Box office opening weekends:
Valley of Elah $133k
Rendition $4mm
The Green Zone $14mm
Lions for Lambs $6.7mm
American Sniper $94mm
Hmm…could it be that when you make a decent, patriotic war movie, the American public will turn out in droves for it?
Even with these numbers, I still doubt that Hollywood will see the lesson within and learn from it.
YGBSM:
Lib Rag Salon: Woman Explains Why She Decided To Lose Her Virginity To Her Dad…
First we had New York legalize marriages between uncles and nieces last year…now there’s this. I would’ve illustrated this story with an image from Deliverance, but given that incest is taking hold mostly in the northern states (Salon refers to this story, in which the father and daughter are from one of the Great Lakes states), I suspect that all of the usual incest jokes that pick on the South need to either be thrown out or retooled to more accurately reflect the reality of the situation.
Your turbolift is about to arrive:
Elevator Redesign Straight From the Future
With the new elevator proposed by ThyssenKrupp, elevators as we know them could be a thing of the past. While the invention of the elevator made the skyscraper possible, this new elevator could once again redefine the urban architecture and design. The new elevator would be able to go up and down, as well as side to side, and do so without any cables or pulleys, or the need to wait for the elevator in case you just missed it.
They dubbed this concept Multi and it is based on the same technology that is behind Shanghai’s super-fast Maglev train, which was built by Transrapid International (a joint venture between Siemens and ThyssenKrupp). This elevator would be propelled by a magnet-based drive, with each cab featuring one set of induction motors for horizontal and vertical movement. The tracks along which these cabs would run, would be attached to the wall, eliminating the need for cables. Furthermore, because of this novel design, there could be more than one cab travelling through the shaft, meaning that a cab could pick up passengers every 15 to 30 seconds. This would mean smaller and slower elevators, which would still get you to your destination faster.
Failure to lead. Even Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu both showed up, and they’re pretty much polar opposites in their neck of the woods. 0bama, OTOH, couldn’t be bothered:
“Je Suis Charlie” Morphed into ‘Je Suis Obama’ Before the Entire World
Barack Obama came out of the weeds today showing who and what he really is—and did it on his own.
While millions out on the street were chanting “Je suis Charlie”, came only lip service from the White House with the chant, “Je suis Obama”.
By ignoring the anti-terrorism rally in France—the largest in its entire history—Obama is no longer only America’s problem any more. He’s now the one Western leader who came out of the weeds to prove to the world that he doesn’t give a rodent’s rear about the horrific carnage of Islamic terrorism at a time when millions are taking to the streets to take a most public stand against it.
By staying at home in the White House, purportedly to watch a football game, Obama came out as stridently non-sympathetic to a world worried about terrorism; a politician who thinks it’s good enough to let empty lip service do his talking for him.
Everyone should care about terrorism, and everyone includes the arrogant community organizer in the White House.
France has strict gun laws. Why didn’t that save Charlie Hebdo victims?
When American audiences read of a dramatic event in a foreign country, they often frame it in terms of the political debates occurring at home. As such, it was no surprise that after shootings at the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris this week, some Americans began to wonder about gun control laws.
“Isn’t it interesting that the tragedy in Paris took place in one of the toughest gun control countries in the world?” American reality television star Donald Trump wrote on Twitter shortly after the news broke. The tweet prompted both praise (over a thousand retweets) and scorn (Trump was labelled a “moron” and an “idiot” by other tweeters).
Trump, a perennial attention seeker, was likely attempting to score political points and insult liberals with his tweet. But behind the disingenuity, there is is a genuinely troubling question: Why didn’t France’s gun laws save the Charlie Hebdo victims?
Umm…perhaps it’s that, by definition, criminals don’t obey laws? Mohammed bin Hajji doesn’t give a damn about gun laws when he’s got his psychopathic rage on. What’s one more broken law when he’s already getting his splodeydope on?
It’s not gun control. It’s victim disarmament.
(h/t: JWF)
Perhaps Master Klein should familiarize himself with Occam’s Razor before putting his foot in his mouth again:
Everything You Need To Know About Voxsplaining The Charlie Hebdo Massacre
Wednesday’s terrorist attack on the office of French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo is a grim reminder that the last couple hundred years of increased tolerance for unfettered speech is largely an anomaly. Viewed over the course of history, freedom of speech as an ideal can only be seen as a bizarre fetish, propagated by a few lone cranks and out of step with humanity’s preference for order, deference to raw power, and violence as a means of achieving those preferences.
I say this because, over at Vox, Ezra Klein has an article on the Charlie Hebdo attack that is wildly divorced from both current and past history. Klein writes that the murder of Charlie Hebdo’s employees “can’t be explained by a close read of an editorial product, and they needn’t be condemned on free speech grounds.”
“They can only be explained,” Klein continues, “by the madness of the perpetrators, who did something horrible and evil that almost no human beings anywhere ever do, and the condemnation doesn’t need to be any more complex than saying unprovoked mass slaughter is wrong.”
Basically Everything Ezra Klein Said Is Wrong
New York Times Reports On Muslim Proselytizing During Charlie Hebdo Attack, Then Deletes It
Here’s the latest example of the New York Times censoring itself to avoid offending Muslims after an act of Islamic terror. This morning, BenK at Ace of Spades quoted an NYT story by Liz Alderman titled “Survivors Retrace a Scene of Horror at Charlie Hebdo.” Take note of these two paragraphs from that story:
Sigolène Vinson, a freelancer who had decided to come in that morning to take part in the meeting, thought she would be killed when one of the men approached her.
Instead, she told French news media, the man said, “I’m not going to kill you because you’re a woman, we don’t kill women, but you must convert to Islam, read the Quran and cover yourself,” she recalled.
That inconvenient truth has been flushed down the memory hole, replaced with this fabrication:
Sigolène Vinson, a freelance journalist who had come in that morning to take part in the meeting, said that when the shooting started, she thought she would be killed.
Ms. Vinson said in an interview that she dropped to the floor and crawled down the hall to hide behind a partition, but one of the gunmen spotted her and grabbed her by the arm, pointing his gun at her head. Instead of pulling the trigger, though, he told her she would not be killed because she was a woman.
“Don’t be afraid, calm down, I won’t kill you,” the gunman told her in a steady voice, with a calm look in his eyes, she recalled. “You are a woman. But think about what you’re doing. It’s not right.”
Apparently nobody at Pravda-on-the-Hudson has figured out that the Internet is forever, and that their fecklessness would be discovered and held up for the ridicule it deserves…either that, or they just don’t care.