Umm, yeah. Remember this? Well, it happened again. And it’s even worse. Link to follow tomorrow morning.

Update: So here it is. Is doing a deep-dive reconstruction of Frozen worse than doing it for Star Wars? Who can say.

Unbelievably fantastic story from Justified’s Tim Jacob Pitts about being in K-19 with Harrison Ford:

“[The movie] is about a nuclear submarine whose reactor starts failing and melting down, and as the captain of this boat [Harrison Ford’s] gotta send his guys into the core of this submarine knowing that they will certainly die of radiation poison and horrible deaths. And that’s the crux of the drama.

And at this point, it’s three-quarters of the way through the movie, and he’s sent a bunch of people in, and he’s overlooking the sick bay where his men are nearly dying or laid out. I’m one of the men nearly dead in one of the bunks and Harrison Ford is looking across the cabin.

The DP (director of photography) is trying to get his eyeline, and he says, “Harrison, where are you looking for this scene? Where’s your eyeline. Where are you looking?

And Harrison says, (in a gravely Harrison Ford voice): “Into my soul.”

And the guy goes, “All right, Harrison. But where is your soul exactly? Is it to your right? To your left? Where’s your soul at Harrison?”

And Harrison Ford says, “Buried. Under a mountain of money.”

For reasons not worth getting into, yesterday I came into possession of something I never thought I’d own–a Golden Age Batman, courtesy of Galley Sis M.D. Have a look at the awesome:

It’s a beautiful copy. The ad on the back is classic, too–a Red Ryder air rifle!

But of course, you have to read the fine print. Despite having the price of $4.25 listed for the rifle, this ad is just to order the official Red Ryder comic book. Look closely at the wording in the coupon that you’re supposed to cut out and mail in:

This is so great. Cut it out and enclose “one thin dime” plus three cents for postage. But be aware! “Most boys are ordering an extra copy for their Girl Friend.”

Jon Evans has another entry in the post-scarcity economy genre here. It continues to amaze me that people not named Matthew Yglesias can write passages like this:

I’ve been arguing for some time now that the combination of new technology and old capitalism will soon drastically worsen inequality. It seems to me that technology will soon destroy jobs faster than it creates them, if it hasn’t started to already. Which is a good thing! Most of the jobs it destroys are bad, and most of the ones it creates are good.

What classifies a job as “good” or “bad”? Who has done the tabulation of jobs destroyed by technology versus created by technology? What, exactly, is the distribution of “good” and “bad” jobs in each of the created and destroyed columns?

Like so much of the tech-futurist press, this is all just taken as given because . . . internet!

As I’ve mentioned before, “post-scarcity economics” didn’t arrive yesterday. It’s been bouncing around the popular press and sci-fi writers for at last three quarters of a century. I’d be interested in knowing to what extent these boomlets coincide with moments of relative prosperity (or hardship) in the real world. Do our futurists tend to be more optimistic about the future when the here-and-now is gilded, or hard? Or is there no correlation between techno-utopian fantasy economics and real economics?

Seniors in Teaneck, New Jersey, engage in massive school prank/petty vandalism. Fifteen law-enforcement agencies (including K-9 units) respond.

It’s enough to make you wonder how the United States ever functioned in the lawless bygone days of, oh, 1990.

Those MIT kids were lucky the law didn’t SWAT teams and snipers weren’t around.

As a friend of mine delicately put it over email, OH MY GOD!

I don’t want to spoil it for you, so just go. Go. GO.

Disclaimer: The images you are about to see are merely historical recreations of what might have transpired based on meticulous research and the public record.

From Peggy Noonan:

Everyone keeps talking about the Francis Effect. The pope has captured the world’s imagination with his warmth, apparent merriness and palpable affection for those who are poor and imprisoned, in whatever way—jail, loneliness, illness, disability. An American cardinal smiles and shakes his head when he tells me that nowadays his seminaries are full.

Boy, that really is some effect. Francis assumed the throne of Peter on March 13, 2013 and just 13 months later, the “seminaries are full.” This suggests three possibilities:

(1) The Francis Effect is so powerful that within weeks of his ascension, a generation of young men suddenly decided to enter the priesthood because of him.

(2) A rising wave of vocations has been nurtured and seeded in the American Church by other, hardline, pontiffs who led the Church for the vast majority of these young men’s lives.

(3) Or, once again you have Catholics who should know better talking nonsense.

If there was a Francis Effect, it wouldn’t be hard to measure. Look at Church attendance year over year, from March 2012 to March 2013 and so on. Do the same thing with giving. Then look to enrollment in the vocations, numbers of baptisms, etc.

The fact that no one touting the Francis Effect actually shows any of these elementary numbers is pretty suggestive.

Update: Rod Dreher notes a particularly silly tweet from Pope Francis, who may or may not be angling to become the patron saint of Vox Dot Com.

And remember, I’m one of the bleeding hearts who thinks that “inequality” is a real problem.

Update 2: From Galley Friend L.B. in the comments:

Pew Research actually did a survey of American Catholics in March and found, as you might suspect, that the “Francis Effect” is bunk, at least when it comes to tangible stuff like Mass attendance or going to confession, as opposed to people just saying “He’s the Greatest Pope Eh-vur!”
http://www.pewforum.org/2014/03/06/catholics-view-pope-francis-as-a-change-for-the-better/

Money quote: “But despite the pope’s popularity and the widespread perception that he is a change for the better, it is less clear whether there has been a so-called ‘Francis effect,’ a discernible change in the way American Catholics approach their faith. There has been no measurable rise in the percentage of Americans who identify as Catholic. Nor has there been a statistically significant change in how often Catholics say they go to Mass. And the survey finds no evidence that large numbers of Catholics are going to confession or volunteering in their churches or communities more often.”

Yesterday the good folks at the Public Discourse published an uncharacteristically foolish essay by Brandeis grad student (and Islamic-convert) Celene Ayat Ibrahim-Lizzio, which takes the side of Brandeis and criticizes Ayaan Hirsi Ali for lacking a sufficiently “nuanced” view of the world in general, and Islam in particular.

As Galley Friend X put it:

[The Ibrahmi-Lizzio piece] was gross for a number of reasons–not least of which was that the Public Discourse was adopting a “free speech has consequences” view that they really don’t want to be adopting.  (“Brandon Eich could not be reached for comment.”)

There is something very rich about the girl who converted while living life’s lottery at Princeton lecturing Ali about how her position is insufficiently nuanced. I guess Ali missed the nuanced exegesis of the Imam in the Hague who prayed for her to get mouth cancer. Or she overlooked the critical-gender Sharia analysis of the Imam in Pittsburgh who said she should be sent to an Islamic country and beheaded for her apostasy. Those American Muslim communities are so diverse!