Month: April 2022

MIT Reinstates Standardized Testing Requirements for Admissions


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This week, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced that it would reinstate its SAT/ACT test requirement for applicants. In a departure from the trends set by other elite universities, MIT rolled back its admissions policy, implemented in the 2020–2021 admissions cycle, which made standardized test scores optional. Administrators cited key issues with “holistic” admissions standards, an increasingly popular method of equitably distributing open spots to students regardless of how well they perform on standardized tests.

In a statement explaining the decision, MIT Dean of Admissions and Student Financial Services Stu Schmill noted that MIT’s “research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT.”

Without an objective measure like a standardized test, low-income students—who may not have equal access to other pieces of the holistic pie, such as a plethora of Advanced Placement (A.P.) classes or numerous extracurriculars—have a harder time proving that they are academically prepared for an MIT education. A move that was intended to increase diversity and help low-income students, as it turns out, mostly helps low-scoring wealthy students—and makes it harder to identify talented yet underprivileged applicants.

MIT now distinguishes itself from other elite universities, a spate of which have removed their SAT and ACT requirements in recent years, primarily citing COVID-19 and diversity-related justifications for the policy change.

The original logic of such policies is based on the idea that SAT and ACT scores correlate strongly with income, which suggests that students from poorer households are denied admission to competitive schools solely because they can’t afford to ace the SATs.

However, omitting standardized test scores makes all applicants reliant on application materials that correlate even more highly with income, such as admissions essays. A 2021 Stanford study found that essays are actually more strongly correlated with household income than SAT scores. Thus, by omitting one income-correlated metric, one that is even more closely related to income takes prominence.

While wealthy parents can pay for test prep, they can’t take a standardized test for their children (well, almost never). However, with essay coaches and college counselors at their disposal, many wealthy students’ college essays can be manicured to fit exactly what schools are looking for.

Another factor that few holistic admissions advocates acknowledge is that family wealth correlates with college readiness. This is not because applicants from middle, upper-middle, and upper-income households are more worthy of higher education, but because their family wealth has allowed them to purchase tutoring and test prep services, if not property zoned for an elite public school, as well as extracurricular opportunities.

Attempting to shuffle around the factors used to measure college readiness will never close the readiness gap between low- and high-income students. The narrative pushed by some testing critics is that there is no actual academic skill gap between low- and high-income students, and that it is simply the tests that create this illusion (with some even claiming standardized test questions are too culturally biased for poor students of color to understand). However, as uncomfortable as it may make us, a student attending a poorly performing school with few A.P. classes and a student who attends a school with a rigorous college-prep curriculum will likely end up with vastly different skill sets. In short, the issue is the massive disparity between what American primary and secondary schools can do for their students, not the ways in which we measure the very real results of that disparity.

MIT’s turn toward standardized tests will hopefully encourage other universities to reinstate their own standardized test requirements—a move that will actually help ambitious low-income students prove their exceptional talent, rather than making it harder to identify.

The post MIT Reinstates Standardized Testing Requirements for Admissions appeared first on Reason.com.

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In Major Escalation, Germany Approves Delivery Of Infantry Carrier ‘Tanks’ To Ukraine

In Major Escalation, Germany Approves Delivery Of Infantry Carrier ‘Tanks’ To Ukraine

In a significant escalation that is sure to have huge impact not only on the prospect for direct Russia-NATO military confrontation but also Europe’s energy crisis and natural gas showdown with Moscow, Germany has approved “tanks” for Ukraine. 

“Germany has approved the delivery of 56 combat tanks to Ukraine, a German defense ministry spokesperson told CNN Friday,” according to a breaking report. But more specifically these are in actuality ‘infantry fighting vehicles’ – and lighter than what CNN is referencing as conventional “combat tanks”.

The ministry described to CNN that “The tanks, which are type Pbv 501, stem from the Cold War-era East German army and had been sold to Sweden, then resold to the Czech Republic, who will deliver them to Ukraine.”

Final approval is expected to come pending review by the country’s Federal Security Council, as stipulated under the German War Weapons Control Act.

The 56 PbV-501 armored personnel carriers are expected to be equipped with cannons and machine guns. Reuters details the nature of the heavy armored vehicles as follows:

Germany has approved the delivery to Ukraine of several dozen infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) that originally belonged to the former communist East Germany amid criticism that Berlin is not sending enough military aid to Kyiv.

Berlin has given the green light for 56 vehicles of the type PbV-501 to be passed on from a Czech company to Kyiv, a spokesman for the defense ministry said on Friday.

So Germany has gone in a little over a month from being ‘neutral’ on weapons for foreign conflict, refusing to allow even third parties from shipping German-produced weapons to Ukraine, to now shipping some serious heavy military machinery. 

And even though these old east German troop carriers will do little to stand up to Russia’s actual tank units, Kiev is likely to seize on this as at least a start leading possibly to the transfer of more up-to-date combat tanks from the West capable of blunting Russian infantry.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/01/2022 – 11:25

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/nJuaY40 Tyler Durden

A High School Banned Students From Selling Snacks. Predictably, a Black Market for Snacks Emerged.


dreamstime_xl_46304468

When Carlos got pinched by the fuzz, he was holding some hot commodities.

Flaming hot, in fact.

No, that’s not slang. The illegal behavior that landed Carlos (not his real name), a ninth-grade student at a high school in the southern suburbs of Chicago, in the deans’ office on a mid-September morning in 2019 was the illicit sale of chips to one of his fellow students. For the crime, he was summarily sentenced to a one-day suspension from school—and his mother was called to pick him up.

As Karlyn Gorski, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago, relates in a paper recently published in the journal Youth & Society, Carlos is just one small part of a robust black market for snack foods that persists at Hamilton High (not the school’s real name) despite the best efforts by school administrators, security guards, and teachers to stamp it out. The punishment handed out to Carlos for his busted chip-deal was actually a light sentence, Gorski explains, with administrators granting leniency on the grounds that Carlos was a freshman and might not yet understand the school’s zero-tolerance policy for unapproved exercises of snack-related capitalism. Repeat offenders, she writes, faced in-school suspensions—the high school equivalent of solitary confinement.

Gorski spent 112 days observing students and adults at Hamilton during the 2019–2020 school year, though her research was cut short by the school’s closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While there, she observed a widespread black market for snack sales. The perpetrators were mere children, but they organized “elaborate strategies to hide sales, build networks of sellers, and develop a verbal shorthand around the market.”

By outlawing the sale of snacks, the school ensured that only outlaws would sell snacks.

Enforcement of the snack-selling ban was robust, with security guards even relying on the use of mounted cameras to identify perpetrators so they could be hauled out of class and reprimanded.

“I had to go get him out of class, send him to the dean, do the whole thing,” one security guard—pseudonymously monikered “Karen”—told Gorski. Punishing a student for a victimless crime was apparently more important than whatever he might have learned in class that day.

But beyond the amusing anecdotes about deception and the heroic struggles of would-be entrepreneurs against the school snack cops, the paper contains some serious implications about what the school is teaching its students. “Adult responses to youth behaviors can produce a stigma of deviance around activities that, in other contexts, are permitted or even lauded,” Gorski explains.

Within the school environment, not all snack sales were illicit. Students in a Spanish club selling cookies to raise money for a field trip to Peru were allowed to “carry their wares openly and advertise on posters throughout the school,” writes Gorski. “Sellers working for their own gain did not have the luxury of such promotion. When the profits of snack sales benefitted organizations that fell under the school’s purview, they were lauded; the school retained control over the proceeds, ensuring the money went to something ‘worthy.'”

By contrast, when students were caught “selling” by teachers and administrators, their motives were “subject to moral scrutiny,” writes Gorski, who described an incident in which one teacher told a student that selling snacks to fund the purchase of a new pair of shoes was a “poor use” of resources.

The students at Hamilton, a majority of whom are minorities and roughly 80 percent from low-income households, had no trouble deconstructing the school’s unequal treatment of the same economic activities. One student, code-named Lucas, told Gorski that “they’re basically training us for a fake world” in which good behavior is rewarded while trying to make a buck is regarded as valuable only if the seller’s intentions are worthy.

“Adults thus undermined their own disciplinary apparatus by demonstrating its unfairness,” concludes Gorski. “With consequences so irregularly applied, and the activities they aimed to prohibit so mandate…it made more sense to disregard the prohibition and enjoy the rewards of buying and selling treats.”

The high school snack policies that are the subject of Gorski’s paper form an eerily effective microcosm of similar arrangements in other parts of the world. Prohibition, which banned the serving of alcohol in the United States for more than a decade in the early 20th century, produced a black market that kept the booze flowing to those who had access to the necessary money and connections. Drug prohibition has produced many of the same outcomes.

Gorski points to an even more pernicious parallel: prisons, where the passing of illegal goods ranging from cigarettes to hard drugs is similarly handled via a black market. Indeed, the government can’t even keep drugs out of prisons—how could the drug war be anything but a failure everywhere else?

Still, treating innocuous behavior as criminal forces students to behave more like criminals in order to continue engaging in the market. Those patterns are the opposite of what schools should be teaching.

“Through their disciplinary apparatuses, schools not only punish deviance or delinquency—they produce it,” Gorski argues.

A few days after Carlos was busted for his illegal snack sales, Gorski reported that the student was the target of profiling by the school’s security guards, who approached him as he arrived at Hamilton one morning.

“They asked me if I was selling, and I said ‘nah’ cause I stopped,” Carlos told the researcher.

Had he learned his lesson? Well, yes, actually.

“But they don’t know,” he told Gorski with a smirk, “that my two employees are still selling.”

The post A High School Banned Students From Selling Snacks. Predictably, a Black Market for Snacks Emerged. appeared first on Reason.com.

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Rabobank: “No More Gucci! Cancel The War Now!”

Rabobank: “No More Gucci! Cancel The War Now!”

By Michael Every of Rabobank

Piffle Durch Waffle

Well, there was a volatile quarter; and if you think Q2 looks to be any better then you weren’t paying much attention in Q1.

US stocks had the worst quarter for two years, i.e., since Covid, underlining the scale of the shock of the Ukraine metacrisis, even if some say they have far from realised or priced in what is still to come because of their innate “because markets”-ness.

US bonds had one of their worst quarters since the Civil War 157 years ago, hit by a Fed reacting late to a metacrisis out of its control and structural inflation it saw as “transitory”. There I can report, via someone other than a reporter in the room, that the Fed’s Harker yesterday spoke of measuring inflation in terms of increases in the price of a friend’s golf club membership(!) and seemed to rely heavily on “my mate says…” anecdotal wisdom. Gives one full confidence the Fed will hit a hole in one on monetary policy, doesn’t it?

Bloomberg speaks of talk of 1970’s-style inflation returning. The Fed doesn’t. True, we don’t have those kinds of unions. But as geopolitics-driven deglobalisation sees manufacturing supply chains shift, we de facto close off cheap foreign labor physically represented as imports. Meanwhile, the government response to higher prices is often more stimulus. The White House is to release oil from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR): 1m barrels a day for six months, around a third of the total. This is not due to economic war: nobody is being asked to change consumption patterns, apart from boycotting Dostoevsky and Mussorgsky. Rather, the SPR is being used because prices are too high. In which regard, yes, oil will drop, and bond yields; but the lower oil price will slow any domestic increase in output; and when the SPR draw-down stops and it has to be refilled, prices will go back up again,

FX markets were choppy. As commodities soar and current accounts go into the red, and some try to print their way out of pain while pegging bond yields via activist central bank techniques used under the ‘new normal’, we can expect more downside for net importers and more upside for net exporters; and a sustained US dollar bid even if the dollar is far less popular, because debts still have to be serviced, and food and fuel bought, with less easily available greenbacks.

Commodities were understandably back to the 1970s. but we do have the same kind of supply-side shock as commodities look they did nearly five decades ago. On which note, the big news yesterday was Putin’s announcement that EU payment for gas will indeed be in RUB, and Europe insisting, no, it will be in EUR or USD. We saw EU gas prices swing 18% on the day before they realized that, so far, Putin really has succeeded in rebuilding parts of the Soviet Union – inserting unneeded labor into a simple process. The EU pays Gazprombank in EUR; Gazprombank swaps it into RUB; and then remits both to Russia.

As a parallel, I recall post-Soviet-but-still-Soviet supermarkets where you had to queue to see the (poor) choice of food available in each section; calculate in your head the price of 200g of grey sausage; queue at a separate cashier to tell them “200g of sausage at 10 roubles a kilo, so 2 roubles total”; they gave you a chit; and then you went back to the meat counter and queued again to swap the chit for grey sausage. And so on for every item you bought. Of course, nowadays we have empty shelves with efficient self-service and credit cards all over.

Depressingly, food continues to be weaponized. Ukraine alleges Russia is not only deliberately bombing Ukrainian food depots but is attacking its agricultural industry, including mining fields and destroying farm equipment. Russia also just announced a ban on the export of sunflower and rapeseed starting today. The US is also, unhelpfully, talking about perhaps increasing ethanol (so, corn) usage to try to bring down its energy prices.

France wants the UN World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to coordinate the allocation of extra supplies to countries facing urgent needs. This was a food security initiative backed by the G7 and to be discussed with G20 nations including China and India, which have amongst the largest grain stocks in the world. In short, we will soon find out who is helping and who is hoarding. This will be one of the topics discussed at the EU-China summit to be held today.

It’s amazing how much things have changed for this summit compared to the last one, which was held under the auspices of former Chancellor Merkel’s “wandel durch handel” (change through trade) Panda-and-Bear-hugging foreign/economic policy framework. At least in EU terms, has there ever been a more rapid, thorough, and passionate rejection of an entire weltanschauung than of the ‘piffle durch waffle’ that Merkel offered the EU for so long, and which Germany today sees led it to the crisis it now faces? I can’t think of one. Ironically, rather than reheating the stone-cold EU-China trade and investment deal, this summit could potentially see a further large step towards a more bifurcated world of ‘The West vs. The Rest’. Of course, neither side wants that outcome. Yet neither side looks able to bend over the Ukraine metacrisis.

@StuartKLau tweets the view of an anonymous EU official that Europe will pressure China to come out more strongly to try to stop the war – just after China’s foreign minister came out strongly in favor of Russia’s geopolitical position, if not the war itself. He quotes the official directly that:

“China has to realize that, while it thinks that [the war] has nothing to do with EU-China relations, actually it does. We have now a top security interest, not only for Europe, but for the world to address. We won’t whitewash our differences with China.” There are even veiled threats: “President Xi wants to be re-elected at the Congress in autumn. The society has had the stability over the last decades with the permanent promise it will be better for you than the preceding generation? Does he want to risk this? We don’t believe he does.” That’s fighting talk: and China will see it that way.

The official also stated “I don’t think is wise to speculate in detail,“ on possible EU sanctions on China, but ”I think there’s still the space to make the diplomatic argument that we do not believe it’s in China’s interest to provide for a circumvention of sanctions. If we were to see very active circumvention of sanctions –I’m not saying this is happening, I’m not saying it’s going to happen– you would probably see ramifications for China’s reputation globally.” To paraphrase Stalin: “How many divisions does reputation have?”

Indeed, ‘trundle durch bumble’ has not been entirely expunged from the EU. Being proved existentially wrong is not necessarily enough to change minds. (I am not joking, sadly: it’s a universal truth that ‘rationalists’ and ‘but GDP!’ crowds fail to grasp.)

The EU official adds: “Many Chinese citizens [like] luxury products, many of which are produced in EU. Many EU companies, many international global companies decided they no longer wish to market, sell and promote their goods in Russia.” Is the implied threat, beyond that to “reputation”, really that the EU might stop exporting luxury goods to a China already embracing Common Prosperity, to steer away from excess high-end consumption, and Dual Circulation, to encourage local alternatives to imports? If so, it will land as powerfully in Beijing as it did in Moscow. (“No more Gucci! Cancel the war now!”)

I refer back to my comment on inflation and supply chains earlier: the juiciest parts of them are, well, luxuries: who needs them in a war? Ask instead, who makes your widgets? Who makes your products and product packaging? And who provides your raw materials? Not the EU, almost all of the time. For others, things are perhaps shifting.

The White House has invoked Cold War powers to boost electric vehicle battery production. The decision adds lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese to a list of items covered by the 1950 Defence Production Act: former president Trump used the same to spur mask production during Covid; Truman to make steel for the Korean War. However, the total public cash involved is pitiful: just $750m. Moreover, a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources says the step is unlikely to result in any meaningful increase in US production without fixing the permit process (i.e., lowering environmental protections). Recall the pollution involved in getting these minerals, along with similar rare earths, was one of the reasons why their supply was offshored to places with far lower labor costs and environmental standards and sold as a free-trade win-win.

But war is messy: so is economic war; and so is the increasingly linked war against climate change. You cannot get a ‘clean’ segue to clean energy when it needs filthy amounts of dirty inputs first, the lion’s share of which China already controls the supply chains for on the ground because it was thinking ahead. At the very least, if it has to be done to win all the wars at once, it won’t be doable for just $750m. It’s ‘piffle durch waffle’, or ‘baloney durch blarney’ to think otherwise. So, yes, we will see lots of wandel durch handel – just not in the way Merkel envisioned it: quite the opposite.

Now on to Q2, as we plunge deeper into our Brave New World Order.

Happy Friday.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/01/2022 – 11:05

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/Jb9lhK1 Tyler Durden

A High School Banned Students From Selling Snacks. Predictably, a Black Market for Snacks Emerged.


dreamstime_xl_46304468

When Carlos got pinched by the fuzz, he was holding some hot commodities.

Flaming hot, in fact.

No, that’s not slang. The illegal behavior that landed Carlos (not his real name), a ninth-grade student at a high school in the southern suburbs of Chicago, in the deans’ office on a mid-September morning in 2019 was the illicit sale of chips to one of his fellow students. For the crime, he was summarily sentenced to a one-day suspension from school—and his mother was called to pick him up.

As Karlyn Gorski, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago, relates in a paper recently published in the journal Youth & Society, Carlos is just one small part of a robust black market for snack foods that persists at Hamilton High (not the school’s real name) despite the best efforts by school administrators, security guards, and teachers to stamp it out. The punishment handed out to Carlos for his busted chip-deal was actually a light sentence, Gorski explains, with administrators granting leniency on the grounds that Carlos was a freshman and might not yet understand the school’s zero-tolerance policy for unapproved exercises of snack-related capitalism. Repeat offenders, she writes, faced in-school suspensions—the high school equivalent of solitary confinement.

Gorski spent 112 days observing students and adults at Hamilton during the 2019–2020 school year, though her research was cut short by the school’s closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While there, she observed a widespread black market for snack sales. The perpetrators were mere children, but they organized “elaborate strategies to hide sales, build networks of sellers, and develop a verbal shorthand around the market.”

By outlawing the sale of snacks, the school ensured that only outlaws would sell snacks.

Enforcement of the snack-selling ban was robust, with security guards even relying on the use of mounted cameras to identify perpetrators so they could be hauled out of class and reprimanded.

“I had to go get him out of class, send him to the dean, do the whole thing,” one security guard—pseudonymously monikered “Karen”—told Gorski. Punishing a student for a victimless crime was apparently more important than whatever he might have learned in class that day.

But beyond the amusing anecdotes about deception and the heroic struggles of would-be entrepreneurs against the school snack cops, the paper contains some serious implications about what the school is teaching its students. “Adult responses to youth behaviors can produce a stigma of deviance around activities that, in other contexts, are permitted or even lauded,” Gorski explains.

Within the school environment, not all snack sales were illicit. Students in a Spanish club selling cookies to raise money for a field trip to Peru were allowed to “carry their wares openly and advertise on posters throughout the school,” writes Gorski. “Sellers working for their own gain did not have the luxury of such promotion. When the profits of snack sales benefitted organizations that fell under the school’s purview, they were lauded; the school retained control over the proceeds, ensuring the money went to something ‘worthy.'”

By contrast, when students were caught “selling” by teachers and administrators, their motives were “subject to moral scrutiny,” writes Gorski, who described an incident in which one teacher told a student that selling snacks to fund the purchase of a new pair of shoes was a “poor use” of resources.

The students at Hamilton, a majority of whom are minorities and roughly 80 percent from low-income households, had no trouble deconstructing the school’s unequal treatment of the same economic activities. One student, code-named Lucas, told Gorski that “they’re basically training us for a fake world” in which good behavior is rewarded while trying to make a buck is regarded as valuable only if the seller’s intentions are worthy.

“Adults thus undermined their own disciplinary apparatus by demonstrating its unfairness,” concludes Gorski. “With consequences so irregularly applied, and the activities they aimed to prohibit so mandate…it made more sense to disregard the prohibition and enjoy the rewards of buying and selling treats.”

The high school snack policies that are the subject of Gorski’s paper form an eerily effective microcosm of similar arrangements in other parts of the world. Prohibition, which banned the serving of alcohol in the United States for more than a decade in the early 20th century, produced a black market that kept the booze flowing to those who had access to the necessary money and connections. Drug prohibition has produced many of the same outcomes.

Gorski points to an even more pernicious parallel: prisons, where the passing of illegal goods ranging from cigarettes to hard drugs is similarly handled via a black market. Indeed, the government can’t even keep drugs out of prisons—how could the drug war be anything but a failure everywhere else?

Still, treating innocuous behavior as criminal forces students to behave more like criminals in order to continue engaging in the market. Those patterns are the opposite of what schools should be teaching.

“Through their disciplinary apparatuses, schools not only punish deviance or delinquency—they produce it,” Gorski argues.

A few days after Carlos was busted for his illegal snack sales, Gorski reported that the student was the target of profiling by the school’s security guards, who approached him as he arrived at Hamilton one morning.

“They asked me if I was selling, and I said ‘nah’ cause I stopped,” Carlos told the researcher.

Had he learned his lesson? Well, yes, actually.

“But they don’t know,” he told Gorski with a smirk, “that my two employees are still selling.”

The post A High School Banned Students From Selling Snacks. Predictably, a Black Market for Snacks Emerged. appeared first on Reason.com.

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Jen Psaki Reportedly In Talks To Leave White House For Lucrative Gig At MSNBC

Jen Psaki Reportedly In Talks To Leave White House For Lucrative Gig At MSNBC

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, known for her “Psaki bombs” and also for masterminding the White House’s briefing of American TikTok stars about the war in Ukraine, is reportedly in talks with MSNBC to leave the West Wing in favor of a lucrative posting at the liberal news network that will include hosting a show on NBCUniversal’s new streaming service, Peacock.

The news, broken Friday by Axios (a popular receptacle for uncritically republishing leaks from the administration) follows ‘weeks of speculation’ that Psaki would leave the Biden Administration for a lucrative TV gig (where she will most likely continue to parrot the administration’s line, but from outside the confines of the West Wing).

According to the report, she has been carefully working with the White House counsel’s office to ensure that she doesn’t cross any ethical or legal lines (ethics rules carefully stipulate how WH aides must pursue private-sector job offers while in office).

Per Axios, Psaki has yet to inform her team (or the president) about her plans for departure.

It was reported last month that Psaki had been in talks with CNN, but has since started to gravitate toward MSNBC.

She will also be a part of live programming on MSNBC’s cable network as a voice on different shows, but she will not be hosting the 9 p.m. hour replacing Rachel Maddow, which has been speculated.

Axios compared Psaki’s deal-in-the-making with that of Symone Sanders, a former adviser and senior spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris. Sanders signed an exclusive deal with MSNBC in January to host a show on Peacock.

While liberals and Democrat-aligned pundits like to slam conservatives (including former members of the Trump Administration like Hope Hicks) for taking lucrative jobs at conservative-leaning media outlets (Hicks infamously left the Trump Administration for Fox before returning to the White House), Glenn Greenwald pointed out on Twitter Friday morning that the same thing happens on the left, and that “by far the quickest and easiest way to get rich in politics and journalism over the last 6 years was to churn out anti-Trump/Russia hysteria.”

Of course, assuming Psaki does make the jump to MSNBC, how many Americans (outside of hard-core political junkies) will even notice?

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/01/2022 – 10:51

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/Tle3LZg Tyler Durden

Morbius Is a Superhero Vampire Movie That Really Sucks


morbius-large-use

Morbius, the latest quasi-addition to the Marvel movie megafranchise, can’t quite decide whether it’s a modern vampire movie or a dark superhero flick. But if you have to choose, it’s pretty clear that it leans toward the vampire genre, if only for the reason that, like all those fanged blood fiends, it really, really sucks. 

I say “quasi-addition,” because Morbius exists in an intellectual property netherrealm, an awkward in-between zone in which it is neither a full-fledged Marvel movie nor its own entirely separate franchise.

Historically, Morbius is a Marvel Comics character—originally a Spider-Man nemesis who rode the wave of trippy, horror-shlock comics in the 1970s. But like Venom, who has already headlined a pair of solo films, the rights to the character are controlled by Sony through the studio’s deal to produce Spider-Man movies. Complicating things further, however, the Spider-Man films are actually produced in conjunction with Marvel (which is owned by Disney), in a secondary deal that allows Marvel to incorporate Spider-Man into the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Thus, the movie ends with Morbius connecting with a character from one of the recent MCU Spider-Man films, in a multiverse event presaged by Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Got that?

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter whether you do or don’t. Somehow, all of this comic book movie deal-making lore makes much more sense than the movie itself. 

Like the two Venom films, Morbius is a chaotic and cruddy looking mess, a dull and listless watch-checker made to be ignored on streaming while you scroll through Twitter. It’s poorly paced, barely has a story worth following, and has all the markings of a movie heavily reworked during post-production.

Unlike the Venom films, Morbius doesn’t even make a token effort to have fun with its character or concept. I didn’t like Venom or its sequel at all, but there was a crude energy to both films, especially the second. They weren’t good by any definition, but they occasionally seemed to try to engage the audience.

Morbius, on the other hand, grudgingly trudges from one predictable beat to another, barely developing a plot about a scientist with a rare blood disease who gains vampiric powers after he experiments on himself. What are those powers, exactly? The movie never really defines them, except to show Dr. Michael Morbius (a lethargic, unusually bland Jared Leto) swinging around his lab and occasionally moving with such speed that he turns into an airborne purple goo. If you find yourself in a room with him, be sure to wear an N95.

Elsewhere in the movie, there’s a close childhood friend, Milo, another blood-disease sufferer played by former Doctor Who Matt Smith. An hour or so into the movie, Milo becomes a villain for no apparent reason other than that the movie eventually needs one. At times the movie seems to want to liken the experience of the two lead characters to the experience of gay men during the early years of AIDS. But it has absolutely nothing to say about this comparison except to vaguely gesture in its direction. Like everything about Morbius, the central metaphor is entirely inert. This is a $75 million movie without a single remotely interesting idea.

The hope, then, seems to be that audiences will flock to it anyway because of its tenuous connections to the Marvel machine. Some of the posters explicitly play on this connection, advertising the film as the dawn of “a new Marvel legend”—true in the sense that Morbius is an old Marvel Comics character, but false in the sense that the producers and creative forces behind the MCU had nothing to do with making the movie Morbius.

Indeed, watching an off-brand not-quite Marvel movie like this is probably the best way to demonstrate the Marvel difference, and why the superhero brand has remained so successful across so many movies and TV shows for so many years. Even the very worst actual Marvel movie—and I’m specifically talking about Eternals, which was three hours of cosmic dreck—displays more ingenuity and delivers more genuine spectacle than a rote cash-in like Morbius.

And on the small screen, with large-for-TV but comparatively modest budgets, Marvel’s work has remained somewhere between pretty good and excellent.

Consider, for example, the pilot episode of Moon Knight, an official MCU TV series that debuted on streaming service Disney+ this week. Like Morbius, Moon Knight is a modernized riff on an obscure comic book character, a man haunted by demons and granted supernatural power. But it’s clever and engaging, with character gags and nifty action and a pair of high-powered performances from stars Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke at the center. It breathes life into an old, lesser-known character. Morbius’ nickname is “the living vampire,” but this movie is utterly dead on arrival.

The post <i>Morbius</i> Is a Superhero Vampire Movie That Really Sucks appeared first on Reason.com.

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Morbius Is a Superhero Vampire Movie That Really Sucks


morbius-large-use

Morbius, the latest quasi-addition to the Marvel movie megafranchise, can’t quite decide whether it’s a modern vampire movie or a dark superhero flick. But if you have to choose, it’s pretty clear that it leans toward the vampire genre, if only for the reason that, like all those fanged blood fiends, it really, really sucks. 

I say “quasi-addition,” because Morbius exists in an intellectual property netherrealm, an awkward in-between zone in which it is neither a full-fledged Marvel movie nor its own entirely separate franchise.

Historically, Morbius is a Marvel Comics character—originally a Spider-Man nemesis who rode the wave of trippy, horror-shlock comics in the 1970s. But like Venom, who has already headlined a pair of solo films, the rights to the character are controlled by Sony through the studio’s deal to produce Spider-Man movies. Complicating things further, however, the Spider-Man films are actually produced in conjunction with Marvel (which is owned by Disney), in a secondary deal that allows Marvel to incorporate Spider-Man into the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Thus, the movie ends with Morbius connecting with a character from one of the recent MCU Spider-Man films, in a multiverse event presaged by Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Got that?

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter whether you do or don’t. Somehow, all of this comic book movie deal-making lore makes much more sense than the movie itself. 

Like the two Venom films, Morbius is a chaotic and cruddy looking mess, a dull and listless watch-checker made to be ignored on streaming while you scroll through Twitter. It’s poorly paced, barely has a story worth following, and has all the markings of a movie heavily reworked during post-production.

Unlike the Venom films, Morbius doesn’t even make a token effort to have fun with its character or concept. I didn’t like Venom or its sequel at all, but there was a crude energy to both films, especially the second. They weren’t good by any definition, but they occasionally seemed to try to engage the audience.

Morbius, on the other hand, grudgingly trudges from one predictable beat to another, barely developing a plot about a scientist with a rare blood disease who gains vampiric powers after he experiments on himself. What are those powers, exactly? The movie never really defines them, except to show Dr. Michael Morbius (a lethargic, unusually bland Jared Leto) swinging around his lab and occasionally moving with such speed that he turns into an airborne purple goo. If you find yourself in a room with him, be sure to wear an N95.

Elsewhere in the movie, there’s a close childhood friend, Milo, another blood-disease sufferer played by former Doctor Who Matt Smith. An hour or so into the movie, Milo becomes a villain for no apparent reason other than that the movie eventually needs one. At times the movie seems to want to liken the experience of the two lead characters to the experience of gay men during the early years of AIDS. But it has absolutely nothing to say about this comparison except to vaguely gesture in its direction. Like everything about Morbius, the central metaphor is entirely inert. This is a $75 million movie without a single remotely interesting idea.

The hope, then, seems to be that audiences will flock to it anyway because of its tenuous connections to the Marvel machine. Some of the posters explicitly play on this connection, advertising the film as the dawn of “a new Marvel legend”—true in the sense that Morbius is an old Marvel Comics character, but false in the sense that the producers and creative forces behind the MCU had nothing to do with making the movie Morbius.

Indeed, watching an off-brand not-quite Marvel movie like this is probably the best way to demonstrate the Marvel difference, and why the superhero brand has remained so successful across so many movies and TV shows for so many years. Even the very worst actual Marvel movie—and I’m specifically talking about Eternals, which was three hours of cosmic dreck—displays more ingenuity and delivers more genuine spectacle than a rote cash-in like Morbius.

And on the small screen, with large-for-TV but comparatively modest budgets, Marvel’s work has remained somewhere between pretty good and excellent.

Consider, for example, the pilot episode of Moon Knight, an official MCU TV series that debuted on streaming service Disney+ this week. Like Morbius, Moon Knight is a modernized riff on an obscure comic book character, a man haunted by demons and granted supernatural power. But it’s clever and engaging, with character gags and nifty action and a pair of high-powered performances from stars Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke at the center. It breathes life into an old, lesser-known character. Morbius’ nickname is “the living vampire,” but this movie is utterly dead on arrival.

The post <i>Morbius</i> Is a Superhero Vampire Movie That Really Sucks appeared first on Reason.com.

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House GOP Investigating Twitter And Facebook For Censoring Hunter Biden Laptop Story

House GOP Investigating Twitter And Facebook For Censoring Hunter Biden Laptop Story

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

House Judiciary Republicans have begun an investigation into Facebook and Twitter censoring The New York Post’s October 2020 revelations regarding the Hunter Biden ‘laptop from hell’.

The Republicans accused Twitter and Facebook Thursday of working to protect Joe Biden from “increased scrutiny about the impropriety detailed in the Post article.”

Recall that the New York Post was censored on social media and labelled fake news for the reporting directly before the election. Users were also prohibited from sharing the story.

All coverage of the revelations by Infowars and other alternative media sites was declared to be “false conspiracy theory.”

Now, over a year later, the establishment media is suddenly desperate for everyone to know that the story is real.

In an open letter to Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal published Thursday, Republican lawmakers wrote “Shortly before the 2020 election, Twitter suppressed an explosive New York Post article detailing how Hunter Biden used the position and influence of his father, now-President Biden, for personal gain, with the apparent awareness of President Biden.”

The letter continues, “We wrote to Twitter at the time with important questions about Twitter’s knowing suppression of First-Amendment protected activity. Twitter ignored our letter and, in the months since, has avoided any meaningful accountability for its actions.”

“Now, with even the New York Times confirming the accuracy of the Post’s reporting, we are investigating Twitter’s actions to interfere in free and fair election-related public discourse on its platform to the benefit of President Biden and the detriment of former President Trump.” the letter concludes.

Another letter has been sent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, noting that “Facebook’s actions gave rise to other news outlets, tech platforms, and even Biden himself dismissing the Post story as disinformation or untrue—when, in fact, it had never been rebutted.”

The letter continues, “The Post article was likely to have significant implications for the presidential election,” emphasizing that “Although the Post explained exactly how it obtained the emails on which it reported and included pictures of certain emails, Facebook still suppressed the article. The mainstream media followed Facebook’s lead, wrongly claiming the Post story was “disinfo” and unverified.”

“It appears that Facebook knowingly and deliberately used its platform to control election- related information accessible to the American people shortly before the 2020 election, and that Facebook did so to the primary benefit of then-Vice President Biden,” the letter further states.

The letter concludes, “This irresponsible conduct demands a thorough investigation so that we may understand how Big Tech wields its enormous power over the free flow of information to the detriment of free and fair elections.”

Appearing on Fox Business Thursday, ranking GOP Rep Jim Jordan declared that “Big Tech, Big Democrat Party and Big Media all colluded to keep critical information from the American people in the run up to the most important election we have — the presidential election, so we’re launching an investigation.”

Watch:

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Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/01/2022 – 10:30

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Two Iliberal and Unjust Zelensky Policies the West Should Force Him to End


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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. March 21, 2022 (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office).

 

Ukraine is fighting a brutal and indefensible Russian invasion. Their cause is just, and the Ukrainian government is vastly preferable to the sort of puppet regime Vladimir Putin would install if he prevails.  Indeed, from the standpoint of liberal democratic values, Ukraine is far better than Putin’s increasingly repressive rule in Russia itself. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky deserves credit for his inspiring leadership under fire.

But these realities should not blind us to the injustice of two deeply illiberal policies enacted by Zelensky in the wake of the Russian invasion: decrees forbidding all men aged 18-60 from leaving the country, and imposing government control over all previously independent TV channels. Zelensky has appealed for increased Western aid on the ground that “we….are fighting for freedom and in defense of democracy together.” The two decrees are blatantly inconsistent with those principles. The West should use its leverage to force him to end them. Doing so would simultaneously advance liberal values, and strengthen our position in the conflict against Putin’s authoritarian regime.

The exit ban imposed on men has lead to heartrending scenes at Ukraine’s borders, as women and children are forced to separate from their fathers and husbands. In addition to the pain and restrictions on liberty imposed on the men themselves, it has also increased the suffering of female and underage refugees, who are forced to make do without them.

Even most liberal political theorists who who believe governments are justified in restricting entry by immigrants generally agree that they are not justified in barring exit. That’s one of the reasons why virtually all liberal democrats condemned the Berlin Wall and other emigration bans imposed by communist governments. Zelensky’s policy is an obvious violation of that fundamental principle.

The rationale for the travel ban is the supposed need to keep the men in Ukraine, so that they can be drafted into the armed forces, if necessary. Military conscription is itself a grave injustice, incompatible with liberal principles. But even if you believe conscription can be justified in extreme cases where there is no other way to ensure national defense, Zelensky’s decree is still unjustified.

Ukraine is not suffering from a shortage of manpower. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians  have volunteered to fight, and Ukrainian military has even had to turn away some of them. Many thousands of foreigners have also volunteered to fight for Ukraine – again to the point that some are being turned away (especially if they lack previous military experience) or forced to wait until weapons become available.

For obvious reasons, volunteers are likely to be better and more highly motivated fighters than conscripts who serve only because they have been compelled to do so. The poor performance of Russian conscripts in Ukraine is a case in point. In addition, many of the men covered by the travel ban are unlikely to prove to be effective soldiers, for any number of reasons related to temperament, skills, and physical ability. Zelensky’s decree goes far beyond any possible conscription-based  rationale, even if the latter were defensible to begin with (which it is isn’t).

At this point, Ukraine needs weapons to arm its large numbers of volunteers, not forced laborers. The West should give them as many weapons as possible – but condition at least some of that assistance on Zelensky’s ending his cruel travel ban imposed on Ukrainian men. No government claiming to fight for freedom should impose such a cruel and pointless restriction on liberty.

The Ukrainian government’s takeover of private TV channels probably causes less suffering. But it is just as illiberal and indefensible. It is a dangerous assault on freedom of speech and press. The government’s rationale for this measure is the need to ensure a “unified information policy” in time of war. The justification actually highlights the illiberal and undemocratic nature of the policy. A “unified information policy” is deeply inimical to democracy, which requires an independent media willing and able to question the government line.

Government takeovers of private media for the purpose of forcing it to toe the official line are a classic tool in the incipient authoritarian’s playbook. For a textbook example, we need look no further than Vladimir Putin, who started by seizing control of private TV networks, and most recently put an end to nearly all independent media.

Ukraine’s media policies – so far – are not nearly as repressive as Putin’s. State control is limited to TV channels, and does not extend to print, radio, and internet outlets. But things are obviously moving in the wrong direction. This, too, is a policy the West should force Zelensky to reverse.

The Ukrainian government’s human rights violations might be rationalized on the grounds that they are just temporary emergency measures that will be repealed when the war is over. Perhaps so. But history shows that repression begun during emergencies often persists long afterwards. Moreover, the emergency might well continue for a long time to come. Even if large-scale fighting ends soon, Russia and Ukraine might remain in a tense military standoff on into the indefinite future. An emergency situation could easily persist for years on end. And it could be used to rationalize the continuation of these repressive policies – and perhaps others, as well.

Forcing Zelensky to end these injustices isn’t just a matter of moral principle. There is a strategic advantage to it, as well. The conflict between liberal democracy and Putin’s authoritarianism is a war of ideas, as well as a military and geopolitical confrontation. One of the reasons why Putin invaded Ukraine in the first place is the fear that a successful liberal democracy there might create a dangerous (from Putin’s perspective!) example for the Russian people. To prevail in the war of ideas, we need a Ukrainian government that actually lives up to liberal values as much as possible, not one that practices a kid of Putinism-lite.

Foreign policy is an often-sordid business. Sometimes, we have little to choice but to put up with illiberal allies, either because we lack the leverage to force them to change, or because the available alternatives to these regimes are even worse. Zelensky’s human rights violations are modest, not only compared to Putin’s, but also relative to those of such longtime US allies as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

In this case, however, the US and other Western nations have a great deal of leverage by virtue of Ukraine’s need for for large-scale military and economic assistance, that it cannot get anywhere else. And the alternative to Zelensky with these two awful policies is Zelensky without them! The latter is both politically feasible and clearly superior to the former.

Ukraine’s brave resistance to Russian aggression deserves our support. But its people also deserve a government that genuinely respects liberal democratic values. The West can and should use its leverage to help ensure they get it.

 

 

 

 

 

The post Two Iliberal and Unjust Zelensky Policies the West Should Force Him to End appeared first on Reason.com.

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