since 77 AD.
Your long read of the week is an article by Mike Whitney, which asks why the Krauts appear to have completely lost their damned minds over the whole Banderastan War thing:
How did we get here? How did we reach a point where no one is concerned about the reemergence of German militarism?
It can all be traced back to Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev.
In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev lifted his objections to German reunification and “agreed that a unified Germany will be free to choose which alliance it will belong to, and Chancellor Helmut Kohl told Gorbachev that Germany wanted to stay in NATO.”
Got that? Gorbachev gave Germany the green light to join NATO.
Can you see what a terrible mistake that was? Can you see that German reunification and the entry of Germany into a hostile, Russophobic military alliance (NATO) paved the way for the current conflagration?
Germany’s entry into NATO was followed by three waves of expansion that pushed the Alliance further and further eastward until today, NATO’s combat troops, military bases and missile systems are on Russia’s doorstep just a few hundred miles from Moscow.
And NATO’s eastward push will not stop at Ukraine either, any more than Hitler or Napolean stopped at Ukraine. Ukraine is just the last whistlestop on the way to Moscow. That’s the real strategic endpoint; Moscow. So, eventually, NATO will push deeper and deeper into Russian territory destroying everything in its path and killing anyone who gets in its way. That’s where all this is headed, in fact, the Pentagon warlords don’t even try to hide it anymore. “We want weaken Russia,” they say. “We want to break Russia’s back”. And, that is the plan. They want to crush Russia and seize its resources. Nothing is concealed. All of this is being stated publicly.
And it’s all Gorbachev’s fault. The crisis Russia faces today, can be traced back to Gorbachev.
What was he thinking? Was he thinking that NATO would honor its word and not “move one inch east” like they promised? Was he thinking Germany would not eventually ‘get back on its feet’ and resume its habitual march eastward? Was he thinking that leaders in the west had miraculously changed their spots and become more trustworthy, unselfish and peaceful?
What a stupid, stupid man. Gorbachev’s breezy liberalism has brought NATO’s weapons systems and NATO’s shock troops to Russia’s doorstep. He has cleared the path for another agonizing and bloody conflict that will plunge the entire region into chaos and ruin.
Gorby certainly was not quite the peacemaker and great man that the West thinks he is. He has a Nobel Piss Prize – and St. Reagan of the Right, who did more to bring about peace in his lifetime than any other President since, except Donaldus Triumphus Magnus, didn’t get anything like that kind of recognition. That should tell you everything about just how much one of those Ig-Nobels is actually worth.
Linkage is good for you:
- The great Dr. Ron Paul explains why his son, Rand, held up the US$40B boondoggle that the USSA sent over to Banderastan in terms of “aid and comfort”;
- Pepe Escobar points out that Russia plainly has a strategy in Banderastan, but the West plainly does not, and wonders what on Earth the Western powers are thinking or aiming for in the crisis;
- Mike Whitney again, explaining why Scott Ritter changed his views on the likely outcome of the Banderastan War and now thinks that it will result in a long-term quagmire for Russia;
- Larry Johnson, on the other hand, is not even slightly convinced by Mr. Ritter’s arguments, and explains why he is wrong – I come down on the side of types like Mr. Johnson, Jacob Dreizin, and Andrei Martyanov on this subject;
- Taki Theodoracopoulos points out that, as sinister and creepy as Klaus Schwab is, he is actually a bit of a red herring – the really scary people are the neoclowns and arms dealers behind him;
- Kevin Barrett does an excellent job satirising the recent decision by McDonald’s to leave the Russian market – to the point where the article might as well be a piece in The Babylon Bee;
- The SANKSHUNS are clearly working so brilliantly that the Euzis are planning to ration energy across the continent;
- Jorge Vilches coins a new compound noun in German for what the Krauts are doing to themselves by denying themselves the exact kind of Russian oil for which their largest refinery is specifically designed;
- Here’s your lesson in the Law of Unintended Consequences – apparently men in Ireland are paying a lot of money to live out “war-escape fantasies” with, you guessed it, female Ukrainian refugees;
- And speaking of which, here’s a darkly hilarious story that has been making the rounds in PommieBastardLande about a guy who took in a Ukie female refugee, only to break his relationship with his long-term partner and run off with her;
- The Finns and Swedes may just have made a catastrophic mistake by trying to get into NATO – the move will not increase their security, and if they don’t make it in, the consequences will be truly disastrous;
- Pat “Mr. Paleoconservative” Buchanan asks why America has any business whatsoever giving a military guarantee of any kind to the Finns, given their 1,280Km border with Russia and the Finnish refusal to host military bases and nukes;
- Turns out that the last US Census in 2020 substantially miscounted the population in a number of places – to the detriment of, you guessed it, the Republicans;
- Simon Black points out that, in actual fact, the world has plenty of food to feed itself, but unbelievably dumb government policies and sanctions have created an artificial crisis that could take years to solve;
And some more from Dawn Pine:
- Here’s a tip for you, lads – if you’re going to propose to your special lady, don’t do it at a McDonald’s!!!;
- OK, who had “Near Miss by an Empire State Building-Sized Asteroid” in the Doomsday Bingo Sweepstakes for May 2022?;
- Netherflix is finally discovering the indisputable truth behind “Get Woke, Go Broke”, and is now pretending to care about not censoring people and creating content that its (dwindling) subscriber base actually wants to watch;
- Some anonymous Good Samaritan paid off the entire college loan debt of the graduating class of an HBCU – question is, what exactly were the students learning, or not, in the first place?’
- It is an iron law of nature that More Islam = Less Freedom, as the Dutch are FINALLY beginning to understand – though, of course, their own mavericks have been warning about this for years;
- If you’re worried about machines replacing you, don’t be overly concerned – it turns out that they are so good at doing jobs no one else wants to do that they end up killing themselves in the process;
- A woman in Bombay who applied for a job with the police ended up testing as “male”, somehow – the whole story is one giant snarled-up ball of stupid, but then, this IS India, where transvestites and gods with 20 penises abound;
- The Norks appear to have a rather novel solution to dealing with the Coof – they’ll probably just end up shooting anyone who has it and then claim that they never existed in the first place;
- Robert Kiyosaki – yeah, that guy – reckons that the biggest financial crash in history is coming up, and actually, he’s probably right, but the problem is that nobody quite knows what the timing is here;
- Even evil god-kings are pragmatists – Herod the Great, the guy who built the Second Temple, got the alabaster for his bathtubs from quarries within Israel itself;
- The long sad story of Sri Lanka’s decline into bankruptcy, chaos, and starvation is genuinely heartbreaking, but it essentially comes down to “live within your means”;
- Yet another Western nation comes in to save yet another African shithole from itself, and ends up making things worse in the process – haven’t we seen this movie before, like dozens of times?;
- We all like to make fun of the Chinks for producing cheap shitty knockoffs of Western goods, but it is downright hilarious when the Chinese themselves complain about EXPENSIVE shitty Western goods that don’t work at all;
- The CFO of not-vaxx maker Moderna stepped down US$42M richer than the day before he left, which is a staggering amount of money for just 2 years’ worth of work;
- Finally, because everything is bigger, and generally better, in Texas, we end with a story about an awesome doggo that stands over 3 feet at the shoulder – which doesn’t sound like much until you actually think about it and see the pictures;
MUH RUSHIAN KAHLOOOOOZHUN!!!
The aforementioned Greek gents in joint programme on The Duran analyse what the current Banderastan crisis means for the hardliners in the Kremlin, and their tug-of-war with The Neo-Tsar:
Indeed, the Neo-Tsar is in fact a MODERATE, relative to the rest of the siloviki. If you compare Putin’s attitudes toward the West with what Patrushev, Medvedev, Shoigu, Lavrov, and others think, you will quickly realise that those others think that Russian needs to strike HARD at the West, militarily, and the sooner, the better.
The Neo-Tsar is not the warmonger among the bunch – he is the one holding the warmongers BACK.
Those Who Fail To Learn From History…
History lessons of the week:
Your Great Man of the Week is President William Howard Taft, whose time as POTUS was cut rather mysteriously and dramatically short:
On the plus side, we got Calvin Coolidge right after him, and President Coolidge was a LEGEND.
HALO Nation
Ryan Kinel points out that the OG creator of HALO – none other than Marcus Lehto himself – doesn’t recognise what the HELL this Paramount Minus version of the lore is supposed to be:
Master (Badass-In-)Chief spends most of his time out of his armour, sulking, and then bangs some Covenant spy while Cortana watches?
What.
The.
ACTUAL.
F**K.
This is why we can’t have nice things, lads.
Now let’s watch slayergod Remy aka Mint Blitz do his thing, so we can get that horror out of our minds:
That’s Not Gone Well…
Wazzocks gonna wazzock:
Comedy hour:
Ladies and gentlemen, please rise and doff your hats, we are about to play the national anthem of the South – SWEET HOME ALABAMA.
Pictionary, Pulchritude, Pew-Pews
We start with some hilarious memes from Dawn Pine about UFOs/UAPs/whatever we call little green men now:
Jeff Foxworthy had an absolutely hilarious bit about that. I can’t find it, but it’s in the first Blue Collar Comedy Tour special – it’s about how the fish that gets thrown back goes to his buddies and talks about it in the way that humans talk about out-of-body experiences.
Onward:
Headlines of the week indicate that the presstitutes are beginning to figure out what we knew decades ago:
Your “It’s Already Happened” moment of the week:
I’m not joking about this. Human male lactation is extremely rare, but it does happen. (Try sleeping with that image in your head. One of my readers told me about this, and now I’m sharing the misery around.)
Your “Baked Sumatran Blend” moment of the week:
Your “NO SH!T SHERLOCK” moment of the week:
Your “In the Navy” moment of the week:
Your “Holier Than Thou” moment of the week:
Animal Planet
Your aminules are adorkable moment of the week:
And also your animals are absolute DICKS moment of the week, to balance things out:
And finally, your “Meanwhile, in Russia” moment of the week:
The Lords of Steel
Gym beast props this week go to Pana.. Pano… Panagiotis Tarinidis, however the hell you pronounce that:
The Buakawminator invited his protege, Superbon, to train with him, and the two of them ended up doing a light sparring session and having loads of fun – while also showing off some of Buakaw’s most effective KO-ready techniques:
While we’re on the subject, let’s watch Buakaw and Saenchai slap-fight:
Those two are actually very good friends who horse around like little kids, even though Buakaw is like 39 and Saenchai is 41.
Livin’ in the Land of the Metal Gods
Hot Totty
And here we are at the Instathot to get the week off to a prim and proper start. This here is Kylie Marie Walton, age 25 from Newport Beach, Commiefornia. She is apparently one of the Monster Energy girls, whatever that means.
OK, that’s all, show’s over, back to work.
3 Comments
While it is true that Ultraviolet is not a great movie, it is worth rewatching the beginning given the last 2 years of covid insanity and now the monkey pox fear porn.
GOOD point. Kurt Wimmer directed both movies – which explains why both movies suffer from the same flaws, though Ultraviolet has them dialled up all the way to 11. Interestingly, he seems to be a much better writer than he is a director.
Monday returns with a storm, great post today.
Equilibrium is a good movie, the first half in particular. Drags a bit in the second half. It could not be made today.
Here is a testament to both actors: In my head, Keanu Reeves is the lead in Equilibrium. This means Christian Bale’s character modeled a Neo-character, whom Keanu embodied so well in the Matrix, that I conflated the two in my head.
From a similar era, the Prestige with Nolan, Hugh Jackman, and Michael Caine is a wonderful movie to enjoy with a date, hits the right notes at all the right times.
The Better Bachelor video ‘Screaming into the Void’ is remarkable and insightful. Joker is right. Men are saying ‘please stop the train wreck’ to women all over the place. In-person, women even say it to each other. But the social media bots are spinning a web of lies that women are short-circuited into following. Beyond the anonymity granted across the internet, the bots make more likes and follows then are even humanly possible.
My wife is now off all social media, several years after I got off of them as well. It’s been a great level-up at life for both of us, equivalent to lifting weights or running a garden. Those algorithmic systems are not friendly.
The Census should not be a political agency, the range of the corruption impacts congressional seats and electoral college seats, for as much as the stolen election system matters. People should be going to jail over this. But hey, we’ve imported the third world so we’re well on our way to being the third world.
What a story out of Bombay. This is masterful attorney-speak:
“The woman, having regard to her socio-economic condition, was not even aware that she was not a female. No fault can be found in her, as throughout, she has pursued her career as a female. In fact, according to her, she has all female attributes. Be that as it may, the medical condition of the woman need not detain us, having regard to the sympathetic stand and the course of action proposed by the State Government,” the bench noted.