Do These People Even Understand How This Stuff Works?

 From Trump lawyer Sidney Powell at their crazy press conference this week:

They can say that … show of votes from one thing to another, they can say that a Biden vote counts as 1.25, and a Trump vote counts as 0.75 and those may be the numbers that were actually used here. It’s not just the swing States that were affected. The algorithm was likely run across the country to affect the entire election. Like I said, we only discovered it this year because of the overwhelming number of votes for President Trump in the swing States that caused the machines to have to shut down for them to backfill for adding votes.

Uhh, I'm pretty sure a voting reporting system that reported a quarter of a vote would raise suspicions. Even programming one to accept decimals instead of integers would look fishy. 

Movie Review: Mr Jones

I wrote my senior thesis at the Jackson School many years ago on Collectivization, which I have long considered a criminally under-appreciated story in the West, the lone exception being the recent Red Famine by Anne Applebaum, so I was excited to see a review of the film Mr. Jones in today's New York Times.

This work by Polish director Agnieszka Holland, who years ago directed the exceptional WWII/Holocaust drama Europa Europa, covers the story of Welsh Journalist, and former advisor to Lloyd George, Gareth Jones and his trip to the Soviet Union in the early 1930's. I still find it appalling that so little is known about an event in which somewhere between 3 and 10 million people were murdered, so maybe I am biased, but I found it a quite interesting portrayal, if sometimes a bit surreal. Admittedly I was quite the fanboy when George Orwell made a cameo. Well, that and the fact that Walter Duranty is essentially the main villain. Did I mention that I was the president of the local Anti-Walter Duranty Society? Regardless, it is an important story that is competently portrayed in a new an interesting way, and deserving of your attention in an era when we are often left with watching the latest superhero movie for the 4th time.

Churchill and Trump

I had to post an Amazon review regarding this ridiculous book, Trump and Churchill: Defenders of Western Civilization.  Who knows if it will stay up.

As a huge Winston Churchill fan who owns most of his books and has made a pilgrimage to Chartwell, I was interested in this book. Unfortunately I couldn't make it past the free Kindle download portion of this ridiculous work.  Aside from the horrible research, which previous reviewers have already covered, the premise of this book is completely absurd. The author argues, not only that Churchill and Trump are similar (based on superficial things common to many politicians like the fact that they didn't get along with the press) but that Trump has actually done more to defend western civilization than Churchill, based on... uhh... owning libs on Twitter as best as I can tell. As a long time conservative, I am all in favor of owning the libs on social media, but I find it hard to compare to, I don't know, DEFEATING NAZI GERMANY?

The author picks out a couple of other superficial things to make his argument, "they love their country". OK, are there many politicians who run around claiming not to love their country? They both are alpha males! Uhh, yeah. Churchill was a Sandhurst graduate who served in 4 wars, and even became famous for escaping as a POW in South Africa. Trump received 5 draft deferments and bragged that avoiding the Clap was "his Vietnam". Yeah, a lot of similarities.

Both of them are good communicators, he argues. Uhh, aside for being one of the highest paid war correspondents for a while, Churchill wrote over 30 books. He received the Nobel Prize for literature. Trump has a couple of ghost written books, and incorrectly misspelled "Noble" several times in a tweet. He is famous for his inability to even read 4 page intelligence briefs, much less write thousands of pages on the Second World War or the Duke of Marlborough. Churchill gave us, "their finest hour" and "We will fight on the beaches". Trump gave us "American carnage" and "Covfefe".

I decided to give the author another shot and watched his CSPAN interview on this book, and it was even worse. He actually cites the scene in the movie the Darkest Hour of Churchill hanging out in the London Tube with commoners as an example of how he related to the average person, just like Trump!  Only one problem though. It never happened. It was made up entirely for the movie.

Doubtless this book will still sell plenty of copies to Trump fans, eager to pump up their hero (Trump himself has even tweeted promoting it) but anyone seriously interested in history should look to serious works. I highly recommend Andrew Roberts "Churchill: Walking With Destiny", Eric Larson's recent "The Splendid and the Vile" and if you want a comparative work Thomas Rick's Churchill and Orwell. This is book is to be avoided unless you are a Trump sycophant, in which case you will probably love it, but then again, Twitter is free.