Tag: analysis

SubscribeStar Saturday: Mostly Peaceful Politics

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Lately I’ve been listening to a number of historical biographies from The People Profiles, an excellent YouTube channel that produces incredibly balanced, detailed biographies of historical figures.  The videos are always very well done, and the channel hosts a stable of exquisite narrators with British accents.

My absolute favorites are their biographies of English monarchs (at the time of this writing, they’ve just posted a video about King Charles II, which I am excited to listen to soon).  What strikes me about these monarchs is that, even as rulers, they dealt with constantly shifting political landscapes that would make our current politics look tame by comparison.

It wasn’t like these monarchs were sitting back and eating grapes (I mean, they probably did do that stuff); they constantly had to balance the needs of their people; their ornery nobility; and their expensive foreign policies (which typically meant “expensive foreign wars”).  Add to that rebellions, assassination attempts, succession crises, and all the rest, and it quickly makes one thankful for a relatively peaceful and predictable political order.

At the same time, there is something enviable about monarchical rule.  A bad king could cause a great deal of damage—and many bad kings did just that to England—but could also be identified easily as the source of a nation’s woes.  Dealing with a tyrannical monarch, in some ways, was far easier than dealing with a tyrannical bureaucracy.

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TBT^16: Back to School with Richard Weaver

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The 2023-2024 school year commenced yesterday, which brings to mind this annual tradition of mine:  re-reading the introduction to Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences.

Unfortunately, I don’t always manage to dip back into this classic work every year, but I find that when I do, it helps to crystallize why it is I do what I do, and what is at stake.  I’m under no illusion—as some teachers are!—that I can “save the world” or any such messianic nonsense.  The crusading impulse that I possessed as a naïve young teacher is no longer there, beyond some vestigial bits of self-righteous fury that peak from behind the clouds of well-worn cynicism.

Still, we have much to be thankful for, even as the empire burns around us and the elites fiddle.  Life is sweet; the opportunity for an education is a privilege and joy.  I’m thankful to be a small part of that process.

With that, here is 25 August 2022’s “TBT^4: Back to School with Richard Weaver“:

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

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While I was visiting my older brother in Indiana in July, he took me to see the new Indiana Jones flick, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), on an IMAX screen.

I did not go into the film with high expectations.  Everything I’d heard about the movie was negative:  Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character was obnoxious; Indiana Jones’s advanced age is played to denigrate the character; the whole thing is another one of Kathleen Kennedy’s wish-fulfillment films (in which she casts an unlikable British brunette to be a stand-in for herself, an unlikable feminist studio exec).

Perhaps it’s because I went in with such low expectations that I actually found the movie to be not that bad.  Was it good?  Not really.  Should it have been nearly three hours long?  Absolutely not.  Was it as bad as critics made it out to be?  Well, that depends.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Floozy Report

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

As yours portly edges ever closer to forty, something interesting has happened:  I have suddenly—apparently!—become irresistible to the ladies.

I am as mystified as you, my dear readers.  All I can figure is all the babes have finished riding The Carousel in their twenties and find a chubby, tall, financially stable beta male an attractive prospect.

The point of this piece, however, is not to brag about my sudden abundance of single ladies in their early-to-mid-thirties hankering for some doughy man-meat.  Rather, it’s to document the state of the dating world today, and to identify for the curious reader the types of women that find themselves—like yours portly—cruising dating apps for a chance at love.

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Island Living: Vanuatuan Taxes

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The FAIRtax folks, who advocate for replacing income and corporate taxes with a unified national sales tax, posted an interesting piece about the remote Pacific nation of Vanuatu (“FAIRtax in Vanuatu?“).  It discusses how the archipelago boasts incredibly low taxes:  a 15% value-added tax (“VAT”), and a business license fee of 5% (presumably, 5% of a business’s total annual revenue).

I’m personally agnostic on the adoption of a national sales tax in the United States.  I do believe it would be much better than the income tax, which I absolutely loathe, and which requires a complex and oppressive bureaucracy to administer.  I also resent sending the IRS all of my personal information every single year, including how many miles I drove and what sheet music I purchased (although those are great for those sweet, sweet tax write-offs).  If it were practical, I’d much rather see a national sales tax, or even a return to old-school tariff regimes.

The problem is that, should we ever adopt a national sales tax, it will likely accompany the national income tax.  A national sales tax also places a great deal of strain on States and localities.  Good luck having a 10% national sales tax and a 6% State sales tax (as we do in South Carolina) and a plethora of local-option sales taxes (about 2% here in Darlington County; higher in neighboring Florence County).  Tack on hospitality taxes, and it adds up fast.

For example, in neighboring Florence County, eating out automatically comes with a 10% sales tax:  the 6% State sales tax, plus local sales and hospitality taxes, totally 10%.  If we had a conservative 10% national sales tax on top, your $5 footlong (already gone—part of America’s mythological past) becomes $6 immediately.  20% sales tax means $1 of taxes for every $5 spent.  A $500 item would cost $600.

I still think that’s preferable to the income tax, and instead of creating a disincentive to work, it would create a disincentive to spend.

But I digress.  For a small nation like Vanuatu—population of around 300,000—a national sales tax makes sense.  It’s a small enough area geographically and demographically that it the national sales tax is, essentially, akin to a State sales tax.  As the article from FAIRtax.org notes, the island has something of a clean slate:  no welfare, no government pensions, etc.  Most people are subsistence farmers, and tourism is the major industry.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Oppenheimer (2023)

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If Sound of Freedom (2023) is the must-see film of the year due to sheer moral imperative, Oppenheimer (2023) is simply the must-see film of the year due to its technical and artistic brilliance.  If means and availability allow, see it in IMAX.  The visuals and the sound are a massive part of this film, and feeling the sound of the first successful test of the atomic bomb really drives home the impact—and the implications—of this terrible new weapon.

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The Return of the Cinema?

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After years of declining box office totals and the closures of The Age of The Virus, it suddenly feels like moviegoing is back.  Four major releases seem to be driving folks to theaters in droves:  Barbie, Sound of Freedom, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, and Oppenheimer.  Even with relative flops like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and the woke Pixar flick Elemental, everyone seems to be flooding back into theaters, almost out of nowhere.

To be fair, box office receipts for Summer 2022 were up, likely on the strength of Top Gun: Maverick (2022).  Perhaps I didn’t darken the door of a theater in 2022 as frequently as I have in 2023 (there’s something about being single and dating that drives me to the movies frequently), so my admittedly anecdotal observations are skewed.  But, dang, it sure does feel like folks are flooding back into theaters.  In my mind, that’s a good thing.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Sound of Freedom (2023)

The Portly Politico17 Comments

Before beginning this review, let me state that you must see Sound of Freedom (2023).  It is likely the most important film of the last decade, if not this century, so far.  If you’d like to contribute to help others see it in theaters, Angel Studios has a pay-it-forward program.  If you are financially strapped but want to see it on the big screen—and, trust me, you want to see it on the big screen—Angel Studios allows you to claim free tickets (well, tickets, other folks have paid for).  Lead actor Jim Caviezel compares the film to Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which President Lincoln (apocryphally) claimed “started this great war” (the American Civil War) because of the impact it had on the burgeoning anti-slavery movement in the United States.  For what it’s worth, I think Caviezel is correct:  Sound of Freedom is waking people up to the terrifying realities of child sex trafficking.  —TPP

If cinema does one thing well, it is creating an experience for the audience.  We’ve grown used to watching big-budget, CGI-infested foolishness that overloads our senses and shuts down our brains—an experience in and of itself—but the real power of film is to make something beyond our personal experience real for us.  Sound of Freedom (2023) has that effect in bringing to life the real-world tragedy of human trafficking, specifically child sex trafficking.

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The Joys of Fasting

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Yours portly got very portly over the last year.  I struggle against two of life’s greatest delicacies:  food and women.  Without getting into too many specifics, the untimely implosion of involvement with a member of the latter led to a self-drugging with the former.  Combined with the cold winter months, when all I want to do in the evenings is eat an entire pizza while watching horror movies, yours portly’s weight ballooned from around 235.5 pounds to a disgracefully fat 271.8 pounds in a matter of six months or so.

Being morbidly obese is certainly on-brand for this larger-than-life blog (and the chunky personality behind it), but it’s not exactly good for mental and physical health.  I’d like for readers to continue to have something to read from me, so after months of overindulging, I’m finally taking steps to right the ship and throw some of the blubber overboard.

My solution is one I followed last summer, when I found myself in a similarly bechunked state (though not nearly as bechunked as I am now):  intermittent fasting.

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