Culture for the cultured and uncultured alike.
If you’re a movie buff, like me, there’s a good reason to buy physical media – DVDs and Blu-Ray disks. Yes, this is the age of streaming, and yes, streaming is easy and convenient. But if you, again like me, like old movies and prefer to see them un-fucked-with – well, buy a Blu-Ray. My colleague and occasional drinking buddy Stephen Green has some thoughts on this, and some precautionary examples.
In one of the ugliest scenes in movie history, tough-guy cop Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) and his partner Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) roughly confront and interrogate a black drug dealer on his no-BS way to 
finding The French Connection delivering heroin to the streets of New York.
Doyle is angry, impatient, violent, and in a hurry to get “Pusher” (played with genuine terror by veteran stage actor Alan Weeks) to flip on his supplier. Doyle uses all that aggression — plus a nonsense accusation — to unsettle Pusher and force the truth out of him.
“All right! You put a shiv in my partner. You know what that means? G**dammit! All winter long, I got to listen to him gripe about his bowling scores. Now I’m gonna bust your a** for those three bags and I’m gonna nail you for picking your feet in Poughkeepsie.”
Here’s why that matters:
Doyle is bad news, indeed, and audiences see that before and after he chases down and drags a suspect into a back-alley interrogation/beating. The “after” is what sells it, because that six-second exchange forces viewers to revisit Pusher’s alley beating with a better perspective…
…but modern audiences aren’t supposed to see it.
Somebody — nobody seems to know exactly who — cut six pivotal seconds from Hackman’s Oscar-winning performance. The cut was discovered in 2023 by viewers watching the movie on the Criterion Channel. That’s shocking because Criterion has a reputation for restoring classic movies as close to the original as digital video can present.
Hackman, by the way, hated the n-word and balked at doing the scene. 
Friedkin had to remind him that this movie was a quasi-documentary-style look at the ’70s drug war and the cops who waged it.
And Another Thing: That scene finishes with Russo protesting, “He could have been white.” To which Doyle says, “Never trust anyone.” The whole exchange is key to Doyle’s character, but it had to go because somebody didn’t want to trigger some precious snowflake born decades after the film’s 1971 release.
Vodkapundit has a lot more at the link above, and some of it is just unexplainable – like blurring Daryl Hannah’s shapely buttocks in Disney’s 1984 film Splash, the appearance of which was momentary and perfectly innocent. Splash, which not many people seem to realize was a live-action, much more optimistic telling of Hans 
Christian Andersen’s 1837 story of The Little Mermaid. (Forget Disney. The original story is actually pretty dark.)
But, I digress.
It seems so many people have grown so weak, so hyper-sensitive, that even Mel Brooks’ masterpiece, Blazing Saddles, probably the most side-splitting comedy movie ever made, now comes pre-loaded with a trigger warning. What utter horseshit.
Steve’s right. If there are any great old movies you enjoy, buy the originals, while you still can.
President Trump has been angling for a Nobel Peace Prize, but so far his name hasn’t rung any bells in Oslo. That’s a shame, and unfair to boot, as a lot of his foreign-policy peace efforts have been successful. The Abraham Accords alone would seem to call for such recognition, and yesterday, another majority-Muslim nation signed on. I covered it at RedState.
There are yet hopeful signs coming out of the Middle East. In Gaza, Hamas is still dug in like a tick on a dog, and the Israel Defense Forces are still occasionally playing Whack-a-Mole with them. But in another development, on Thursday, President Trump is expected to check another box on one of his primary foreign policy wins, when he welcomes Kazakhstan into the Abraham Accords.
President Trump on Thursday will welcome Kazakhstan into the Abraham Accords, the agreements centered around normalizing ties with Israel, two sources confirmed to The Hill.
Israel and Kazakhstan have had diplomatic relations since 1992, and it’s not clear what benefit Astana will get from joining the accords — although it provides a forum for greater cooperation on economic and security matters.
The Abraham Accords were established in 2020 and succeeded in brokering ties between Israel and Persian Gulf countries — like the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain — marking the first time in nearly 30 years that Israel had established new ties with one of its Muslim neighbors.
On Thursday evening, Trump is hosting the leaders of Kazakhstan and four other Central Asian countries, called the C5+1 summit. The forum was established in 2015, and this year marks the first visit to the White House. The meeting is expected to focus on deepening economic cooperation, developing rare earth mineral supply chains and strengthening security ties.
This is indeed a big freakin’ deal, although it would be a lot bigger if the Saudis signed on. Saudi Arabia is a major player in the region. The holy cities of the Sunni branch of Islam, Mecca and Medina, are there. It’s said to be the center of Islam, or at least, it’s said to be so by the Saudis, and if you don’t believe that, just ask them, and they’ll tell you.
The Accords in and of themselves are a pretty huge accomplishment. The State Department presents the details:
We, the undersigned, recognize the importance of maintaining and strengthening peace in the Middle East and around the world based on mutual understanding and coexistence, as well as respect for human dignity and freedom, including religious freedom.
We encourage efforts to promote interfaith and intercultural dialogue to advance a culture of peace among the three Abrahamic religions and all humanity.
We believe that the best way to address challenges is through cooperation and dialogue and that developing friendly relations among States advances the interests of lasting peace in the Middle East and around the world.
There’s more; you can read it at the link.
Mind you the Nobel Peace Prize hasn’t meant all that much since they gave one to the terrorist Yasser Arafat, and has meant even less since they gave one to Barack Obama for… existing. But to shut President Trump out after all he’s done? After the Abraham Accords, and the various other conflicts he’s helped bring to an end?
Come on, Nobel committee. Get your shit together.
I stumbled across this while cleaning up some old files, and given the state of affairs in our major cities in recent weeks, I thought it bore trotting out for you all to read again. It may be more true now than it was in the 2020 “Summer of Love” rioting.
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A comment on this article over at Glibertarians provoked some thought. Glibertarians is one of my favorite sites not only because they let me write about guns and outdoor stuff, but because the commentariat there is a good cut above the normal. The comment that got me thinking:
The social justice cadres suffer under the delusion that all of our social codes, all of our strictures on what we can do to one another are about 
protecting us from them. It doesn’t occur to them that it just might be about protecting them from us. Unremitting brutality isn’t some sort of exception or oddity in the course of human history. It’s historically been the utter norm.
Does anyone think, for a moment, that the men who settled continents, conquered the elements, and defeated any challenger who crossed their path established concepts like individual liberty, rule of law, or private property to protect themselves from bands of marauding purple-haired Women’s Studies and Literary Criticism majors?
Or is it maybe a little more likely that we’ve chosen to bury our more vicious and murderous impulses under a set of standards of bourgeois 
restraint? Now, they’re insisting that that veneer of restraint is unfair. Holy Shit! Have they thought for second about what their own damnation of bourgeois standards and values implies about the what they’ll be facing then?
Makes you think, doesn’t it?
It’s true that the vast majority of human history has been one of brutality, oppression and violence. That continued until fairly recently; the late 18th century saw, in Western Europe and the New World, the Enlightenment that led to one small group of people in North America proclaiming the blessings of liberty. But it’s true that you can see the endings in the beginnings; just as you can listen to Wagner and hear the roots of modern German death metal, just as you can look at Mozart and Freddie Mercury and see uncanny similarities, you can see a return to elitist brutality in the goals of modern statists:
“Liberty? You’ll have as much liberty as we allow you. Property? It’s only yours after we take what we want to redistribute it to others who haven’t earned it, after skimming off… well, a lot. Individual rights? You have the right to labor on other men’s behalves; the right to submit to the rule of your ‘betters’ for your own damn ‘good.”
They forget what kind of people set up those institutions that protect and defend liberty, property and individual rights. They forget how many people still value them today. They forget to what lengths people who decide they have nothing left to lose will go. Strength, true strength, does not arise from outrage; it arises from work and achievement. Confidence, real 
confidence, arises from the knowledge you can do things no matter what obstacles others try to put in your way.
How much longer will regular folks allow people to be intimidated by street thugs with black masks? How much longer will people watch Berkeley cops stand by while those thugs run riot in the streets? How much longer will it be before people have had enough, before the counter-protests become counter-attacks? How much longer before the perpetually outraged suddenly, horribly, realize what wages their outrage has wrought?
The message to those who would tear down those institutions that define civilization – liberty, property, individual rights – I can only offer the warning voiced in that same comment: We’re not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with us.
You win some and you lose some, as the saying goes, and here in Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Borough, where we hang our hats, we just won a local victory; one that has to do with schools and bathrooms.
A state superior court judge has upheld a Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District policy that restricts “transgender” students from using bathrooms and locker rooms aligned with their confused ideas about their sexual characteristics.
The ruling was issued Thursday by Alaska Superior Court Judge Tom V. Jamgochian, marks a defeat for the ACLU of Alaska, which brought the case early last year on behalf of an elementary school student and his parents. The lawsuit had argued that the district’s bathroom rule violated the student’s constitutional rights to privacy and education.
At issue was MSBSD Policy No. 5134 BP, adopted in October 2022. The rule requires students to use restrooms corresponding to the sex listed on their birth certificate or to use a single-occupancy restroom as an alternative.
The judge determined that the policy does not infringe on rights guaranteed by the Alaska Constitution, citing the availability of a private restroom option as a reasonable accommodation. That finding rejected the ACLU claims that the rule discriminates against the plaintiff.
There is no discrimination. Not a jot. Boys will use boys’ restrooms, and girls will use girls’ restrooms. This is a policy with thousands of years of precedence. The only thing being debated here is the definition of “boy” and “girl,” which in humans, was decided millions 
of years ago; in mammals, this was decided around 200-some million years ago. It’s not subject for debate, and our daughters shouldn’t have to put up with a boy who has just decided he’s a girl and insists on invading their safe spaces, or vice versa, for that matter.
Those policies rarely end well.
Besides, these confused kids do have other options:
The ruling leaves the policy in place and means the student must continue using either the girls’ restroom or a designated single-occupancy restroom.
The case, filed in Palmer Superior Court, could next be appealed to the Alaska Supreme Court. The ACLU of Alaska has not yet indicated whether it will pursue further legal action.
Forget legal action, ACLU; why not instead take a science lesson or two? Specifically, biology, and mammalian reproduction.
