Has anybody on here watched the new movie “Napoleon”? Is it worth seeing?

From the trailer, the actors looked a bit too geriatric for the roles but it seems like a new fad to star actors in their dotage in roles they aged out of decades ago.

The new movie I am looking forward to is the prequel to Hunger Games with a convoluted, forgettable title. The book was seriously better than the Hunger Games series, and the trailer gives hope that the movie will do it justice.

Let’s wait for more details but the pictures from the site are very disturbing.

I always wondered how my midlife crisis would manifest. Unexpectedly, it turned me into a Ukrainian writer, and this will never stop being funny.

God, I wish my father were alive to see it.

What do you, friends, think that the cover of my book Contemporary Spanish Literature for Ukrainians should look like? I have zero ideas.

The absolute cynicism of “inclusive and anti-racist” policies is extraordinary:

Nov. 20, 2023

New York Gives Up on High-School Education

Last Monday, the New York Times reported that an advisory group for New York’s Education Department, under pressure to fix slumping graduation rates at its public schools, would propose not improving the education of the students but making the Regents Examinations, which the state has required since 1876 for a high-school diploma, optional. Other options such as “capstone projects,” presentations, or “performance-based assessments” would also enable graduation.

What offends the most about the proposal to make the Regents Exam optional is that it is understood by all that the children of the ambitious, upwardly mobile, or rich will continue to take standardized tests to distinguish themselves from their competitors for admission to top undergraduate schools. Rather, this is merely a shabby way for New York’s Education Department to help “clear the books” of students whose educational experiences have not prepared them for life. Unstated, but no secret, is the disparate impact this will have on black and Hispanic students who are disproportionately likely to be given a diploma as a substitute for an education. Instead of teaching them properly, New York cynically proposes to choose the path of least resistance: lowering standards to the point of near-indeterminacy, so that undertaught students can be handed a certificate and passed along to the workforce or the undergraduate system as someone else’s problem to fix

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/new-york-gives-up-on-high-school-education/

This isn’t about going or not going to college. Without standardized testing, you can hide the fact that, like already happens in Baltimore, the entirety of the students in inner-city schools lack proficiency in reading and math. You can simply not educate these kids at all.

Folks, remember: anti-racism is austerity. You’ll pay more taxes, get fewer services, and pay out of pocket for what the taxes used to cover. Those who don’t have money to cover additional out of pocket costs will be exceptionally screwed.

Many good people were duped into supporting anti-racism and the BLM. They sincerely thought they were doing good. But look where it led. It’s time to stop before we destroy an entire generation of low-income kids for short-lived joys of acute self-righteousness.

I have to keep reminding myself that language means something different to most other people. I have moved between several languages easily my entire life, so I can’t comprehend the reality of the people who only have one language. They are terrified of other languages because they genuinely can’t imagine not feeling like crap in a different linguistic environment.

Quebec is having yet another language freakout, and I’m trying to be understanding. They have excellent coffee, so I’m willing to cut a lot of slack.

Milei won in Argentina.

This is amazing. Argentina is a country that deserves better, and now it has a chance.

It’s been a very long time since anybody heard anything remotely resembling hopeful news from South America. Coupled with the nationalist protests in Spain, this is a good moment for the Hispanic world.

Here’s a text message exchange I had with my husband who’s back home while I’m in Canada:

N: I picked up a hot hen at Sam’s.

Me: I assume what you mean to say is that you bought a roast chicken for dinner.

He wasn’t trying to be funny. “A hot hen” is a literal translation from Russian. We have no idea why the gigantic birds sold in North America are called chickens and not hens.

Going back to the subject of over-representation, it’s curious but not remotely surprising that the scientists at the center of the OpenAI scandal – Altman, Brockman and Sutskever – are Jewish. And half of the company’s employees are Israeli.

This isn’t just IQ. These are the people with both brain power and vision. Jews are very over-represented among this small group.

Here’s another example of over-representation:

I’m an immigrant and I don’t murder anybody. Most of my friends are immigrants, and nobody is remotely violent. But this is massive over-representation. Really striking.

The taboo on noticing over-representation is that, supposedly, once people notice it, they will do terrible things to the over-represented group. The theory makes no sense because everybody already notices. The prohibition on saying it aloud doesn’t prevent anybody from knowing. All that happens is that people get mad at the efforts to protect them from observing reality.