Archive for the ‘media’ Category

Review of the Netflix series Thieves of the Wood

Posted: January 19, 2020 by John Ruberry in culture, entertainment, media
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By John Ruberry

Are you missing some Robin Hood in your life? If you are a Netflix subscriber and you can stomach graphic violence, including torture, as well as gratuitous nudity, then you may want to take a look at the ten-episode Belgian series Thieves of the Wood, which began streaming earlier this month.

And you must be patient. Thieves of the Wood moves slowly, and if you don’t know about Jan de Lichte or Flanders of the 18th century, as I didn’t until a few days ago, you might get lost.

After watching the first episode I was indeed lost. So I got on my iPad where I learned that Jan de Lichte was a real person, a highway man, who of course robbed from the rich. After all, stealing from the poor is never very profitable. At the beginning of that first episode, de Lichte (Matteo Simoni) is being dragged on a sandy trail by mounted Austrian troops, he’s accused of murder and desertion. Now is the time to bring some historical perspective. Most of contemporary Flanders, a Dutch speaking region, lies in Belgium. But in the 1740s this region was then part of Austria although it was occupied by France. Historians call this conflict the War of Austrian Succession.

De Lichte escapes. He returns to his hometown of Aalst, which is run by corrupt Flemish aristocrats, led by Mayor Coffijn (Dirk Roofthooft). Just as de Lichte arrives in Aalst, so does the new bailiff, that is the chief of police, Jean-Phillipe Baru (Tom Van Dyck). Both learn that punishment is harsh in Aalst. Baru is horrified when he learns that a man and a woman are about to be flogged for the crime of stealing two rabbits from Coffijn’s estate, then branded–while their children watch. Now paperless, they are exiled from the city to live in a nearby forest.

Those woods are not the Nottingham Forest of Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood. The refuge is overrun by abject poverty, disease, prostitution, and opium smoking. De Lichte, aided by his half-brother Tincke (Stef Aerts), organize the downtrodden to fight back against the oppression, although it’s not until the fourth episode–I did say that Thieves of the Wood requires patience–that their plans bear fruit.

The loot is shared. Everyone wins in the forest. While Coffijn seethes

The scriptwriters are clearly hostile to the Catholic church. There is no Friar Tuck in this forest, in the town presides an imperious priest, Picke. He reminded me of the cruel Lutheran bishop in Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. 

As the series played out to me I fully expected a Donald Trump reference or two, especially since America comes up in the dialogue a couple of times. Then it hit me. Two of the town council members, including Mayor Coffijn, wear orange, or I should of course say red, periwigs. Perhaps that’s only a coincidence. Perhaps not. 

Some of the good: The costumes of Thieves of the Wood, including those wigs, are first-rate and the cinematography is superb. 

And now some of the bad: There are no subtitles, the Dutch dialogue instead is dubbed by British actors. The American entertainment industry suffers from the false premise that we won’t watch subtitled offerings. But last night I saw the Korean film Parasite, which is subtitled. Not only is Parasite an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture (and Best International Feature Film), but it is also performing very well in the domestic box office. Deservedly so, I’d like to add. 

Thieves of the Wood is rated TV-MA for reasons I listed above. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

America’s Greatest Enemy is Not a Physical One

Posted: January 18, 2020 by julietteochieng in media, Uncomfortable Truths, war
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But I repeat myself

by baldilocks

David Solway: 

Writing the book forced me to undertake relentless scrutiny of the values and beliefs I’d accepted as gospel and to realize that I had thoughtlessly succumbed to an all-encompassing lie fostered by the media, the academy, and the political left. Intellectually speaking, I had thought I was pole-vaulting; instead, I was doing the limbo. Almost every statement I’d read about American treachery, Israeli apartheid, the “religion of peace,” feminist grievance, global warming, right-wing extremism, the ironhanded Patriarchy, oppression of minorities, and the rest was an outright lie and functioned as aspects of what Quentin Skinner in From Humanism to Hobbes called “the potentially ruinous impact of rhetorical redescription,” that is, reframing something that is not the case as emphatically and undeniably the case. (…)

I finally began to understand that what I’d taken for history was nothing but ideology and what I’d thought was truth was an order-of-magnitude lie. And that my political and cultural preceptors were, to a man and a woman, professional liars.

Everything I’ve learned since I began paying attention has only served to confirm my conviction that we are living in unique times, an era in which lies come so thick and fast it seems like one is dodging bullets. It makes no difference where we turn, the lie is there. And we have credulously absorbed it as indisputable fact.

We Christians are familiar—some only passingly familiar–with Jesus’ assertion that the Devil is the Father of Lies. That is, he is the progenitor of everything that is false. Let’s stipulate that and go further: he is the architect and builder of Lies.

God is building His kingdom, and so the Adversary is building his.

This adversary does deal in simple falsehoods, but those aren’t his most lethal weapons. He is an imitator of his enemy, God, and therefore, his deceptions are high, wide, deep, broad, complex — and, long-term.

These types of deceptions are four-dimensional at the very least; they are his weapons of mass destruction.

I’ve pointed this out before.

Solway again.

Nearly all the political news we get is Fake News, disseminated by a media conglomerate that constitutes the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party in the U.S. and the Liberal Party in my own country. The media are proof positive that the political and cultural left has completed its long march through the institutions.

I kept reading to see if Solway came to the same conclusion that I did.

Pay-dirt:

We need to recognize that these “kings” have built a world of lies so massive and infusorial that we have been unwittingly conscripted into its dominion. We must somehow expose this bogus world and return to the real one, we must be wakeful rather than woke, though I’m afraid the struggle may now be Sisyphean. (…)

As M. Scott Peck reminds us in People of the Lie, “the only power that Satan has is through human belief in its [Satan’s] lies,” a belief consistent with lack of empathy, the failure of introspection and the inability to distrust oneself. This leads to the further question of whether evil lives in the human spirit or is a factor in the objective world. As Peck remarks, “Perhaps it will forever be impossible to totally discern exactly where the human Shadow leaves off and the Prince of Darkness begins.”

You’ll want to read Solway’s entire essay … and the late M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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Deval takes the Flag, CNN in action, Iranian Anchor vs American ones, Dems shocked Pols playing to win and Spot the Parody Under the Fedora

Posted: January 14, 2020 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, media, middle east, News/opinion, politics

Ok who had Deval Patrick in the: Last Black Democrat Standing Pool? That’s the case now that Cory Booker is out. I swear someone needs to find out if anyone with a large combination of vowels in their last name put a large wager to that effect down in either Vegas or London.

Went to lunch with DaWife monday and they had CNN on in the background. You would think the attack on the US embassy in Iraq or the protests in Iran going on right now never took place.

Speaking of the protests in Iran a rather amazing thing took place this week

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

This is an amazingly brave thing to do as such a public statement risks her life, but what I’d really like to see is such a statement from a member of the MSM.

Am I the only person in the US who isn’t all shocked over the Bernie and Warren playing hardball with each other.

Politics isn’t beanbag and presidential politics even less so. The idea that people are getting the vapors over these two fighting tooth and nail for the nomination make no sense at all to me.

Particularly since neither of them have a prayer of beating Trump anyway.

Finally let’s play “spot the parody” look at the image below

One of these is an actual news story from Newsbusters, one is from the Babylon Bee. A person familiar with the layout style of Newsbusters could likely spot the which is which but if you showed it to somebody who isn’t, would you be willing to bet real money as to which is which?

(FYI I showed it to my wife, she guessed wrong)

Spot the “Maverick” Paul, Lee (but NOT Gabbard)

Posted: January 13, 2020 by datechguy in media, politics
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Over the last week the MSM has developed a great affection for a pair of Republican “Mavericks” Rand Paul (R-KY) & Mike Lee (R-UT).

Both had serious objections and had a very different opinion of the White House briefing on Iran than other senators and those differences of opinion were highlighted & Lionized by the MSM. Mike Lee in particular was highlighted on MSNBC , CNN, NBC News & CBS.

As you might guess the MSM loved it because nothing is more popular than a republican who is willing to publicly hit a republican, particularly if it’s Donald Trump.

Paul’s or Lee’s moves which incidentally are both consistent with their previous positions. Those positions are coincidentally shared by their position on the President’s recent decisions on Iran. However a month ago there was another act of a Maverick that took place, one even more significant than either.

Tulsi Gabbard a Democrat candidate for President, when the vote for impeachment came up, voted “Present” on both articles of impeachment, in defiance of both the house but of the base if the party that she is seeking the nominate.

However you might have noticed that while there were several different words used to describe her, the one which was not employed was “Maverick”.

That’s because during the time of John McCain the word “Maverick” was always given a positive connotation because any person who took the side of the Democrats on a key issue, must be lionized across the press. In fact during the presidential campaign that language was used to describe Lindsey Graham, until of course he started supporting Donald Trump.

However a Democrat refusing to support impeachment, the single cause most dear to the left/media, is, as far as the media is concerned, beyond the pale, and a Democrat candidate for president doing so is even worse and Maverick is now identified as a complement of honor.

To put it simply because of her vote on Impeachment, Tulsi Gabbard couldn’t get herself described as a Maverick by the MSM if she came into congress wearing black broadcloth and wielding a deck of cards

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