Review of THE LION KING 2019

My daughter and I saw the new Lion King movie on July 19, 2019. The video below was my initial reaction,

To answer the question of whether the different animals on the different trophic levels represented classes of people, I made a second video.

A remark I once overheard was: "It's funny how all the animals bow down to the new baby lion, when lions kill other animals." I answered that lions, as apex predators, also make sure that the lesser animals that they hunt remain in prime condition. So the lion really does perform an important service to the animals he preys on. The benefit of this service is reaped collectively, rather than individually.

Nevertheless, The Lion King was never meant to be realistic. It is a musical with a story that has more to do with human beings than lions. The ethical dilemmas The Lion King portrays make sense to modern humans. The sensibilities it plays to are specifically American. Is it terrible to kill the baby son of the man you just slew in battle? Ask Achilles' son, Pyrrhus. You do know that he married Hector's widow and threw her son off a cliff, right? There's a reason you're not going to get a Disney movie that gives us a musical number based on that  moment. It's contrary to current American values. People today still praise Andrew Jackson for adopting the son of native Americans he slaughtered. The survivors said to him: "You killed his entire family. Why not kill him, too?" And while that reasoning makes sense to a lion or an ancient Greek warrior, it is not PG13.

It's not that real animals have no feelings. They do. It's not that real animals can't give us moving performances. They can. But the CGI version of The Lion King is trying so hard not to anthropomorphize that the charaterization of Mufasa and Simba as Americans and of Scar as a hoity toity British flavored intellectual just fails. It's a clash between the visuals and the soundtrack.

The Tim Rice lyrics, which are so clever, get very short shrift in this new version. So attend the Broadway Show or watch the old movie, if you want to experience the musical drama. And if you do eventually get a copy of the 2019 version, I would watch that with the sound muted. Because it does look good. But that's about it.

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In our last livestream, Julia Hanna and I discussed independence, sustainability and off grid life.

One of the problems in any attempt to achieve freedom is that we are -- in our modern, high tech society -- extremely dependent on others. Some people, like Yaron Brook and other Objectivists, would call this "interdependence" rather than dependence, but as far as I can see, it is a word with the same denotative meaning, but a slightly more positive connotation. The result of this dependence on others is that while we may be free to choose with whom we associate up to a point, we are not free to choose not to associate at all, as our livelihood depends on association with others.

But what if we could individually get our energy from the sun? Or from wind? What if we could maintain a high technology while being independent of manufacturers or software developers. What if we each had a search engine we created ourselves, and nobody could monitor our activities? What if we were free to trade calories with others, but only if we wished to, and not because of economic compulsion? What if we could associate with people we liked, but were free to ignore anyone we were not interested in?

One side effect of such a situation would be that we could not be taxed. Naturally, we would also need to be able to defend ourselves from any who sought to take advantage of our independent resources. Is this just a pipe dream? Watch the livestream and leave a comment.

The Expert Problem

Julia Hanna and I recently discussed the "Expert Problem".

What does it mean to be an expert? Does it mean that you know things that other people do not? Or does it mean that you have an exclusive right to speak on a certain topic, while others do not?

Today,  if you do have education and even government certification in a certain field, you are expected to toe the party line of your profession. The truth of any assertion is judged by the percentage of "experts" who agree to any given statement. Even world renowned primatologists are not permitted to stray from consensus of what is "The Truth" in their field. If you are not an expert, you might even be kept from sharing articles in a peer reviewed journal. Is this in order to protect the public from "fake news"? Or is this the latest form of establishment censorship of any view but the one the powers that be approve?

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Censorship in social media is a problem we all face. Julia Hanna and I discuss the problem, among other issues, such as nutrition.

Do you know there are still people on low fat/high carb diets who have yet to hear the news that fat is a necessary nutrient for good health? Is it possible that mainstream media is part of the problem, and that censorship of social media is now a contributing factor?

The Time I almost Ran for Congress

A long, long time ago -- Saturday, April 22, 1989 at 5:30 pm -- in a place very far away -- Holiday Inn -Texas Stadium in Irving, Texas-- I almost ran for Congress. The problem: I didn't know how to raise a thousand dollars to pay for the filing fee. So we had a fundraiser. Here is what happened there. People you will see in this video, besides me: Jimmy Morgan, Janet Kollmeier, Jack and Jacqui Estes. Piano accompaniment is by Pat Brown. I never raised the thousand dollars I needed to file, and that is why I never ran. But almost running is something I will never forget. The district I was almost running for was the 24th Congressional District in Texas. The incumbent was Martin Frost. People at the Grand Prairie Memorial Library would not let me post anything about this on their bulletin board, even though they always posted flyers by Martin Frost. At the time, there was no world wide web, and nobody I knew had a cell phone. If you want to see what I was like when I started writing Vacuum County, this is a good place to start. Here is a link to Vacuum County. Buy it. Read it. https://www.amazon.com/Vacuum-County-... Yes, I was always a libertarian. But I was pretending to be a Republican. Also, notice the accent! I never really had a Texas accent, but I was trying to blend in. And don't ask about the gigantic glasses -- that was what people wore back then.

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Is YouTube a Content Farm?

Back in February 2011, Google issued the Panda Update to its algorithm. Among other things, this update targeted "Content Farms", and Hubpages, where I used to write, was found to be a content farm.  At the time, I was making money by writing articles, and Hubpages had a mechanism to get these indexed on Google so ordinary people could discover my articles. At the time, YouTube was not a source of income for me, but I began to use it create videos to illustrate my articles. Here is the first video ever that I uploaded to YouTube, as part of an article called "Chocolate Under Communism".

After my traffic on Hubpages was destroyed by the Panda Update, I hosted articles on sites of my own, such as PubWages and Historia Obscura . But eventually only YouTube videos and their monetization brought me pageviews and income.  In suggested videos, YouTube pushes videos that appeal to the lowest common denominator. YouTube is filled with a diverse group of content providers. By its own definition of a content farm, Google is running a content farm. But now they are going after their own content farmers... What gives? Is this censorship? Or are the powers that be just making sure all content creators have to be employed by large corporations?