Meet Iris Varela.

She is an old Chavista, basically since the beginning of the revolution and a couple of steps behind Chavez. She is a foul and disgusting creature who enjoyed bullying people adverse to her when the revolution was in its infancy and up to the point of showing up unexpectedly to a TV station and attacking a news pundit live because the day before he had said something unkind about her.

But as bully and disgusting as this little bundle of communist fascism can be, do not make the mistake of underestimating her as she is the Éminence grise behind the roving band of armed political enforcers known as Los Colectivos. She nurtured them, saw the row and released them into the wild and they repay her by being absolutely loyal to her and the revolution. It is hard to know how many thousands of people have been killed by her goons and probably we will never know.

Not too long ago, sh was named Minister of Prisons Affairs, a move that initially did not make much sense because she nows about running prisons as much as I know how to knit a sweater out of wool still attached to an alpaca. But then she fielded a strange request to president Maduro: 30,000 rifles. It was then that the information leaked: she will form a private army of violent pardoned felons  who will trade their pardons for service to her and the revolution “against the upcoming invasion by US Marines.”

There are leaked videos of sworn-in convicts standing at attention and a spokesperson thanking the Minister for the chance she is giving them and assuring they are willing to die for the Revolution. Of course, since there is no invasion coming, this is nothing but Iris increasing her power over the little people…ahem…the comrades.

In other news; Six years later, Venezuela’s Law for the Disarmament still has not yet achieved a reduction in deaths (other than by fudging stats), but the Government assures us that the results will be seen soon by everybody.

“Racists/Misogynists/-phobes are going to hate this movie because of [character]” is an obnoxious marketing ploy.

The use of it for the newest Terminator movie is stupid beyond measure.

Tim Miller Has A Message For Misogynists That Aren’t Happy With Mackenzie Davis In ‘Terminator 6’: “I Don’t Give A F–k”

My first thought was “I don’t give a fuck pretty much summarized my opinion of the next shitty Terminator film?”

Filmmaker Tim Miller has read your comments and knows that the general sentiment surrounding his upcoming “Terminator: Dark Fate” is a resounding “Why?” Specifically, after “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” why have filmmakers attempted (and failed) to bring back a franchise that hasn’t had a good sequel since the 1991 film? Well, Miller thinks he knows why and is hoping to show everyone come November.

I know the answer, but let’s see what he says.

In a new interview with Variety, Miller talks about why his film is different than previous ‘Terminator’ sequels that have sullied the image of James Cameron’s classic franchise. And apparently, a lot of that comes down to his lead, Mackenzie Davis.

Who is Mackenzie Davis and why should I care about her?

In the film, as seen in the trailer, Davis plays a new version of the “protector” character that has been seen in just about every ‘Terminator’ film since the first one in 1984. However, she’s not just a rehash of the Kyle Reese character from the original or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s lovable killer cyborg from ‘T2.’ No, she’s something very different.

“Joe [Abercrombie, a novelist & consultant for the film] came out with this idea that a new protector from the future is a machine fighter,” explained Miller. “It’s a painful life, and they’re scarred and take a lot of drugs to combat the pain of what’s been done to them. They don’t live a long time. It’s a very sacrificial role; they risk death to save others.”

I love The Terminator and T2, and I’m pretty sure both Reese and the T-600 die at the ends of those movies.  Reese knew he was sacrificing himself when he went back in time, so I’m not sure how this ‘new protector’ is much different.

He continued, “And from the very first suggestion it was always a woman. We had to look for someone who has the physicality, but I’m very sensitive to actors. I didn’t just want a woman who could physically fit the role but emotionally as well. Mackenzie really wanted to do it; she came after the role. She worked harder than anybody.”

And when you give a role like this to a female, it’s likely to turn heads. Even with Sarah Conner, played by Linda Hamilton, becoming one of the most iconic badasses in all of film, the general feeling is that ‘Terminator’ is a muscle-bound, bro-y affair. And if you’re one of those guys that expect dudes kicking the shit out of other dudes in ‘Dark Fate,’ you’ll likely be disappointed.

Have any of these people watched the first two Terminator movies?  Way to just blow past Sarah Connor and how awesome she was.

“If you’re at all enlightened, she’ll play like gangbusters,” said the director. “If you’re a closet misogynist, she’ll scare the fuck out of you, because she’s tough and strong but very feminine. We did not trade certain gender traits for others; she’s just very strong, and that frightens some dudes. You can see online the responses to some of the early shit that’s out there, trolls on the internet. I don’t give a fuck.”

Fuck you.

I genuinely love The Terminator and T2, those were excellent movies that 35 and 28 years later still hold up.  Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in T2 was a total badass.

I didn’t realize that I needed to be enlightened to understand that, I just thought I needed to like superb action flicks.

The thing about great female and black characters from the 80’s and 90’s is that they were great.  You weren’t force-fed some woke horseshit about how you should like them because they are minorities.

James Cameron made the protagonist of his move a woman and people ate it up.

Roger Murtaugh was too old for this shit in 1987.  Apollo Creed beat the piss out of Rocky then joined the CIA and got killed by a Predator in South America.  Then Murtaugh killed a Predator in LA in 1990.  That was an awesome era of action movies.

In 1996, the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was in the Marines and nuked a bunch of Aliens with the guy who predicted that the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park would start breeding.

I can’t imagine this current marketing style being used in the mid 90’s.

“If you’re at all enlightened, hell play like gangbusters,” said the director. “If you’re a closet racist, it’ll scare the fuck out of you to see a black man killing space aliens.”

That’s stupid.

We’ll see how Miller’s “Terminator: Dark Fate” plays with audiences when it’s released on November 1.

Based on this article, I’m sure it will play like shit with audiences.

If you want to know why there hasn’t been a successful sequel to the Terminator franchise since 1991, there is a simple answer: James Cameron.

James Cameron is a genius filmmaker and storyteller.  He wrote and directed The Terminator and T2.  Those were his.

Every single one since then has suffered from the Jaws Effect.  What is the Jaws Effect?

Jaws is a fantastic movie.  A true epic of a movie.  Miguel has written much about that.

Only Steven Spielberg had the genius to take a story about a shark attack and turn it into the movie that created the summer blockbuster.

The sequels were not Spielberg movies.  They were handed off to other directors to create formulaic gore movies that lacked the soul of Jaws.

T3 through T5 were the same, other directors and other writers using characters that Cameron created to make predictable CGI laden action movies.  They lacked the soul, the ‘jeu ne se qua’ that made Cameron’s movies so great.

Now here is the kicker.  James Cameron is back for T6.  He is the producer and writer, with Miller directing.  Cameron himself said “Terminator: Dark Fate is the direct sequel to Terminator 2.”

Holy shit, the genius is back!!!  And he brought Schwarzenegger and Hamilton back with him!!!

This could be good.

Why the fuck didn’t they say that.

Screw telling me, someone who grew up watching and loving The Terminator and T2 that I won’t like the movie if I’m not “enlightened.”  Tell me that James Cameron wrote the script.

In the words of ‘Joilet’ Jake Blues, they’re putting the band back together.

That should be the selling point of this movie.  That should be the ONLY selling point of this movie.

If this movie bombs, it’s because this style of aggressive “woke” manufactured controversy marketing just turns people off.

If they want this movie to do well, just keep telling people that James Cameron is once again managing the franchise.  We’ll come to see it for that.

I mentioned  last week that Mad Magazine was closing down and that it was a Mad Magazine that got me to begin to learn the English language just to try to understand the jokes. The day I posted, I found me what looked to be a decent copy and bought it. It just arrived:

It is almost pristine. The Fold In was never folded and what I can see is just old age because 46 years will leave a mark or two. And since I am not interested in the reselling value but the sentimental one, I am more than happy with it,

I already got a frame and I will put it up sometime tomorrow with my other landmark magazine.

Not a bad day conserving memories.

This is from the parade in New York City honoring the US National Women’s Team.

WATCH: NYPD officer Lauren Leggio sings the National Anthem at the start of the ceremony honoring the USWNT https://t.co/bD6LgDSbQa pic.twitter.com/OS1i1aPC1o

— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 10, 2019

And there is Megan Rapinoe on the end continuing her Anthem protest.

From CNN:

Senate Democrat wants to halt federal 2026 World Cup funding until USWNT receives equal pay

Sen. Joe Manchin introduced a bill Tuesday that would withhold federal funding for the United States’ hosting of the 2026 men’s World Cup until the men’s and reigning champion women’s national soccer teams receive equal pay.

Here is my solution:

Stop funding the US National Team.  All of it.

The men are losers and the women are disrespectful partisan hacks.

Rapinoe has every right to engage in her protest, but we shouldn’t have to fund it with tax dollars.

Kaepernick has every right to his protest and I don’t spend my money with the National Felon League.

This will also solve the gender pay issue, let the teams fundraise, then they can base their salaries off just how much money they can raise.

Problem solved.

This article is a year old, but I just saw it and considering what the Democrats are advocating in the Primary, it’s still appropriate to write about.

From Bloomberg News:

Finland’s Basic Income Test Wasn’t Ambitious Enough
The payments encouraged beneficiaries to take work that doesn’t pay a living wage.

No shit, Sherlock.  Who would have thought giving money to people would encourage self-indulgent indolence?

I know, everybody who didn’t get their degree from The Marx School of Economics at Leftists Indoctrination University.

KELA, the Finnish social security agency, has failed to secure the funding it needs to extend its universal basic income experiment beyond this year. Although it’s sad that this grand leftist idea is suffering another setback, Finland’s trial effort deserved its fate.

At least the land of Nokia has figured out that they should let the program, which was a terrible idea to begin with, die before it bankrupts them.

Before the experiment was approved by the government in 2016, KELA officials talked of paying 800 euros ($974) a month in unconditional income to a test group of working-age citizens.

That’s over $11,000 per year or just shy of a minimum wage job after taxes.  For doing nothing but breathing.

But by the time the program began early last year, the amount was whittled down to 560 euros: If extended to the whole country, the cost of the earlier proposal would have exceeded the Finnish government’s entire revenue.

It’s fun to watch a nation put its hand over the country’s “economic self destruct” button.

A similarly impractical approach led to the failure of a 2016 Swiss referendum on offering a payout of 2,500 Swiss francs ($2,540).

Two countries tried this bullshit and both failed.

That’s like watching your buddy lose at a game of Russian Roulette with a semi-auto and saying “I think I can do better.”

It’s all but impossible to live on 560 euros in Finland. A one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Helsinki rents for almost that much. So the experiment’s designers settled on not really paying the UBI to the unemployed, who kept a higher level of government support — at least 32.4 euros a day for the first 400 days after losing a job. Only the working poor would benefit significantly from it.

That limitation was designed to address two problems. Finland has a low employment rate for a rich country: just 71 percent of the working-age population, compared with 77 percent in neighboring Sweden and almost 86 percent in Iceland. So the idea was to provide an incentive for the unemployed to step into the job market, even if it meant taking on part-time or badly paid work. The other goal was to simplify Finland’s complex system of housing, child-care and other benefits by replacing them with the lump sum payment.

Macroeconomics is not a terribly hard subject to understand.  It is just “human behavior with money.”  The best way to understand macroeconomics is to be a cynical bastard and assume the worst in people, that they are lazy, stupid, and selfish.

That’s not mean by the way.  Lazy and selfish is the natrual state of life on earth.  Cheetas don’t run at top speed all the time, just the minimum that they need to, to catch a meal.  Life expands the least amount of energy it has to, to accomplish a goal.  It’s why ambush predation is so often seen in nature.  Extrapolated to economics, it means people won’t work harder than they have to, to meet a desired level of economic security.  You don’t put in overtime if you’re not going to get paid for it.

For something like UBI, ask “how would a lazy, stupid, and selfish person act if I gave them a bunch of cash.”  The answer is “they will work just enough to make up the difference in income between what we are giving them and where they feel comfortable.”

KELA is not promising to release any results of the experiment, which involves 2,000 people, until the end of 2019 or even the beginning of 2020.

It’s so bad they want to burry it.

But it was clear from the start that a basic income, even such a low one, is an extremely expensive way to boost precarious forms of employment. At 550 euros a month, KELA calculated, the UBI would cost 19.3 billion euros a year, while the government would only save 3.6 billion euros on existing benefits.

That is a shit ROI.

There are, in other words, less financially bruising ways of streamlining the benefit system. As for getting people to return to the job market, the center-right cabinet of Prime Minister Juha Sipila appears to be more interested in cost-effective negative motivation for the unemployed than in rewarding them for finding work that doesn’t pay a living wage. The government has proposed, for example, requiring out-of-work people to apply for at least one job a week to keep receiving benefits (unless they’re in job training programs).

they thought they would be paying people to work part-time until they found full-time employment.  What they got was subsidizing some millennial to have a part-time job so that millennial could spend more time hanging out or going to slam poetry readings or whatever bullshit millennials do.

Finland undertook its experiment for the wrong reasons. Using the universal basic income to increase labor market participation and phase out some benefits is like swatting flies with a sledgehammer. In a report on the future of work released earlier this month, the World Bank recommended the much more ambitious goal of considering UBI as a means of ensuring a “societal minimum” of welfare in a world of increasingly precarious employment and growing automation. If a society is to accept much higher taxes to pay for a basic income plan, it has to be for a revolutionary outcome, not a mere bump in employment numbers and a dent in the cost of social security administration.

BANKRUPT ALL THE NATIONS!!!

Low UBI-like payments aren’t even likely to work well for the purposes KELA had in mind. Neither dividends from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which paid every state resident $1,100 for 2017, nor Iran’s one-year experiment, in 2011, with paying 96 percent of its population $45 a month, had any effect on employment. The Finnish program, of course, pays more but also below subsistence level, so its outcome is likely to be similar.

Must try the failure of Communism harder next time.  This is actually worse than Communism because you are not making up the difference with forced labor.  It’s “to each according to his need” without the “from each according to his ability.”

The UBI idea is not dead. It’s still worth watching other experiments, especially the ones that actually provide a living income.

No, no it’s not.

These include Oakland, California, which pays $2,000 a month, almost exactly at the poverty line, and the one in Kenya, which pays $23 a month, about half the average income in the country’s rural areas. Other tests, in the Dutch city of Utrecht and an upcoming one in Ontario, Canada, offer low payouts relative to the living standard, but still higher than in the Finnish test.

If these experiments show that tangibly increased financial security makes people more inclined to study, try more creative endeavors or even start businesses, the undeniably high cost of the UBI may yet seem justified.

Those will fail too, and fail harder and faster because those people will be paid not to work at all.

UBI is just as much of a failure as socialism and for exactly the same reason.

There has never been an UBI that worked the way it was intended, yet these idiots want more of it.

As we watch the Democrat primary in which every Democrat promises more free stuff, keep thinking about this.

All free stuff does is subsidize indolence.  It never fails to fail, and still they want to do it more.

Mom woke up with may seem to be stomach flu. Usually nothing bad, but she is 87 which means she is not a young spring chicken anymore. She is grumbling and complaining more than usual and I that means I must pay no other attention than to hers.

At least I managed to sneaked Cup #1 of Coffee.

I leave you with a funny so your trip over here is not wasted. And it is for real.

Suspect hiding from authorities passes gas so loudly that it gives up hiding spot

A year ago, I wrote a post about how tourists are starting to see San Francisco and how the city just didn’t care about the tourists’ opinion.

It’s something many San Franciscans see on a daily basis, outside their homes or offices and during their commutes. For better or for worse, locals are used to walking by crime scenes, have seen open injection drug use, and have witnessed mental health episodes firsthand.

But when a tourist lands at SFO, guidebook in hand, that reality can be shocking.

“Is this normal or am I in a ‘bad part of town?’ Just walked past numerous homeless off their faces, screaming and running all over the sidewalk near Twitter HQ and then a murder scene. Wife is scared to leave hotel now,” wrote an Australian Reddit user Wednesday.

Well, the tourists noticed and as a result:

Big Convention Pulls Out Of San Francisco, Citing Unsafe Streets

Tourists are turning away from the City by the Bay, while a huge medical convention has cancelled plans to meet in San Francisco, saying its members don’t feel safe on the streets.

Locals may feel comfortable, but visitors are often shocked when the reality of San Francisco’s streets is a far cry from its postcard image.

This is something I have and will never understand about “big city folk.”  How does a person normalize to the idea of seeing some homeless junkie taking a shit on a sidewalk while jabbering to themselves and think “that’s just life in our diverse metropolis.”  No, that’s a deranged person shitting on your street, being a biohazard to the rest of society.

“You can smell it,” says one tourist.

“I come from a third world county and it is not as bad as this,” says another.

Holy fuck.

Now it’s seriously affecting the city’s biggest business: tourism

Who’d of thunk that?

“They feel their safety is as risk because they are seeing so many people with issues,” says Kevin Carroll of the San Francisco Hotel Council.

“They see people laying on the streets — petty crimes going on in the streets,” says Joe D’Alessandro with Travel SF.

I went to my last convention in San Francisco in 2011 when I got a paper published.  The two-block walk from the hotel to the convention center was littered with panhandlers and bums that were begging from the people attending the convention.  Half of them were smoking pot, stoned, sitting on the street with a cardboard sign in their laps.  I can’t imagine how much worse it’s gotten in the 8 years since then.

Tourism rakes in $9 billion per year in San Francisco, so officials have been reluctant to go public with the problem. In part, it is because it makes the city look bad and that’s bad for business.

That is some God-damn Soviet level bullshit.  Rather than fix the embarrassing problem, the bureaucrats hide it.  Fuck the city management and everyone who keeps voting for them.  They deserve every bad thing that happens to the city.

A major medical association has pulled its $40 million convention out of San Francisco over the state of the streets.

“The convention felt that the streets of San Francisco are not a place that a lot of their delegates wanted to come to,” says Alessandro.

The medical group is not alone.

“A number of groups are concerned about the streets of San Francisco,” says Alessandro. “They say ‘we don’t know if the streets are safe, we don’t know if we want to meet here.’”

You mean a bunch of doctors don’t want to get accosted by junkies and bums?  I’m shocked.  I bet Orlando is happy to take them.  There are no bums in The Mouse’s back yard, he makes sure of that.

San Francisco spends over $300 million each year on housing and homeless programs, but you wouldn’t know it walking down Market Street.

“It’s obviously not making the difference that it needs to,” says Carroll.

Well ackshually… any economics nerd will tell you that what San Francisco has created is a perverse incentive and that rather than fix its homeless problem – which is also a drug problem – it attracts more homeless junkies who show up for all the free giveaways.  There was a whole South Park episode about that.

The hotel industry is pressing for a heightened police presence in tourist spots to give people the feeling of safety and comfort. They also want the existing laws on drugs and loitering better-enforced.

THAT’S RACISTS!!!

As long as the radical Left still rules the roost in San Francisco the police will always look the other way and crime, vagrancy, and public drug use will go up.

Like in every other case, the woke management won’t suffer an ounce but the working people who rely on the business income – in this case, tourist dollars – are going to get punched right in the wallet.

Go woke, go broke, San Francisco tourism.