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Toxic Hollywoodinity

Isn’t this Harvey Weinstein scandal interesting?

Turns out that just about everyone working in Hollywood knew he was a scoundrel, at the least, if not the mass rapist he is alleged to be.

Meryl Streep, Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, and many other celebrity actors knew full well that Harvey was preying on women, and not only did they do nothing about it, they actually went out of their way to stop the reports from coming out.

Back in the early 2000s, the New York Times top staff actually participated in deep sixing the story, instead of reporting it like a responsible news organization would. Because Harvey was their bud. He was a huge political fundraiser and donor to their liberal causes. Therefore, they had to protect him, and let him continue ruining people’s lives.

Reminds us of Hillary Clinton being in charge of the “bimbo eruptions” to protect her sexual harasser\ rapist husband, Bill. All those poor women beaten up and raped by Bill Clinton, sexually harassed, and then accused of being the cause of their victimhood.

When the Harvey story was blown, the same people who had their photos taken with Harvey for the past forty years suddenly became Harvey’s victims. They became his victims by claiming they, too, had suffered at his hand, after victimizing his real victims by aggressively suppressing their reports.

You can’t make this stuff up. It is pure evil.

If you were looking for the definition of hypocrites and liars, these people (Meryl Streep!) would be the picture in the dictionary.

These same sanctimonious, judgmental, self righteous blowhards (Matt Damon!) are actually leading double lives. They pretend all day long in their real job of acting, then they pretend to be good people, and it turns out they are all really bad people.

This is toxic to America.

Is there no end to Hollywood’s toxicity?

Riffing on the fake notion of toxic masculinity, a new term has been coined to capture Hollywood’s evil reality: Toxic Hollywoodinity.

Everything Hollywood is toxic, that is clear.

Some reflections on yesterday’s Election Day results

Yesterday was Primary Election Day here in Pennsylvania, and I was up to my eyeballs in electioneering/ volunteering.

Setting aside politics yesterday after lunch time, I helped bury in the ground a beautiful and perfect 21-year-old young lady who was killed the day after graduating from the University of Miami. Her name is Elizabeth Goldenberg, and she was from nearby Hummelstown, practically a suburb of Harrisburg these days. As her sobbing parents and siblings stood by, a large and far-flung community gathered around to give support, caring, and sympathy.

Young Elizabeth was killed in a boating accident while touring the Everglades with her family. She went from award-winning sky-is-the-limit talent to snuffed out like a light switch had been pushed. She was a hugely positive force surrounded by affectionate people who basked in her glow.

In moments like this I question my faith, I question God, because I can think of plenty of bad people who deserve to die, and yet this perfect young person is prematurely cut down. It is the essence of makes no sense and unfair.

It is hard to shake that feeling, and so that is also my thinking about the politics results: a lot of it makes no sense and is patently unfair.

While it is true that all my candidates but one prevailed yesterday, three issues nag at my mind:

  1. Republican Establishment is still inflicting self-damage by protecting poor candidates who are weak go-along get-along types, while stopping strong candidates from getting ahead. We saw that with the county judicial endorsement. The Dauphin GOP continues to artificially undermine the strongest Republicans and thereby alienate conservative grass roots voters, which the party needs. Unfair and self-defeating.
  2. I feel bad for Josh Feldman, candidate for the Uptown Harrisburg magistrate position, held by Barb Pianka. Feldman is a recent transplant to this area, with no roots, and had done no work related to the job, and yet he threw himself into the fray at the urging of other people. You might say he was used to try and settle a political score. If you read this blog, then you know I played a role in that race. It still brings me no pleasure to have played that role, and now more than ever I feel bad for Mr. Feldman. Hopefully he is able to get over the hard work and big expenditures he invested and get back to his pet service business in one piece. Whoever encouraged you to run was not your friend, Josh. Unfair to the unsuspecting.
  3. All the mainstream media’s anti-Trump fake news and fake leaks and fake analysis and fake issues and fake chaos are aimed at one thing: Obfuscation and diversion, hindering President Trump from digging into the morass and removing the cancer. For fifty years the anti-America left (which is in many ways lead by the mainstream media) has quietly infiltrated and taken over a great deal of American government. Had Hillary Clinton been elected, those bureaucrats were all poised to get it over the goal line, a line of no return, and fully take control of America. If Trump is able to “drain the swamp,” then all of that effort will have been for naught. Impeachment? After 100 days in office? For what? How? After Hillary Clinton’s lying and cheating and sale of emails with secret classified information, and sale of key uranium stockpiles to the Russian government, no one is more due for a trial and jail than she. The US media has become a partisan machine disconnected from real journalism, and so they treat Trump and his supporters unfairly.

While shoveling dirt on sweet Elizabeth’s coffin yesterday, miserable at the unfairness of her death, I was also struck by how meaningless so much of our material life is, how much we Americans take for granted, how relatively easy our lives are, compared to how most other humans live, and how we so easily fill up our lives with stupid, shallow things.

What is most important are relationships: Relationships between old friends, family members who respect one another, business colleagues, neighbors, and so on. Appreciate what we have. Hold our loved ones tight. In the end, it’s all ya got.

 

Women marching in DC + Hollywood = end of an era

Hollywood had the power of suggestion, once.

Producing movies that highlighted the best of human attributes, the best of Americanism, of small town communities resulted in Americans spending their hard-won dollars for more meaningful entertainment. Heroes sold tickets.

Then came the strictly action genre, still riding on the saddle of good vs. evil Westerns. Still we were on board, as the Soviets really were an evil empire worthy of being blasted out of the sky by Rambo. Heroes had bigger muscles, bigger guns.

Then came the sanctimonious genre, and Hollywood really poured on its power of suggestion. Stretching Americans’ willingness to budge on principle, Hollywood mistakenly comingled emotion with contrary logic. And so here we are, treated to a long line of Hollywood stars openly at war with the very people and fans who made them stars to begin with. Americans still believe in God and the Bible, even if they are willing to look the other way on certain policy issues. But they are not willing to abandon their core beliefs.

Drawing upon my work as a conservationist, this Hollywood pickle reminds me of the faux “Highbridge/Sturbridge/ Scarsdale/ Woodcroft Crossing” – type low-density developments ravaging America’s best farmland, destroying the very beauty which first drew Americans to live in those places to begin with.

The similarity and irony are too much to ignore. A sense of invulnerability and profligate spending of hard-won resources drive this mentality in both models. But whereas America has a lot of open land left to develop, Hollywood can ill afford to burn its bridges and crossings. If Hollywood becomes the permanent home of the goofball aggrieved and whiny upper middle class, it will not sustain itself. Hollywood may say it is against capitalism, but without capitalism, Hollywood ceases.

Perhaps the strangest example of this self destruction is actor Bradley Cooper’s choice to abandon the heroic persona he adopted for American Sniper, and trade it in for open contempt of Donald Trump and support for Crooked Misogynist Hillary. Cooper had a fan base across America rivaling any actor, and then he detonated it. Similarly, Jack Nicholson is a talented actor garnering appreciation for being a chameleon, but who knew until recently that he not only supervised Roman Polanski’s rape of a 13-year-old-girl, but then applauded Polanski years later when he received a Hollywood award in absentia?

Need anything be said about Meryl Streep’s recent hypocrisy? She has been held accountable elsewhere, so we move on here.

These are the acts of clueless people, whose once gentle powers of suggestion once held sway over an American public willing to forgive small differences of opinion, but who are now greatly inflamed by the many acts of war and outright treason committed by their former heroes and heroines.

If you are an actor, whose job it is to pretend to be things and people you are not, then it is highly unlikely you are qualified to comment on anything serious, is what America has learned.

After looking over the signs and placards those marchers carried, and listening to their speeches and bad poetry, I could not help but feel sorry for them. They really do not know what they are protesting.

Oh, sure, they did not vote for Trump. OK. But it is very rare for Americans to protest against the outcome of a fair and square election result. That would be really bad form. Super sore loserish. Wearing suggestive hats isn’t a substantive statement, either. It is juvenile.

The women and men who took to the DC streets Saturday with their Hollywood escorts, protesting God Knows What, are coming from a distant past.

Emerging from their caves, where there was once inequity, to be sure, the America around them today does not square with their views. Take all the updated statistics like, for example, women outnumbering men in American medical schools and law schools. Trying to resurrect the distant past and fuel it with Hollywood’s now over-played power of suggestion just gives us a bigger bonfire on which to watch all of the old vanities burn.

You all can go to bed now. I will be happy to kick the dying embers and watch them blink out into darkness.

Voting for Hillary?

Voters who select Hillary Clinton now forever disqualify themselves from criticizing any future candidate. There has never been nor is there likely again to be a candidate as unqualified and as corrupt as Clinton.

Knowingly choosing Clinton means a voter forfeits their ability to credibly attack future candidates. If Clinton is worth your vote, then anyone is worth voting for, because a candidate cannot be worse than Hillary Clinton.

Sure, you could disagree on policy with a future candidate, but you could not fairly accuse that person of being flawed. If Hillary isn’t too flawed for you now, then no one can ever be flawed again.

Hold Hillary to the same standard you have for other candidates, or forget being taken seriously.

Hypocrosy corrodes credibility. Don’t be a hypocrite. Vote for Trump and hope he’s happy to leave after one term.

Are We at Culloden, 1746, or Towcaster, 61? Where are We in History?

Are We at Culloden, 1746, or Towcaster, 61? Where are We in History?

At Culloden, the Scots hastily lost to the British and their Scottish Lowlander allies. A poorly planned battle from the very beginning, French officers advising the Highlanders stated that the Highlanders would lose quickly, which they did. In the following years, Britain went on to overrun Scotland, terrorizing the disarmed natives with rapine, murder and mass theft. No rule of law, but rule by the sword in 1746.

1688 years earlier, Briton Boudica had rallied some 200,000 men and women to her anti-Roman cause. After utterly destroying several Roman colonial cities, Boudica allowed her outgunned adversaries to pick an advantageous battleground at Towcaster. There, using the terrain to their advantage, only 10,000 Roman legionnaires mechanically sliced their way through the poorly organized mob. Britain became fully Roman thereafter. No rule of law, but rule by the sword, as Roman soldiers completely dominated disarmed Britons and took whatever they wanted.

In a more civilized form of combat, in 1948 Dewey defeated Truman for the presidency. Except that he didn’t. Media allies had talked up Dewey so much that the election was marketed as a foregone conclusion, leading to the famously inaccurate headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.”  The voters had other ideas and rejected the elites in that election. Truman was an Everyman, a truly humble American, and a real patriot. Dewey wasn’t a bad guy, and in fact by today’s standards few principles separated the two men. But the media had gone overboard to predict a winner, and the American voters didn’t like it.

Today, one wonders where we are in history, because history does repeat itself.

Human passion for control and domination of others being what it is, eventually there will be a clash of mutually exclusive wills, like at Towcaster and Culloden, here in America. We saw it at our formation in 1776, and again in 1861. This time the country has far less resilience to destruction and upset. Our finely tuned, supremely comfortable lives are a finely tangled mess of fishing line. Lines leading off in so many different directions that we can barely keep up with them, let alone untangle them. This is a knot that only a deep cut can separate. It’s not physically hard to make that cut; it is only hard to make that destructive decision, because the mayhem that follows is hard to fathom.

On the one hand Hillary Clinton and her trillionaire allies are poised to make America a subsidiary of global corporations, who like their taxpayers subdued and submissive, thank you. FaceBook, Twitter, and most of the media are leading the charge for Hillary, covering up her evil intentions and ill health. Liberty will be gone so fast that liberal Julian Assange of WikiLeaks has accused the pro-Hillary media of “erecting a demon.”

On the other hand is a ragtag army of citizens. No pitchforks and torches here, yet, but millions of American citizens are getting anxious and worried that they might end up in battle against their fellow Americans, for liberty.

How will this electoral battle go? Will it be a Culloden, a Towcaster, or a 1948 Dewey-Defeats-Truman?

I am betting on the Everyman in every one of us, white and black, brown and yellow, red and pink, to bring our nation back from the brink of the cliff, to affirm our individual liberties as being supreme.

The Clintons strike again

People obsessed with power can be aggravating. It’s all about them, not you or me. Their motives are bad, why support them.

So here I’m watching US Senator Tom Harkin’s (D- Iowa) annual steak fry fundraiser on c-span (yes, I am that much of a political geek), a legendary annual speechathon, and who is there right behind the filibustering Senator Harkin?

Why, Bill and Hillary Clinton are sitting there. Right in line with the cameras, for maximum exposure.

Bill Clinton is smiling and looking intently, or maybe intensely, occasionally smiling to someone in the audience (hot babe?), clapping, waving, nodding in agreement.  Jovial fellow.  Harmless, chummy.

Bill Clinton was impeached and disbarred for lying under oath, while holding the highest office.  He was investigated because he abused his position of authority over a young woman working for him, basically blackmailing her for sex.  He is a serial sexual harasser and sexual abuser, a possible rapist, and yet, he sits center stage, national attention, people cheering for him.

It makes you wonder just what counts for a leader for some parties.  How people can set aside murder, drunkenness, and sexual abuse (Ted Kennedy), and so on.  It makes me wonder, anyhow, what it takes to be a thinker in that party, what it takes to be an adherent to that party.  Easily overlooking horrendous behavior, but quick to jump on someone else’s.

Consistency is not a hallmark.

Anyhow, Hillary eventually stands up and delivers the most monotone, long, drawn out, boring speech to a crowd sitting in the very hot sun already for hours at that point, and the camera shows the audience losing interest, feeling uncomfortable, getting up to move away.  She is not speaking to them, because if she were, she would make it five or six minutes and get credit for getting them out of the hot sun already.  However, Hillary is speaking to someone else, someplace else, and she goes on and on and on and even I couldn’t listen an more, and I was in the comfort of my recliner.

Hillary is speaking for herself, and probably to herself.

It is time to hold the Clintons accountable, for what they did to Bill’s many victims, for they did to America.

And yes, it is a shame that Bill was so flawed; I mean that.  I was working in Washington, DC, when he became president, and the government really did change for the better under his leadership.  I am not talking about policy, but how government functioned, how it was streamlined, how voice mail and email were added to our offices, and the Internet.  Bill Clinton was a gifted president in that way.  His lack of morals were his weak point.

But Hillary has no excuse, no good, demonstrable benefits she has brought to America.  She is merely deeply self-interested.  She is merely power hungry.  She has stepped over the many prostrate female victims of Bill to get to this point.  She should not get any further.  She is not a good person, and she is unworthy to lead.