Posts

Posted on

King’s Park Psychiatric Center

About this institution.

King’s Park Psychiatric Centre was a complex of dozens of buildings intended to house individuals with mental problems. It operated from 1885 to 1996.  At its peak, there were close to 10,000 patients.

The remains of the buildings are haunting.

The intent was good.  Of course.  The idea was to provide a healthy environment for these patients to live in, where they could work on farms and workshops and be fed and housed at state expense.

We are told that governments came to believe this was not a good way to deal with mental patients and the population of Kings Park was reduced through drug therapies, transfers to other institutions, and simple release.  I have read that many of these patients ended up homeless, but I don’t see any clear documentation about the disposition of the thousands of patients.  But they are all gone and the buildings have been abandoned for about 30 years.  Some of them were demolished. Some of them had asbestos in them complicating the idea of recycling the structures.  The remaining buildings are decaying.  There is a lot of graffiti.  People break into the buildings to take photos and videos.

There is something about the ruins that fascinates people.

Posted on

Crowning Prince Poilievre

Before everyone rushes to proclaim Pierre Poilievre the inevitable Prime-Minister of Canada, let’s consider a few inconvenient facts.

By the time Canada gets around to the next federal election, Trump will have been in the White House for at least 6 months.

Now, it is possible that he may prove to be a smashing success, leading a unified government that reduces inflation (something Biden already did for him), low unemployment, increased manufacturing, lower housing costs, and peace in the middle east.  Poilievre, glistening with overflowing luster as the Canadian Trump, glides to a smashing victory, reducing the Liberals to two seats.

It is more likely that Trump’s idiotic policies lead to resurgent inflation, high interest rates, less trade, reduced manufacturing, increased trade deficits, ridicule from foreign leaders, and a circus of bickering party members sabotaging their own party’s administration from the House.

Suppose the Liberals, with a new leader– likely, Mark Carney– provide a engaging contrast. Suppose he cleverly distances himself from Trudeau’s murky political sloganeering and tepid policy initiatives and stakes out a new course of his own.

The thing is, I don’t think most Canadians actually like Pierre Poilievre.  They say they will vote for him because they despise Justin Trudeau, but I rarely hear anyone say that they will vote for Poilievre because they like him.  There will be debates.  I doubt that Poilievre charms the pants off anyone in these debates, if he is genuinely challenged by a more formidable Liberal candidate.

Don’t forget that Quebec has a lot of seats, and the PQ might or might not take a lot of them.

The NDP, as long as they retain Singh as their leader, will be a non-factor.  Singh has lost almost all of his credibility, even among people like me who used to often vote NDP because, well, they used to have the good leaders like Ed Broadbent and Jack Layton.

It’s not likely, but it’s possible we could end up, in Canada, with another minority government.

The overwhelming consensus among political commentators right now is the Poilievre will win a decisive majority in the next election.  That is the kind of uniformity that raises my suspicions.

It reminds me of the belief that Hilary Clinton would crush Donald Trump.

Poilievre was recently interviewed by Jordan Peterson.

Peterson draws fans who are searching for meaning in life and want to learn from someone they see as a great thinker, and his huge social media reach makes him a coveted interview for right-wing politicians.  From Here.

Peterson is not a great thinker.  He reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell (though they have opposite political dispositions): smug and pompous writers who devise compelling anecdotes that cherry-pick facts and prove nothing but serve to assure miscreants that they’re really smarter than educated, competent people.

Peterson recently interviewed the neo-fascist Brit Tommy Robinson, a far-right rabblerouser known for inciting mobs against immigrants in the UK and calling Islam a “mental disorder”.  Robinson’s X account was restored recently by Elon Musk, after he had been barred for his inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric.

So Poilievre is happy to be hosted by an enabler of a very far right activist who is currently in Cyprus at a five-star hotel hiding out from an arrest warrant.

Poilievre told Peterson that young women just can’t wait to get pregnant and take up domestic chores again, after years of tiresome feminists lecturing them about equality and professional achievements.  He also wants to boost energy production to serve the mega-corporations lust for AI processing.

Poilievre thinks climate activists are “loons”.

Poilievre is extremely confident at the moment.  He is probably supremely disappointed that he won’t have Trudeau to run against– perhaps for good reason.

I don’t think most Canadians have looked closely at the man.  And I suspect that once they do, they will discover that he does not have the charisma he himself thinks he has at the moment.

 

 

 

Posted on

The Coming Republican Disaster

No one should say, when it happens, that nobody thought it would.  Everybody thought it would, just as they thought, eight years ago, that a vulgar, loud-mouthed, pathological liar like Trump could never be elected.   But don’t be fooled by a misfire on only one part of the equation.  Yes, Trump got elected,  once, and then again, for a second term, by a population that seemed oblivious to the real forces that shape and distort our economic and social lives.

This is a segment of the population that believes in barstool wisdom: some loudmouth sitting next to you at a bar and mouthing off about how high his taxes are, how crime is getting out of control, how America has outsourced all of the best jobs, how preposterous it is for people to choose their gender, could be the next cabinet secretary in a Trump administration.

When you hear interviews with the MAGA crowd, the first thing that is evident is that they have no idea what economic health or the cause of inflation is.  They believe that crime is on the increase when it objectively is not.  They have no idea that 75% of the manufacturing jobs that were lost over the last 20 years were lost to automation, not out-sourcing. They zero in on inflation and magically believe that Joe Biden’s policies caused it, even though it happened in every developed country.  They hated the constrictions imposed on them by the Covid epidemic but nobody had a magical formula for preventing its spread, and hundreds of thousands of deaths, while allowing everyone to conduct business as usual.  Nobody was going to be happy with any solution– and they weren’t.  They blamed Biden for the deplorable mess at the exit from Afghanistan, but only the generals who believed the U.S. should stay there for at least another 20 years had any alternative.  Diatribes about the messy exist almost never acknowledge the fact that the U.S. and it’s allies were losing, badly, by that time, and that the whole project was a colossal failure, and that it was the Republican Party that got America into that mess in the first place.  The honest Republican knows in his heart that it was their party’s great fortune that a plan devised by Trump had to be executed under a Democratic Administration.  Trump, who was just as determined to leave, would have fared no better.

Lost in all the flotsam around the Biden Administration, is the fact that he pulled off a singularly remarkable achievement: he kept the economy chugging along while reducing inflation.  Most economists will tell you that reducing inflation will causes joblessness to rise significantly.  Biden’s infrastructure investment and other policies prevented that.  That is a signal accomplishment for which Biden gets no credit.

I doubt that anyone would have fared better than Harris had Biden had the sense to not run for re-election.  It will be to his everlasting discredit that he allowed his ego to blind him to his own frailties, but had someone been nominated earlier, and contested the primaries, would it have made a difference?  A large portion of the voting public were ornery, dissatisfied with their lives, and infatuated with simplistic solutions.  Trump would make prices go down, houses go up, and people who don’t like me go away.  Trump will bring peace to Gaza and the Ukraine.  Trump will teach China a lesson.

And so we arrive at the Trump Administration.  I think it is natural for most informed observes to instinctively believe, on some level, that he can’t be serious.  He’s not going to impose sweeping tariffs on foreign imports, deport 15 million illegal immigrants, or invade Greenland.  He can’t let China bully Taiwan.  He can’t really end Obamacare.  He certainly won’t balance the budget.

He can’t be serious, because what he says he is going to do is stupid.

What will probably happen?

Either he will go ahead and impose the tariffs or he will grant so many exceptions that some people will realize– as if they didn’t already know– that he is a liar, like every other politician.  If he imposes the tariffs, he will re-ignite inflation, and that will be embarrassing, but he can try to blame it on some kind of hidden Biden policies that he couldn’t vanquish overnight.  But it will raise suspicions.  But then, other nations will retaliate with tariffs on U. S. exports, causing jobs to be lost and corporations to lose money.

He can try to round up millions of illegal immigrants, but that will require something that looks like concentration camps, and hundreds of thousands of state employees, guards, administration, lawyers.  It will be very costly, and it will have a large impact on some industries that depend on immigrants, like construction, meat packing, and agriculture.  Again, there will be a significant inflationary impact.

He will try to extend his tax cuts, due to expire next year, and add a few more.  This will lead to an interesting battle with the hard core tea-party Republicans who sincerely want to balance the budget.  Dream on.  In the meantime, Speaker Johnson will have a monumental challenge to get any budgetary measures passed given that he has a razor-thin majority and lots of members of his own party who won’t hesitate to sabotage their own agenda.  To keep the tax cuts, Trump badly needs an extension– or suspension– of the debt ceiling.  The Tea Party Republicans will probably try to hold the process hostage to their own radical agenda– massive cuts to the budget.  That should be fun.

Trump has nominated a bunch of clowns for the top cabinet posts in his administration.  Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Jr., are almost literally, yes, clowns.  You can be assured that most of government is actually carried out by deferential functionaries below the level of cabinet secretary, but these three, and the others, have big egos and extraordinary confidence in their own genius and may try to push through things that any sensible person would hesitate to push through.  Will Kennedy try to stop vaccine mandates, or undermine them?  Will he take on the processed food industry?  Will Hegseth stay sober on the job?  Will Gabbard try to restore Assad to power in Syria?

And will Trump cut off aide to Ukraine?  Ukraine does receive a lot of aide from other nations, including Germany, France, and Britain, but if it collapses, will the American public be as eager to wash their hands of it as Trump is?  And what if Putin, seeing the opportunity, starts to mass troops at the border of Moldova or Georgia?

Americans– aside from some Republican true believers– don’t care much about the deficit.  It will balloon under Trump because he will cut taxes even more than he did in his first term but won’t dare touch Social Security or Medicare, the two largest (by far) spending items in the budget.  But Republican strategy– the core of their very being as a political party– is to complain bitterly about the deficit only when they are not in office.

The last balanced budget in the U.S. was the last year of the Clinton Administration.

In Republican Fantasy, after a few months or a year of Trump, inflation will be down to below 2%, housing starts will rise, house prices will drop, mortgage rates will drop, Hamas will turn over the remaining hostages, Ukraine will surrender the seized territories to the Russians, NATO countries will increase their spending on defense, and thousands of factories will open to begin manufacturing televisions, washers, and driers in America.  With high-paying union jobs.  Wait– Trump is not going to be good for unions.

The sales of electric cars will decline while America will amazingly find even more oil to burn.  Don’t forget: crime will go down.

And if it happens, it will be due to the miraculous intervention of Donald Trump, or God, or both.  And if none of it happens, it will still be Joe Biden’s fault, whose administration policies were so bad that even Trump cannot undo them during his time of administration even though he told you that he could.

What he won’t be able to blame on Biden are the numerous scandals and blow-ups that seem likely to pervade this Administration.  Trump’s people are unusually shameless about wanting to get very rich while having a rather cavalier attitude towards ethics and propriety.  Trump’s family and cohorts are already lining up “investments” and real estate deals with the oil-producing Arab states.  In Trump’s view, MAGA people don’t mind. That’s why they elected him.  But there is a tiny smidgeon of shame left in the Republican Party and Trump is a lame-duck: he cannot run again.

I repeat: he is a lame-duck, who cannot run for president again.  If it is to the material advantage of one of his “friends” to turn on him, he will.  If it is to the political advantage of a Congressman or Senator to diverge from the Trump agenda, he or she will.

One last depressing probability: Supreme Court Justice Alito retires and, without McConnell to influence him, Trump gets to replace him with, I don’t know,  Donald Jr.  The most moronic president in recent history will have appointed four justices to the highest court in the land.

 

 

 

Posted on

UnChosen

Here we go again.  Every ten years or so the Evangelical Christian Establishment (I call them the ECE because having an acronym for it makes it real) reboots the Christ franchise and comes out with some new version of the gospel that is supposed to be free of those stodgy suffocating embellishments foisted on it by previous generations making it newly relevant to the young folk out there who are unchurched.  This Jesus is realistic.  He is vibrant. He is young.  Maybe someday, he’ll actually look Jewish.

Remember “Blue Like Jazz”?  Yeah, fooled me too.  Donald Miller with his allegedly enlightened intellectually credible version of the gospel.  It turned out to be orthodoxy 2.0.  Nothing that Billy Graham would not have happily endorsed in 1965.  Remember “The Late Great Planet Earth”?  “Jesus Freaks”?

Everything just comes and goes.

Remember “Jesus of Nazareth”?  Back in 1977, it was considered a daring, unusually authentic version of the gospel.  Starring Anne Bancroft and Ernest Borgnine, among others.  Yes, with an all-star cast.  I don’t think you need to say any more than that to know where it went.

And so we now have “The Chosen”.  And once again, the hype tells us that this one will be different.  This one is special.  This one speaks to the younger generation.  All bad signs.

The most important fact about “The Chosen” is this:  the claims of giving you a more authentic depiction of Jesus in his time and culture is utter hogwash.  It is clear from the very beginning that “The Chosen” is carefully calibrated to slavishly present what American evangelical Christians think Jesus and his culture sounded and looked like according to their literalistic perception as shaped by English language Bibles (reflecting the bias of various historical church establishments) and their own church culture of Americanized banality.   Thus, if the NIV (New International Version) of the bible says that Jesus fed 5,000 people from one basket of fish and bread, then that is damn well what happened and will be depicted as such.  We’ll even have the crowd shout, “Jesus of Nazareth has done a miracle!” to make sure they get it.  And, of course, reflecting what passes for theology in the modern church, when a leper appears, the disciples act exactly like a ten-year-old white boy from Tennessee would imagine from the story he heard in Sunday school.  “Horrors!  A leper!  Run!”  The leper himself acts like the ten-year-old boy, giggling embarrassingly for Jesus.  Does Jenkins even know that this is embarrassing or why?

The most damning indication of this flaw in “The Chosen” is so obvious and so fatal that I can hardly believe the decision to do it:  the actors speak in English with vaguely middle eastern accents.

Are you kidding me?

Well, wait a minute.  It may not actually be the most damning indication.  Take a look at Jesus (Jonathan Roumie).    Roumie is allegedly half Egyptian, but he is clearly more than half Irish.  Half Egyptian, I guess, is as far as Jenkins is willing to go knowing that American audiences don’t want a Jesus that looks too Jewish.

The Chosen Season 3 Release Date, Cast & Storyline

Look at those faces.   Come on now– it could be the starting line-up from a football team from Missouri.   Oh, wait.  Maybe from Utah.

Is it necessary to explain why this is stupid?  Firstly, I accept that having the characters talk to each other in Galilean Aramaic with English subtitles– while the best solution– is not on the table for Jenkins.  Assuming he is sincere– and I never assume that about anyone who belongs to any American religion that claims to be modelled on Christ but overwhelmingly supports Donald Trump for president– Jenkins will undoubtedly judge the success of “The Chosen” not based on awards or money but on how many people he can claim to have brought to Christ.

Okay, yes, I am cynical about American evangelical Christians, but you can’t get much more cynical than to vote for Donald Trump.

Dallas Jenkins, the driving force (IMDB calls him– ha ha– the “creator” of “The Chosen”) doesn’t see a problem.   I see a problem.  Even if you accept the convention that the bible is “infallible” in some way, a qualification foisted upon it by later generations of church leaders, the bible is still language, words that were written down decades or even centuries after Christ lived, translated, transposed, and yes, even edited, before we in the 21st century received them.   They don’t contain, for the most part, the actual dialog or images or smells or tone of the actual events.  This is a problem for every rendering of the Christ story because the story is so well-known and revered by so many people that it is very, very hard to free yourself of the contamination of stereo-types and conventions.

The problem is that the people of Israel in 30 A.D. did not live in a script as a reflection of some quaint idea of what Americans think first century Jews were like.  We know something about people and society and groups and we know, for instance, that an army of 70,000 individuals can’t move to a new location overnight, appear on the top of a hill, and completely surprise another army.   It’s absurd.  Simply feeding the army, supplying it with water, taking care of the horses, finding roads and paths, scouting for obstacles, scouting for enemies, scouting for enemy scouts, and so on, will ensure that the army of 70,000 will be noticed long before they appear in formation for battle.

In the same way, if 5,000 people are fed from one basket of fish and loaves, there will be some people who don’t believe what they see, and some who will believe anything they are told, and some who will not gaze with reverence upon the magician who performed this trick.  And they are not likely to run around holding intact fish and waving them in the air the way they do in “The Chosen”.    I didn’t see any person in the scene biting into it or cleaning and gutting it or anything you might expect someone who is actually going to eat the fish might do.

Jenkins tastefully declines to use the magic of CGI to dramatize the cure of a leper.  Instead, we see the blotches, the wounds, and then we see the same patch of skin without the wound.   The puzzle for some of us is this: did this and other miracles really happen?   Do we believe Jesus the prophet but not Jesus the miracle worker?  Do we believe both or neither?

I personally suspect that most of the miracles were actually ambiguous events that were massaged into the more dramatic stories by years of retelling which necessarily incorporate elements of exaggeration and enhancement.   Apologists consistently argue that the rapid spread of Christianity throughout the Roman world is proof that incredibly dramatic events occurred in Israel during Christ’s ministry.  But the faith did not actually begin to rapidly spread until later, through the devout efforts of the apostles, now evangelists, primarily Paul, who never even met Jesus.

If everyone saw correctly what the modern English bible tells us they saw, Jesus would never have been arrested and crucified.  There clearly were people, including authorities, who did not believe that Jesus’ miracles were real or that they were evidence of divine power.   Even the bible tells us that.  So when Jenkins shows us an awestruck crowd he is showing us a fantasy in which all the participants behave exactly the way the fantasist wants them to behave, in a way that gratifies his infatuation with himself as a believer and supporter of pussy-grabbing porn-star payoff artist politicians or even worse, Mike Pence.

Ross Douthat defends an inerrant interpretation of the Gospels.  He makes a reasonably good case for it, at least, if you already believe he’s right.  He argues that the essential consistency of the gospel message is evidence that it is true.  Then he also argues that the inconsistencies prove it is true: because the fact that inconsistencies were left in the gospels proves that no one edited them later to iron out the inconsistencies, thereby corrupting the accounts.

Well, that’s good.  It’s inerrant because it’s errant.  It’s errant because it’s inerrant.

Posted on

Where Does All That Pop Shit Come From?

It comes from here.

Max Martin produces shit.  Garbage.  Antiseptic mush.  Tripe.  Poop.  Muzak.

[Rick Beato on the same subject.]

Ever wonder why most contemporary pop music has all the distinguishing hallmarks of a wet noodle?  This is why:  Max Martin, and his ilk.  Producers who take whatever creativity and originality remains within a young singer’s aspirational heart and sticks it into a pencil sharpener and grinds it into slivers of febrile strings and then hits it with a flame-thrower and finally shreds it into a box of saturated kitty litter: here, audience, is your dinner.

The Beatles were wrong.  Neil Young was wrong.  Bob Dylan was wrong.  Jimi Hendrix was wrong.  Paul Simon was wrong.  Tom Waits was wrong.  John Prine was way, way wrong.

All of them created distinctive, original music out of their own minds and experiences and intelilgent, thoughtful personalities, and crafted the recordings in collaboration with sympathetic studio producers and sympatigo musicians whose personalities merged into a distinctive entity with personality, mind, and purpose.  They jammed.  They worked alone in dark rooms to imagine words and notes.  They tried out whacky ideas.  But always, always the artists were the masterminds, the creative force behind the songs, the originators and inventors of the work.

If you believe in Max Martin, they should never have done that.  They should have hired a snare drum consultant, a vocal consultant, an Autotune consultant, an echo consultant, a reverb consultant, a D chord consultant, and consultants for all the other chords, and all the notes, and all the knobs on the recording console, each of them committed to optimizing the one mechanical component of the hit record, based entirely on the previous hit and the next hit and all of the future hits that can be promoted and packaged and Spotified and shoved down the tiktokky throats of 12-year-old girls everywhere.  “Picks up the rice in the church where her wedding has been”?  No, no, no:  “Mmmmph ooommm zommminisa, oompah, bahm bahm bahm, auoooooo!”  Yes, yes, yes: those syllables sound moomy.  Swirl them, swish them, lick them.  It’s the sound, not the content!

His roster of customers is a who’s who of mediocrity:  Katy Perry, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Bon Jovi, Celine Dione, ‘N Sync, Pink, Adele, Kesha.  Did you have thoughts about admiring Taylor Swift’s phenomenal “talent”?   We won’t know if she really has any: she is a Martin collaborator.  All she has to do is stand in front of a Neumann microphone in a recording studio and fart and Martin will turn it into a gigantic three-alarm hit, the fucking Grammy people will give her an award, and the sponsors will elbow each other aside to line up at her ass. That means her music is not the product of her imagination or talent or inspiration.  It is the product of a faceless mechanism that doesn’t even need her.

Joe Coscerelli, the author of this suck-up, should be journalistically disbarred for the incredible facetiousness of comparing Martin to Lennon and McCartney, because, you know, the only thing important to compare is sales of hit singles.

“It’s staggering when you see it all together,” said Barry Weiss, a friend and veteran record executive who is also a producer of “& Juliet.” “You can legitimately say Max has had a 20- or 25-year fertile period as a writer. The Beatles were what, eight years?”

“Staggering”?   Seriously?  Seriously?!  You seriously want us to believe that this manufacturer of interchangeable non-descript jingles has had a career that should be thought of as “staggering”, and this output rivals the Beatles, except for more than twice the duration?

Barry Weiss isn’t out of his mind.  He has precisely the mind-set of a music industry executive who doesn’t give even one tiny little fuck about genuine artistic quality or originality.

Martin’s mentor “was not a musician in the traditional sense but began developing a system in which songs were written more like television shows” and that sounds exactly right.  Like “Friends” and “Saved by the Bell” and “Family Matters” in which the entire scripts have been jettisoned in favor of Jaleel White screaming “did I do that?!”  (Urkel is obviously Bill Cosby’s real personality exposed.)

Here’s a sample of his genius:

You’re the one that I ever needed/Show me love and what it’s all about.

Yes, now you see where that crap comes from.  A Swedish songwriter who believes songs should have feelings but not “content” as if a song that avoids content doesn’t have a meaning.  It does.  It means you are a cog in the machinery of exploitation and anesthetization.  And eccentric, idiosyncratic elements of taste you develop are the enemy of Martin’s product.

More drivel from Pink:

The singer Pink, who has worked with Martin for more than 15 years, called him “a closet punk rocker,” who is “very unique in how he can break you down and pull you apart and then put you back together in exactly the right syncopation, down to the second. He knows how to take your mess and make it feel good in people’s bodies.”

Martin’s music is a psychotropic drug that activates a few cells in your somnambulant brain and massages a few loose spirals of squishy ego until you feel all better until you don’t.

Martin is clueless about his own actual identity, or is he?

“Sometimes I question, like, ‘OK, what do I do?’ I make three minutes of sound. What’s the point?” he said.

No, he does know, on some blank level, that all he does is produce “three minutes of sound” and he has asked the right question.  What is the point of this shit?  But he’s lying.  The point is to make a lot of money.  The sales, the popularity of his work, is meaningless– it’s all about selling units to units.  Now he has a musical, which is the masturbatory equivalent of Linda Ronstadt doing an album of jazz standards.  It’s a joke that the “artist” himself is not aware of.

 

Posted on

Fat is Thin, White is Black, Music is Noise, Art is Shit

There inevitably comes a point at which some clever writer or critic seeking prominence will proclaim that contrary to established opinion, this shitty artist or musician is actually great and should be adored but only us truly sophisticated or pure thinks can appreciate the utter brilliance of the man or woman or fish.

And it’s usually bullshit.

Justin Bieber really is a genius.   Michael Jackson actually matters.  Look at how many records Paul McCartney has sold.  Frank Sinatra — the phrasing, the world-weariness!  Leonardo DiCaprio’s desperate commitment to his roles!

We’re all supposed to go, oh yes, I’m cool, I can see how the contempt for that artist is just snobbery.  Andy Kim really does belong in the Canadian song-writers Hall of Fame for “Sugar Sugar”, along with Leonard Cohen and Neil Young.   That guest on CBC’s “Q” that Tom Powers is desperately sucking up to (“Is it possible that you are so great that it actually works against you?” and “when did you first realize that you were a genius?”).

 

Posted on

The Infuriating Defensive Shell

Tonight, the Leafs, down 1-0 at the beginning of the Third Period, exploded for three goals in about five minutes to take a 3-1 lead over the Nashville Predators (a relatively mediocre team right now).

They were attacking aggressively, moving the puck up the ice smoothly, pinching at the blue line, sending wingers deep into the corners to fight for the puck, and dominating the game.

In other words, they were using a strategy that worked.  It generated offense.  It prevented Nashville from mounting sustained pressure (because they constantly had to retreat to defend).

So what do you do when you have a strategy that works?  Abandon it, of course.  Yes, they did.  With about 8:00 minutes left, the Leafs stopped pinching, stop going deep into the corners, and prioritized shift changes over attack.  And this change was not subtle.  They stopped attacking the Predators in their own zone, seemingly content to dump the puck out and turn it over to them, and get off the ice as quickly as possible.

They essentially said to the Predators: we’re not going to try to score for a while so you can try to catch up without worrying about any aggressive counter-attacks or forechecking on our part.  Maybe you can score a goal or two and make it close.  We don’t mind.  We quit.

It is fucking infuriating to watch.  Almost as infuriating as seeing William Nylander receive the puck directly in front of the net and decide to skate in circles for a while instead of shooting.   Or watching him give up the puck near the offensive blue line creating a two on one or three on one or even a two on none break for the opponent.

In baseball, a corresponding strategy is to replace a good hitter with a good defender, once you have the lead, on the often vain hope that your opponent won’t tie the game necessitating more hitting, which is no longer available, on your part.

The Leafs now seem to do the same thing when short-handed.  They are obviously shy about going on the attack when they force a turnover.  It looks like something coming from the top down: Mitch Marner used to be aggressive if he got the puck and bit of space while the Leafs were killing a penalty.  Now he just dumps the puck down the ice.   Their opponents must enjoy being able to relax when there is a turnover during a powerplay: don’t worry– the Leafs won’t try anything.

 

 

Posted on

The 2024-25 Maple Leafs

I have no idea why the Leafs think that the deep drop pass on the rush during a powerplay works. I’ll bet the very first time they did it, 50 years ago, it probably confused the other team for a few seconds. Rielly doesn’t even bother to try to hide the secret plan any more. As soon as he reaches the blue line, he starts looking for someone waiting, hiding behind the net.

Their play right now without Matthews confirms something Bill James pointed out about baseball years ago. People in general have an exaggerated sense of the impact of star players. It appears that the second tier of players on the Leafs are better than they think and, given more ice time and less focus on the “star”, the team performs better.

Helps to have good consistent goal-keeping too.

Nylander, leading the team in goals, in only +1. It’s not hard to see why. He can be brilliant. And then he can fall down with the puck when he’s the last man back or gives it away at center while his wingers are rushing forward. Sometimes he skates by an opponent with the puck and just kind of waves at him.  He often picks up the puck near the net in an excellent scoring position but chooses instead to skate off somewhere.

Max Domi is lost somewhere. I wonder if there’s something going on off the ice that is demanding his attention.

Rielly has always been over-rated. It looks like Berube is starting to realize it.  Watch him: most of the time he either passes the puck to someone who is standing still, or to someone who is about to be checked.

On the plus side, both Woll and Stolarz are performing very well in goal, in the top five of most departments except for wins– which is good (it means the Leafs are able to split goal-tending duties without taking a hit in quality).

Marner is a phenomenal play-maker.  Please don’t continue to make him play with Holmgren.

They are in first place at the moment, in a tough division (up against Boston, Florida, and Tamp Bay, among others).  But nobody cares about first place, of course.

Posted on

Elon Musk Cops No Subsidy

Apparently Elon Musk is on-board with getting rid of the $7500 federal tax break for electric vehicles. (Some Tesla models have some Chinese components and don’t qualify, so it won’t affect him as much as it will GM and Ford).

Why? Musk wants to get rid of ALL government subsidies for all enterprises. Hey, I’m on board with that! The oil industry gets $20 billion a year. Consumers will have to pick up the slack at the pump. The movie industry gets massive state subsidies as localities compete against each other to get Jennifer Lopez and Leonardo Di Caprio to come visit. Best of all, no more tax-payer subsidized sports stadiums. And no more states luring GM and Ford to build their plants in union-unfriendly Kentucky or Tennessee. Detroit will be happy.

I will believe it when I see it. Most likely, they will only try to remove subsidies for industries that benefit the consumer or the environment, but I’m open-minded.

I also hear that the Trump administration wants credit card interest rates dropped to no more than 10%. That might make up for Walmart having to increase their prices because of tariffs on Chinese goods (70% of Walmart’s products come from China).

Gosh, it’s going to be interesting.

The only time in history in which the working classes dramatically improved their economic status was the period after World War II up to the Ronald Reagan era (1980). Since then, under both Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, the working classes’ income level and prosperity has been stagnant, while the investor class has seen lavish increases in wealth.

It is a mass hallucination to believe working class people improved their lot from 2016-2020, but inflation did eat away their income from 2020-2024.

Posted on

The Usual Dubious Diligence

There is a case in Indiana of a man charged with the murder of two very young girls five years ago.  [The NYTimes Story].  

And More.

Liberty German and Abigail Williams went for a hike in a wooded park February 12, 2013.  They did not return.  A day later, their bodies were found at the bottom of a nearby ravine.

We’ve learned a lot over the years about how the police work.

We know that the police absolutely hate it when they don’t solve a crime that provokes a strong emotional response in the community, as in this case: two teenaged girls.

We know that once the police have landed on a possible suspect, they tend to have tunnel vision about any other possible suspects.  Because… well, they have a suspect.  They anticipate accolades from the credulous public: they caught the guy.  They nailed him.  Justice will prevail.

Hang him!

It’s not always clear whether the police are fully aware of how thin the evidence might be but don’t care, or whether they really believe that someone they have arrested and interrogated and pressured and incarcerated and threatened with a long, long prison sentence or even death, is guilty.  I think probably both.  It is clear that once the police have fixated on a suspect, they will come to believe that he is the only one who could have and did commit the crime.

In the case of Richard Allen, all the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction are there.  The evidence is extremely thin: no fingerprints, no blood stains, no objects that can be linked to the crime found in his house or car, no witnesses.  Just a grainy photo from a video on one of the girls’ cell phones.

There is a composite drawing the police issued with a wanted poster and a hefty reward offered for tips.

“It came through because of information that we received from persons that were in the area,” around the time the girls went missing, he said. “Either we did not make contact for the first time, or they were afraid to come forward.”

Sgt. Riley said the sketch artist had started about a month ago to piece together the descriptions, frequently consulting the witness or witnesses to refine the drawing. Investigators also interview people offering descriptions to make sure they are not just trying to get someone into trouble, he said.

The police had not disclosed where they got the composite drawing from.  It is not reassuring when the police insist that they took steps to make sure the source “was not just trying to get someone into trouble”. 

If I told you I didn’t take any money out of your wallet, what would you think?  You would think, why would I think you would think I took money out of your wallet?  

We don’t know if it was someone who might have seen the possible suspect in the area on the day the girls disappeared, or if it was given by someone who knew a man whom she thought was “creepy” and might have done it.  

Mr. Allen was held in solitary confinement.  After an extended period, he began to volunteer a confession to the murders.  We know how that works.

The only other evidence appears to be a bullet found near the crime scene that the police allege could have come from a gun owned by Mr. Allen:

Five years later, on Oct. 13, 2022, Mr. Allen was interviewed again and his home was searched. Investigators found a gun at Mr. Allen’s home that they determined to have at one point held the unspent round that was found near the victims’ bodies, the affidavit said.

Now, think about that.  Did they find the gun’s DNA on the bullet?  They can’t be serious.  Would a jury believe this?  This is ridiculous.

Think about the fact that the police would be extremely disappointed if it turned out that Richard Allen was not a very good suspect.  Well, he isn’t a very good suspect.  Not from the evidence they have presented.

Juries trust the police.  If the police say they have good reason to believe Richard Allen murdered Liberty German and Abigail Williams, well then, that’s good enough for me.  So what if they don’t have much evidence: they probably have stuff they can’t show us because of all those stupid laws protecting the rights of suspects.  You see it on TV all the time.

When you were in high school, did you know any really bright kids?  Did any of them become police officers?  I didn’t think so.