Aliens and Dead People

There's no real doubt that the Democrats won the 2020 election by fraud. The COVID-1984 scam allowed them (and various other anti-Trump conspirators) to change the rules and massively increase the number of postal ballots. The rest was simply a well funded harvesting operation, so that once again the familiar American order was able to re-establish itself. In other words, the money won. Again.*

The bad news is that they have no intention of doing it just once. If they get their way, voter registration will become automatic, including for illegal aliens and dead people. State oversight too will become a thing of the past, and ballot-harvesting will become a permanent norm. (And any attempt to return to an even vaguely fair and open system of representative government will of course be shouted down by the MSM as "voter suppression".)

On the one hand, a party composed of extraterrestrials and zombies would help to explain politicians like Al Gore and Joe Biden. In truth though it's a pretty bleak outlook for the western world, as politicians become ever more detached from reality and any possibility of arresting the decline of our culture through constitutional means is removed.

*Of course, the fraudulent winners were ably aided and abetted by the spectacular incompetence of the losers, but that was only to be expected. Never underestimate the Stupid Party's capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. 

Varoufakis can fak off

No, I haven't changed my mind in the last two years that Varoufakis is basically just a ridiculous Marxist conman. He never cared about his country. He rolled over and let the EU do whatever they wanted to Greece. In Germany (a country not know for its subtle, sophisticated humour) he was treated as a joke. And quite rightly too!

And the great man hasn't changed either. He still loves the EU, despite what it did to his country, and he condemns liberal "warmongers" without even conceding that the era of liberal "imperialism" is now well and truly over - because Ukraine is now fighting a defensive war, as is the West generally because it has now been so thoroughly poisoned by liberalism that it no longer believes in its own heritage.

And Varoufakis is indeed a very good example of a de-westernised westerner. His country gave the world Homer and Herodotus, but he prefers to pose like an ageing James Dean - not because he has any love for American values (constitutionalism, limited government, individualism, etc.) but simply because pratting about like an American pop-star is cooler than being a Greek.

(Tony Blair, for what it's worth, thought the same thing - only in all probability he genuinely believed in the American Dream, whereas Varoufakis very obviously does not.)

Looking shady!

Hadrien Pierre Mazelier, probably photographed by Jannis Tsipoulanis, and doing his bit for transatlantic goodwill

Afterthoughts

Perhaps I should have called this post 'Laughterthoughts'. Unfortunately though, there aren't that many laughs in the new Ghostbusters soft reboot - although OTOH it could have been much, much worse. It is scary, in parts, but with the honest exception of Paul Rudd's performance it's not really funny.

The decision to go full Stranger Things was brave and mostly worked. Wolfhard now plays horny teenage everynerd more or less pat, though his character is underwritten and underused. He's basically the new Peter Venkman except that he fails to get into the girl's knickers. And of course he's not funny either. His consolation prize - and it's a fairly meagre one, given that he's the only one of the "kids" who can feasibly do it - is that he gets to drive the Ectomobile. (Having him as an anaemic Michael Taylor at least meant we were spared a Short Round.) The younger children are also OK. The girl is better than the boy: she's Spengler's granddaughter and a reasonable stand-in for her grandpa, and the boy just about captures Stanz's slow-witted, well-meaning enthusiasm. Only the token black girl - who by process of elimination is there to be a female Zeddemore* - really lives down to expectations.

In theory of course Ghostbusters as a concept should work just as well with any group of early middle-aged, middle-class white men (and their token black friend) who are down on their luck (sacked academics dressed like plumbers going into business in the real world) but make it big by doing something whackily fantastical in a relatively cool, deadpan, Noo Yawk sort of way. In practice though, the camaraderie between Egon, Ray and Venkman was something special, and the real-life friendship between Ramis and Murray was extra special. (Murray's double take at the end of Afterlife when Venkman sees Spengler's ghost is funnier and more emotional than anything else in the whole film.) The first film was originally envisioned for Belushi and Eddie Murphy, and it would no doubt have been perfectly good with them. But without Bill Murray it would only have been half the film it turned out to be, and even today Murray could almost certainly improvise his way half-way through a Ghostbusters film without breaking sweat.

Including the original Ghostbusters at the end was the right decision. Unfortunately in just a couple of minutes they demonstrate what was lacking in the movie - which was, of course, them. Murray in particular proves quite how much of the original film really was just him, and manages to improvise in the space of a few lines more humour, charm, pathos and excitement than the rest of the cast does in the previous hour and a half.

And of course the real ghost elephant in the room is Melissa McCarthy. There's a real sense of Ghostbusters: Afterlife's being really just a franchise palate-cleanser, and as such it was certainly worth it. 

*Winston Zeddemore was originally supposed to be ex-military. By the time of the videogame he's got a PhD. In practice he arrives only just in time to be the straight man (i.e. just before Sigourney Weaver becomes a dog), albeit only narrowly avoiding being the "comedy stupid one" (and let's face it, that's more or less what he is in Ghostbusters II).