• Given the condition of San Francisco today, isn’t it overdue for Hollywood to reboot Dirty Harry? Or at least run Dirty Harry for mayor? After all, Clint Eastwood was mayor of Carmel. Or is the place so far gone that John Wick might be necessary? (Or Robocop?)
• Word out today is that Georgia is going to indict Trump for RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) violations. This is as good a time as any to remind everyone that RICO was intended chiefly to be used against people named Rico.
• Re: Barbie. Okay I saw it (I have a kid who really wanted to see it), and I think a lot of conservative critics of the movie are going overboard with their attacks on it. I’m hoping to have soon a full review here from an occasional guest contributor who has a much better grasp of popular culture, but for now I’ll just say that the “patriarchy” theme running throughout the movie is so over the top that it is meant to be understood as an absurd parody—just like the way race and racism is the central satirical element of Blazing Saddles. As everyone knows, the left can’t see past the use of the n-word in Blazing Saddles to appreciate its intent, whose script was written mostly by Richard Pryor, recall. I think our team is making a similar mistake with Barbie. Your mileage may vary.
(Yes, I’ve also seen Oppenheimer, and will try to treat it in due course.)
• Quote of the day from the great Riley Gaines: “Think about this. 1940s, World War II, men lied about their age to get in to enlist. Now, in 2023, we have men lying about their sex to get into women’s sports, or women’s prisons, or domestic shelters, or sororities or bathrooms, locker rooms.”
• Vive la France! We’ve commented numerous times before about how France went big for nuclear power back in the 1980s at exactly the moment we gave it up under relentless pressure and litigation from the irresponsible environmental movement. Now some of France’s nuclear power plants are aging out and looking at being closed down over the next decade or two. For a time France was talking about “going green” and embracing renewables as replacements like every other misguided European government (thanks, Angela Merkel), but have since done an about face an have just committed to a new generation of nuclear power plant construction:
France to speed up nuclear power deployment
A bill to speed up the construction of new nuclear reactors was approved by the French parliament, with the government hailing it as an environmental step forward.
Lawmakers validated the bill to accelerate the construction of new nuclear reactors. The compromise text struck between the National Assembly and the Senate was voted by 399 votes to 100.
MPs from the majority (Renaissance, Horizons, Modem), the independents (LIOT), the right (Les Républicains) and the extreme right (Rassemblement national) voted in favour of the text, in addition to a dozen communist MPs. (Emphasis added.)
You may remember in a previous note that a French source told me France’s Communists supported nuclear power back in the 1970s and 1980s, while our Communists (Jane Fonda, etc) opposed it. Good to see the French Communists still have more sense than ours.
Once it comes into force, the new law will speed up the construction of new nuclear reactors by simplifying the required administrative procedures and planning documents. The Energy Transition Ministry expects future construction times to be reduced by at least two years.
In addition, a 50% cap on nuclear power’s share of France’s electricity mix was removed.
So what’s our excuse?
• Lastly, California’s last day of snow skiiing this year was. . . yesterday, August 6.
The New York Times was not happy about this climate narrative confounding story:
It’s August. Californians Are Still Skiing. Don’t Ask.
Two of the biggest ski resorts on Lake Tahoe were still hopping on the Fourth of July, a time of year when the mountains are usually full of wildflowers. Mammoth Mountain, 140 miles south of the lake, got a positively Alaskan 75 or so feet of snow at its summit and is only now celebrating the final day of the season. . .
In mid-July, well after all the hot dogs and fireworks, I headed up to the Sierra and ran into so much lingering snow that the road through Yosemite National Park hadn’t yet opened for the season. . .
Remember how we were told a decade ago that snowfalls would soon become a thing of the past, and ski resorts were threatened with extinction?
Anyway, you just knew this story had to build toward a lugubrious “lesson” for us:
Climate scientists have been warning us about not just global warming but also global weirding, or climatic dysregulation so severe that our most familiar landscapes are suddenly unrecognizable. And don’t bother trying to get used to them in their new form, because they’re going to keep changing, at an ever-faster pace. Unpredictable change is the new status quo. On an emotional level, there’s something undeniably frightening about that — where’s it all going? — but it can also, in a rare instance like the chance to ski in the dog days of summer, bring a disorienting joy.
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