RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://politicalmavens.com/

There’s a grand guignol atmosphere in “The Favourite,” with 18th century men coiffed in long sheep-like wigs, made up to look like drag queens and Queen Anne herself looking more like a madwoman than a regal character. Though the story of the queen and Sarah and Abigail, the two women who service her in every sense of the word, is loosely based on historical fact, the language is full of contemporary curse words which seem anachronistic. Surprisingly, they turn out to have been in use during that century – especially the two four letter words with a “u” as the only vowel; this is significant because it lends credibility to some of the sexual behavior you might have thought was not in vogue at that time. Certainly there is no historical record to support the movie’s contentions.

Everything about The Favourite is over the top – the incredible paneled palace, the background music which occasionally rises to the foreground, the oversized ambitions of Sarah and Abigail, well-played by Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone and the complicated, convoluted character of Anne herself in a tour-de-force performance by Olivia Colman. She is sickly and dependent yet willful and demanding; at times a fool and then surprisingly capable of rising to the exigencies of her rank. She remains a deeply unhappy woman who mourns her miscarriages and stillbirths and the early death of her child. She is supremely eccentric and prone to childish tantrums such as summarily dismissing her various ministers so she can return to her bed. Though she is the fulcrum around whom the plot revolves, the main subjects of interest are the two women who are distant cousins, each vying for Anne’s attention and rewards.

Lady Sarah Churchill is a commanding presence who, as the queen’s main lady in waiting, has taken over most of the decision making for the country. She is clever, informed and the wife of the Duke of Marlborough who was leading the British troops in a war against the French. Historically, Sarah is credited with having been the most powerful woman in France in her day. After noticing that Abigail has been demoted to being a scullery maid, Sarah rescues her, bringing her upstairs where the work is more pleasant and where she subtly manages to insinuate herself into the queen’s affections and bedchamber.

How this happens is told in graphic scenes involving nudity, sex, politics, violence, treachery, romance, disillusionment and some surprises. At a certain point, the movie begins to feel like a pile-on that actually makes you lose interest because there’s just too much to digest. The soundtrack, effective at first in foretelling an ominous development, eventually turns into a headache-producing disturbance. But the movie will make you run to the internet to learn more about this unusual triangle of women – no mean accomplishment for director Yorgos Lanthimos.

Yesterday I attended a private screening of a documentary “The Creepy Line” by Peter Schweizer and director M.A. Taylor which reveals the insidious way that Google harvests information from e-mails and searches by individuals who use it. It further discloses the subtle ways in which Google and Facebook manipulate information to influence the behavior, choices and political opinions of their subscribers and users by recondite and difficult to trace means.

The film features commentary by Peter Schweizer, Dr. Jordan Peterson, and Dr. Robert Epstein.

Peter Schweizer is author of many books:
Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends Mar 20, 2018
Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich Jul 26, 2016
Compromised: How Money and Politics Drive FBI Corruption Aug 16, 2018 With co author Seamus Bruner

See the film. It is available on Amazonhttps://www.amazon.com/Creepy-Line-Dr-Jordan-Peterson/dp/B07JQSZN6D/ref=sr_1_2?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1541644975&sr=1-2&keywords=the+creepy+line+documentary

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There’s more heat in a New York Times putdown of Melania Trump’s wardrobe than in Jason Reitman’s biopic of Gary Hart’s aborted run for a presidential nomination in 1988. Overstuffed with tons of newsroom and campaign chatter, Reitman neglects to give the primary players – Hart and his wife – sufficient opportunity to deal with the complicated and conflicted inner feelings of a man and his wife watching their shot at a brilliant future slip down the drain. And not because of a grand love affair, but rather a casual dalliance with a young and as played here, vapid Donna Rice. In real life, Donna had a fresh–faced prettiness but Reitman casts her as an overly made-up girl who looks more like a lap dancer than a model or pharmaceutical salesman, both of which Donna was.

Hugh Jackman plays Senator Hart as a man who is blinded by his insistence on his right to a private life, with little understanding of the growing power of the press and television to make or break a person’s reputation. One of the best moments in the film is the footage of Johnny Carson summarizing Hart’s tone-deafness as he watches the late nite show. Though he has lived through the revelations of the Kennedy clan and Watergate, he seems baffled by the indignity of the press in hounding him at his home and digging up dirt that was floating on the surface on a boat named Monkey Business. We never see him crumble as he realizes the enormity of his mis-judgment and the enduring price he will pay for that. Strangely, the famous picture of Donna Rice perched on his lap on the cruise to Bimini is never shown. Vera Farmiga does the best she can as Hart’s long-suffering wife Lee who gets a shot at emotional fireworks on the piano, hardly sufficient to satisfy our curiosity.

What I was left with was the observation that at least what the press and public were castigating was Hart’s behavior at the time he was running and his hypocrisy at stressing morality and ethics while he himself was an adulterer. What a far cry from our recent outrage at the alleged behavior of a 17 year old student, 36 years before his nomination for the Supreme Court and 19 years after a sterling academic, political, judicial, social and personal life. How far we have fallen as we now consider that progress.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/schweizer-stalin-hitler-mao-would-dream-about-googles-power-over-our-thoughts/

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Google and Facebook have tremendous power to influence billions of people, without them even knowing it. An upcoming film documents how they can make companies rich, they can suppress information, and they can sway an election. They can even suggest thoughts and sway culture. This is the kind of power kings, emperors, and even dictators of yesteryear would envy, if they knew it existed.

“Throughout human history, tragically, leaders, ideologies, and belief systems have arisen that want to have total control over our lives, they want to remake human nature,” Peter Schweizer, New York Times bestselling author and writer for the upcoming film “The Creepy Line,” told PJ Media. He mentioned Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong.

“They all had police forces, they killed millions of people — tens of millions of people, in some cases,” Schweizer noted. “I’m not suggesting companies like Facebook and Google do that, but these companies do have control or influence over us that those dictators and leaders would dream about.”

“All the crude propaganda that they engaged in, the radio broadcasts, the leaflets, the sort of hypnotic speeches that they would give, pale in comparison with the ability for Google to nudge and to steer us in directions they want us to go and we don’t necessarily want to go,” the author explained.

Facebook and Google “do that by sifting our information, determining what we see and what we don’t see, they also do that by censoring information, and they nudge us in directions that they want us to go.”

“This is enormous power,” Schweizer said. “It’s the sort of power of Big Brother in ‘1984,’ and it’s the sort of power that these totalitarians from the last century would have loved and dreamed of having. They have power over the news and information that we get and the thoughts that we start to form.”
DOJ Invites 24 State AGs to Jeff Sessions Meeting About Breaking Up Google, Facebook

“The film is called ‘The Creepy Line’ because we believe that Facebook and Google are doing things that are out of bounds with what we expect from companies,” Schweizer explained. The phrase comes from a speech in which Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Google, said his company likes to “get right up to the creepy line, but not cross it.”

“They never define what the creepy line is, but our view and attitude is that they cross the creepy line all the time,” he told PJ Media. “They have the ability to sway and influence people, and they admit this. They brag about it. It gives them a power over the control of information, it gives them the power of suggestion, and it gives them the power to have a dramatic effect on elections.”

M.A. Taylor, director of “The Creepy Line,” told PJ Media how this power works. He explained that Robert Epstein — a psychologist who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard — has extensively researched the search engine manipulation effect (SEME), discovering that Google’s search engine “can actually sway your opinion.”

“If I type a character in the search bar and suggestions come up, if they’re all positive, they’ll lead to positive web pages which will lead to a positive effect. If you have a negative in there, that negative is likely to get ten to fifteen times more clicks, bringing up negative pages,” Taylor told PJ Media.

Google gives users ten search results on the first page, and it delivers them in ranks from one to ten, with the top result regarded the most reliable. This involves two biases, Taylor explained. First, it has to sift through results to give the top ten, then it has to choose the most reliable result for number 1. Users want this ranking for the most reliable basic information for searches like, “What is the capital of France?”

“This becomes problematic when you talk about things like candidates or issues, because that algorithm has to make that decision about who’s the best candidate or who should you vote for and things like that,” Taylor said. “That’s where it becomes problematic, because we don’t really know what the algorithm is doing to give us these results.”

Robert Epstein ran an experiment, using a search engine to measure the impact of bias on Americans who had no knowledge of a particular issue — like Australia’s 2010 election, for example. “He thought it would be, we put all positive searches for one candidate, they’ll shift two or three percent,” the director said. “It actually shifted 48 percent.”

Epstein first thought this huge result was a mistake, but he ran the study again, and the shift got bigger, 63 percent! He even figured out how to mask the bias by adding one positive search result for the other candidate into a list of results favoring his opponent.

The psychologist has run this experiment in India and with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He found evidence of bias, and conservatives would not be surprised to find that the bias favored Hillary Clinton. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/movie-review-fahrenheit-11-9-michael-moore-tedious/

Moore shakes his fist, and I yawn.

A few weeks after President Trump was sworn in, Michael Moore announced a one-man Broadway play using the advertising slogan, “Can a Broadway show take down a sitting president?” The answer turned out to be no. So Moore moves on to Fahrenheit 11/9, a two-hour movie in which he compares the World Trade Center attack to the Reichstag fire and plays footage of Hitler over audio of a Trump speech.

It’s the same old Moore we’ve seen for 30 years, except these days hardly anyone cares: Moore is a bit late to the Trump-is-Hitler party. Today he’s just another indistinguishable voice in a crowd of the very shouty, and his admixture of breathless hyperbole, vague calls for revolution, and corny humor has no zing. Every late-night comic is woke these days, and their writers are a lot more talented than Moore. His big cinematic stunt in this film is to take a tank of Flint, Mich., water to the home of the Republican governor, who isn’t present, and spray it over the fence into the yard: Watering the lawn to own the cons.

In Moore’s second anti-Trump movie (if you missed Michael Moore in TrumpLand, which grossed $149,000, you have a lot of company), our host’s analysis of Election 2016 is to suggest that reporters took it easy on Trump during the campaign because Big Media were run by fellow sexual predators such as Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Roger Ailes, and Mark Halperin. Moore cites no data, perhaps because even he noticed what actually happened: One study showed 91 percent of network-TV coverage of Trump was negative. The media cheered Trump only through the Republican primaries; then they tried to drag Hillary Clinton across the finish line. The beat reporters covering Clinton were a gang of HRC fangirls who had a collective emotional breakdown when she lost.

Reality-unconstrained conspiracy theories are, of course, Moore’s brand: This is the man who blamed the Columbine massacre on the presence nearby of a company that made rockets used to launch DirecTV satellites, which was the closest Moore could come to saying teen psychosis was caused by the military-industrial complex. This time, judicious as ever, Moore plays footage of the Reichstag fire juxtaposed against audio of news reports of 9/11 including snippets of President George W. Bush’s speeches, then segues into Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13003/operation-finale-eichmann

Martin Heidegger, who was Hannah Arendt’s teacher and lover, was anything but banal. Nor were Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Hitler and the numerous doctors and lawyers who were tried at Nuremberg. Neither were the university students who began by burning Jewish books and ended by burning Jewish children. Adolf Eichmann was also anything but banal, as a perusal of the trial transcript reveals.
Although the film Operation Finale partakes of Hollywood liberties, Ben Kingsley’s fictional portrayal of Eichmann is far more realistic than the allegedly non-fiction account by Arendt.
That mendacious and dangerous phrase, “the banality of evil,” should be struck from the historical vocabulary of the Holocaust and the trial of Eichmann, lest we look in the future for banality and miss the brilliance of those who would repeat Eichmann’s crimes.

One of the most notorious lines — and lies — that grew out of the trial of Adolf Eichmann for his important role in the Holocaust, was what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil,” meaning that even the most horrific people can appear insipid. Arendt was assigned to report on the 1961 trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, but according to contemporaries, she rarely attended the trial. She came to Jerusalem having made up her mind in advance that Eichmann in particular and other perpetrators of the evils of the Holocaust in general, were ordinary nondescript functionaries. She reported on the trial with an agenda. It was not necessary for her actually to observe and listen to Eichmann because to do so might undercut her thesis. So instead she wrote a mendacious screed in which she constructed a stick-figure caricature of one of the most significant perpetrators of the Holocaust.

I use the word mendacious deliberately, because it seems Arendt knew better. One of Hitler’s key supporters was Professor Martin Heidegger, perhaps the most influential philosopher of his day. Arendt was his student and lover. After the war, she tried desperately to rehabilitate him. He was anything but banal. Nor were Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Hitler and the numerous doctors and lawyers who were tried at Nuremberg. Neither were the university students who began by burning Jewish books and ended by burning Jewish children. The perpetrators of the Holocaust — from those who organized it in Berlin to those who carried it out in the death camps and killing fields — included some of the most brilliant young men and women in Germany. Many left university to participate in the “final solution” and then returned to highly prestigious jobs in post-war Germany.

Adolf Eichmann was also anything but banal, as a perusal of the trial transcript reveals. In the new film Operation Finale, he is played by Ben Kingsley. Although the film partakes of Hollywood liberties — a romance between a beautiful doctor who in reality was a man and the film’s Israeli hero — Kingsley’s fictional portrayal of Eichmann is far more realistic than the allegedly non-fiction account by Arendt.

http://politicalmavens.com/

Heavy-handed and cliche-ridden are the kindest adjectives I can summon for the screenplay of Meg Wolitzer’s novel; since I never read that, I can’t say whether “The Wife” is faithful to the original, but the film bats it out of the ballpark on both scores. The plot concerns a writer/husband who wins the Nobel Prize for Literature and his long-suffering writer/wife who turns out to be the actual talent that sparked his otherwise lifeless output. This is not a spoiler because the revelation is obvious at the start from the following tonsorial clues: Glenn Close has a hairdo like Joan of Arc, Jonathan Pryce has wild hair and a scruffy beard, the disturbed son has a nutty comb-forward – uh oh – something’s not right with this family!

In subsequent flashbacks, we will see that Glenn has been locked in a room to pound away at a typewriter for 8 hours a day while her little boy screams for his mommy outside. We will learn that a successful writer advised her that “nobody reads books by women,” obviously leaving her with no choice but to ghost her husband’s work. While in captivity, Glenn clearly hasn’t heard about the hundreds of highly successful women writers in mid-century America (see Wikipedia’s list for evidence). The stereotype of Jonathan Pryce’s Jewish serial lecher is the equivalent of Shylock’s money-lending skills and of course it will extend into the Nobel ceremony itself. If you’re a male Jewish writer, your genes are partly in your jeans.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12958/american-flag-moon-gosling

Ryan Gosling admits he sees things as a Canadian. So it is all right for Gosling to see himself as a Canadian, but it is not all right for Neil Armstrong to see himself an American?

During the Second World War, Oskar Schindler escaped the clutches of the Gestapo by claiming that “his” Jews were doing essential war work. But Schindler also did something that, had it been discovered, he would have been tortured and executed. He stole guns and gave them to “his” Jews, so that they could defend themselves.

The film “Schindler’s List” ran 3 hours 15 minutes, yet somehow there was no time to include this incident. An anti-gun agenda was apparently more important to the filmmakers than the depiction of this dramatic and revealing incident.

Rewriting history and erasing images are symptoms of budding totalitarianism. The moon landing was “one giant step for mankind.” Omitting the planting of the American flag is another small step away from freedom and toward totalitarianism. Totalitarians do not really care whether you believe their lies. If you do, you help to maintain their power. If, however, you do not believe the lies, yet are forced to repeat them, you admit that you have sold your mind — and perhaps your soul.

We learn both from what we see and from what we do not see: this is especially true if we do not see something because it was intentionally deleted. This tells us something about those who deleted it. They considered it so important that they went to the trouble of trying to erase it from our national consciousness. Why? What was so contrary to their value system that they found it intolerable?

The photo above is one of the most famous images in history. In 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to set foot on the moon: planting the American flag on the moon was an iconic event. I would bet serious money that the great majority of the 7.5 million people on earth can identify that photo. But not Hollywood. The scene was omitted from the movie “The First Man”

Ryan Gosling, who plays Armstrong, claims that Armstrong did not see himself as an American hero. Like Medal of Honor recipients, he did not see himself as a hero, but he surely saw himself as an American. As 95-year-old Chuck Yeager says, “That’s not the Neil Armstrong I knew.”

Gosling admits he sees things as a Canadian. So it is all right for Gosling to see himself as a Canadian, but it is not all right for Neil Armstrong to see himself an American?

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2018/09/03/operation-finale-a-review/

Yet another movie about the capture of Adolf Eichman, architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution of the Jewish Question. This one, directed by Chris Weitz, features two Hollywood stars – Ben Kingsley as Eichman and Oscar Isaac as Peter Malkin, the Mosad agent most responsible for his capture and, according to this movie, for the murderer’s final cooperation in Israel’s kidnap of an Argentine citizen. Living openly as Ricardo Klement, Eichman had a wife (the unrecognizable and little-used Greta Scacchi) and two children, one a handsome young man and one a toddler A young woman, briefly involved with the former, introduces him to her blind father who quickly figures out his father’s real identity and contacts Mosad with the information that Eichman is alive and well in Argentina.

A plan is hatched and Malkin is one of the leaders of the team designated to “catch and extract” him and bring him back to Israel alive for trial. There are the requisite number of false starts and obstacles and some questionable and unanswered events, primarily – the 10 day delay of the El Al plane supposed to transport the team back to Israel. We are never told why the plane was so seriously “delayed” – equivalent to the driver of the getaway car in a bank heist not showing up at the last minute. We also don’t understand why no one on this clever team is capable of forging Eichman’s signature on a release form necessary for him to be transported back to Israel. Instead of answers to these pivotal questions, we are given a far too lengthy interval of Oscar Isaac attempting to bond with Eichman in order to get the essential signature; scenes which include Eichman on the toilet (TMI), Isaac promising to let the mass murderer see his wife before he dies (disturbing) and a particularly jarring exchange between Isaac and his on-screen girlfriend who accuses him of making this “all about his pain” – an anachronistic concept that surely would not have entered the mind of an Israeli doctor working for Mosad in 1960, a brief 15 years after the holocaust decimated the Jews of Europe.