Isn’t It Romantic?

With forays into Jaws, and why our culture thinks with its heart and not its head.

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Dear Reader, (Including those of you who had a crush on Jennifer instead of Bailey from the WKRP crew, you traitors),

“That’s some bad hat, Harry.”

That’s a line from Chief Brody in Jaws. An old dude—named Harry—annoys Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) by making fun of the chief’s mild aquaphobia while he is trying to spot a shark that will likely eat another kid.

Brody responds, “That’s some bad hat, Harry.”

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  1. Avatar photo
    Michael Salardino

    At he risk of sounding like a sycophant or stalker ,I continue to think your wisdom is awesome!

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  2. Avatar photo
    Marian Cates

    A friend wants to subscribe to your G-File. How do I sign her up to get it through her email?

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  3. Sullyz

    Ok. I read this just after rewatching ‘Dodgeball’ on HBO. “ESPN, the ocho”, just being slipped in slays me. Keep up the amazing work.

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  4. Anthony Pasquini

    I always wanted there to be an unwritten rule in Hollywood that whenever a sports network is needed in a movie that they should call it ESPN 8 The Ocho.

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  5. Raincheck

    I misread the headline. I thought there were going to be forays into Jews. Alas. I thought you were going blow the roof off the globalist Jewish cabal that caused Coronavirus and Burger King.

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  6. Barry Morrell

    Jonah: Let’s give some context to the Covid-19 cases.

    The US has 132,000 deaths. France, Italy, Spain and the UK have about 138,000 deaths - more deaths than the US, but the US has a population that’s 35% greater than those four countries combined.

    The US and those four European countries account for 8% of world population and one-half of the reported deaths worldwide from Covid-19. The continents of South America, Africa, and Asia have a combined population of 6.3 billion or 80% of the world population, but fewer Covid-19 deaths than the five Western countries. I question the accuracy of these numbers. Don’t you?

    There has been a recent increase in the number of cases, a concern, but not an increase in the number of deaths. Once the weekly death rate falls to 1,200 or so, Covid-19 will look no worse than the flu.

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    Pat Riot

    It's not "romanticism", it's *populism*.

    Mr. Goldberg is overcomplicating this. It boils down to politicians telling people what they want to hear regardless of reality. Reagan started this by saying in essence that we can have our nice welfare state and we can lower taxes too because he said so. And we like what he said because that sounds really awesome.

    I think conservatives are blinded by this because they feel as though they are the furthest thing from populism, what with their pondered musings about long-term thinking and whatnot.

    But taxes harsh on people's buzzes, and it should be no surprise to conservatives (even though it absolutely is) that things like national defense and law and order also harsh on said buzzes.

    Conservatives said "freedom" in the 1980s and millions of morons heard that as, "freedom to do whatever I feel like doing at any given moment regardless of the consequences".

    In other words, "freedom" as defined by a ten year old.

    "Freedom isn't free"? Trump never served, and look where it got him.

    Populism, people...

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  8. Avatar photo
    Dina

    Jonah, it is fair to assign some blame to Trump for his mishandling of the pandemic. His two immediate predecessors took the potential threat of epidemics seriously and set up a framework for its management. Trump dismantled that framework early on in his presidency. He ignored warnings from his own administration. Instead of issuing guidelines to mitigate the effects of the disease, he complained that it was a Democratic hoax to make him look bad. He waited far too long to take this seriously, and even then, he started agitating for the economy to reopen well before cases had even begun to peak in the hardest-hit areas. He encouraged protests against governors who issued stay-at-home orders. He discouraged the wearing of masks. Instead of uniting the American people, he politicized a crisis that should never have been politicized.

    Republican governors have followed his lead and many of his supporters have eschewed masks.

    It is true that politicians of both parties have made mistakes. But he is the president of the United States. The buck stops there.

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    Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

    I know it is not fashionable to like Trump at this site, but I read the text of his speech (I read faster than he talks), and it was a very good speech. Uplifting. Good rhetoric.

    What I found doubly ironic, was the NYT ironically using a racist term to criticize a speech that lifts up multiple heroes of color. I understand why they did it: They are recycling a theme from the 2016 failed Hillary campaign of painting Trump as "dark". It worked so well for her she held onto the smurfiest of the blue states in 2016. Will it work with this time? Probably less so than 2016.

    If Trump is smart (which means he is not likely to do this), he needs to run copies of the NYT headline interposed between each name he mentioned of a person of color. It'll troll them, inflame them, and get discussion going about how Trump is making non racist meanings racist. That would be master trolling, anbd it would destroy the "dark" message....

    But since I don't live in a smurfy blue state, I won't hold my breath waiting for him to do it.

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  10. Paul Mantyla

    This reminded me of a Simpsons moment:

    Homer: Sometimes, Marge, you just have to go with your gut.
    Marge: You always go with your gut. How about for once you listen to your brain?

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