Blog Posts - Jay Peterson

Sounds like

6/15/2022

It's said that scientific discovery sounds less like "eureka!" and more like, "huh. That's wierd."
Sometimes heroism sounds less like "follow me!" and more like, 'wait, WTF?"
There's not a whole lot of press when a riot is stopped before it ever starts. But one in Idaho, where a bunch of Patriot front yahoos were all arrested before they ever got near a Pride event they were looking to disturb, is getting a bit of attention.
What stopped them?
Someone at their hotel noticing a platoon's worth of uniformed, masked, and armored guys loading up into a uhaul and called the cops. The uhaul was stopped within 10 minutes, and everyone there was arrested for conspiracy to riot.
There's a lot of conversation about the state of the world in general and security at Pride in particular that I don't need to be joining.
But I wanted to point out that a good bit of ugly was prevented the other day not from thrilling heroics, but from one working stiff saying, "wait, WTF?"

sigh

6/8/2022

Look folks, complaining that an actor said stupid shit about guns is like complaining the sun rose in the east. It's not gonna stop, so don't waste your time.
The ones that have a clue don't dare say so too loud on official platforms. They can barely talk about it at work without being looked at like they grew a second head. And in a business where you're always wondering where your next job is gonna be, nobody can risk doing so for long, lest they be considered... problematic.
I could say McConaughey is a local of Uvalde, born and raised, and thus has a personal stake in the matter.
I could also point out that he came within a hair's breadth of running for Governor of Texas this year, and there may be a political angle being played.
Would I like more actors to be better educated and able to speak freely? Absolutely.
But it is what it is. And making inaccurate cries of hypocrisy because they've fired guns onscreen is a bad argument that doesn't work.
I've done a stoner comedy and I don't indulge at all.
I've played a demon and I have nothing to do with Satanism.
Kindly give others of my ilk the same benefit of doubt.

Speaking as a Marine Corps combat veteran...

6/2/2022

Marine corps combat veterans are no more or less likely than the general population to be complete fucking idiots.
Seriously, I knew a guy who was an absolute virtuoso behind the trigger of a S.A.W. If there was a Mozart of light machine guns, it was this guy.
He still had a room temperature IQ and the kind of personal hygiene normally found in barnyard animals.
The Marine Corps, for all I love it, is still a government bureaucracy that does stupid shit on a regular basis.
Combat experience, on the other hand, is just as much a function of being in the right place at the right time as anything else.
Someone opening their argument with either, or even worse, both, is making a weaksauce appeal to authority. Probably because the thrust of their argument fucking sucks.
They're not a pearl of wisdom dispenser.
They're the proverbial guy on the other end of the bar trying to get their proverbial dick wet, and they're checking to see if you'll proverbially buy what they're selling.
If you're down for that, then go in peace.
But try to have a solid grasp of what you're actually agreeing with.
Take care of yourselves out there.

Gathered thoughts

5/28/2022

The usual suspects are already holding up Uvalde as an example of a good person with a gun doesn't work. Stretching the logic like pantyhose, but I can see where it might just be a delusion instead of a lie.
The night after Uvalde, a man started shooting up a graduation party in Charleston WV. A concealed carrier at the party shot him, killed him, and waited for the cops to come. There were no other casualties.
Good people armed, already there, and willing to fight works when it's permitted to. End of story.
* * * *
Given that at least three departments were on scene at Uvalde, it will probably be a while before they stop stepping on each other's dicks long enough to investigate, clean it up for the public affairs folks, and release it to the press.
* * * *
And before I say this, I will reiterate that if you're screaming for both gun control and ACAB, you're the kind of dupe that's defying Darwin by your continued existence.
That said, most badges are shaped like a shield for a reason.
If you wear one and aren't willing to act as such for the public you swore an oath to serve, then it might as well be the lid of a garbage can.
I do not know for certain, and won't for some time. But if it turns out the commander on scene declared a barricaded suspect while shots were being fired and calls from children inside were still being relayed through dispatch?
Then the scene commander needs to be in prison. And those who obeyed the order with such knowledge need their badges taken.
I'm not even letting my imagination contemplate worthy treatment for those who restrained parents from entering themselves. That kind of shit makes me glad I'm not the kind of pagan that can call upon the furies.
Take care of yourselves out there.

I see the usual spins and counterspins are in place

5/26/2022

Particularly irritating is when the last few holdouts of stupidly restrictive gun laws come up with the dumbest theories as to why their laws didn't work and they need more.
Remember the Sacramento shooting? Happened about a thousand years ago, or as they say around here (checks notes) this April?
Six killed, twelve wounded, everyone involved stopped giving a shit once they realized it was gang related?
Except the gun control lobby insisted that in a city with every single weapons restriction they ever asked for, up to and including background checks for ammo purchases, it still wasn't enough.
Why?
Because only California had those restrictions. They'd really be effective if they were nationwide.
(Side note: California expats, this is why your neighbors don't trust you. They know you fled a neo-feudal shithole and they're happy for you, really. But then you insist on voting for the very same crap that made California what it is today in the first place. That, not appreciated as much. Work on that.)
Chicago pulls the same bullshit. Can't go five minutes without whining about Indiana. Ditto Baltimore and DC about Virginia, NYC about the rest of the damn country, the list goes on.
And that is why I despise the gun control lobby. Because it's not enough for them to be helpless peasants, they insist that YOU need to be one as well.
Fuck you, no.
I remember after one shooting, some minor celebrity admitted that he bought a gun from a friend in a California parking lot OPENLY ON TWITTER. Fuck-all nothing happened to him.
Same with the DC journalist who waved around a standard magazine in a DC news studio even when it was illegal at the time.
The cognitive dissonance to do shit like that and still insist your bad ideas should still work boggles the mind.
Honestly, one of the few laws I would support is coming down on straw purchasers.
Not the dealers, the purchasers.
Won't do much for mass shootings. Those usually gain weapons one of three ways.
One, purchased legally. Not much to do there.
Two, purchased illegally because a reporting agency didn't update to NICS. That's more or less a funding and staffing issue for a slew of state, local, and federal agencies.
Three, murder a family member and take their (legal) weapons. Again, not much they can do there.
Straw purchases, on the other hand, are the source of much more gun crime. But they are rarely if ever prosecuted. And suspected attempts aren't required to be reported. When they are, cops find it much easier to try and prosecute Bubba's gun and bait store instead of the clean-record girlfriend of a convicted felon.
Unfortunately, the same things that make it easy for straw purchasers to get caught make proving intent a bitch. Like being stupid enough to come with your entire crew and send only the one guy without a record to make the buy while the guys with records wait in the car. Or sending your girlfriend with neither record nor clue about guns, and try to coach her through her cellphone through the process.
It would be a time and resource suck, and I know our legal system has plenty of those already. Shit, I just read about a case in Brooklyn where a 16-year old, on his second weapons charge, shot a cop and himself in the struggle surrounding his arrest, and Brooklyn's D.A. dropped the charges. If shooting a cop arresting you for illegally having a loaded weapon in your hand doesn't get you prosecuted, lying on paperwork probably won't either.
Take care of yourselves out there.

Posted elsewhere

5/25/2022

I hesitate to put forward what I think is the root of the problem. Because then I step out of my subject matter expert office and throw out a wild ass guess with everyone else.
But fuck it, it's my page.
For years now, one word has been in the back of my mind.
Despair.
A lot of people in a lot of demographics are convinced that as a society and a species, we're fucked. And this goes across generational lines. We see it in baby boomers finding the safety net they've paid into their entire lives has huge rips and is spread over a concrete floor. We see it in Gen X'ers laid off, told to go back to school and getting out to find they've been replaced by a cheaper millenial. We find millenials sold a serious bill of goods, smart enough to discover exactly how they're getting fucked by the man and finding a dozen or more clever ways to fuck back.
Our suicide rate has gone up 35% since the late 90's, according to the national institute of mental health.
And a tiny strain of cishet dudes seem determined to take a few with them when they go.
And one in a million choosing to go out in a hail of antiheroism is still 320 of them running around the country at any given moment.
And I have no idea, culturally, how to change or stop that.
The patriarchy, toxic masculinity, critical race theory... shit. I can see why so many parents are pissed off. Take a single demographic of kids and let them know from kindergarten on up that people like them are why the world is shit, and you get confused when they get pissed off and insist otherwise? Or have shitty self-esteem and can't talk among themselves except to egg on each other's hatred?
Is is any wonder why we got parents who believe transgenderism is an agenda being pushed instead of a state of being finally being allowed to openly flourish? If you teach a kid all their life that there's nothing worse than being a cishet white dude, then point out that there are other options, are you really surprised that some are going to fuck up the math in that equation?
I don't think these folks are right. Not even close.
But I can see where they're coming from.
We can laugh and joke about "carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white dude." But seriously, where did you think he would go? What did you think he would do?
Did you really think they would all just wander off somewhere else to die where you wouldn't have to look at or think about them?
Are we seriously surprised that white supremacy is on the rise? Or the ctrl-left and their vicious mobs? Show people a place where they'll be treated like people instead of garbage and they'll go along with a lot.
Show them nowhere to go, and where will they?
And that's without getting into the loads of spin and counter-spin happening with every shooting that actually makes the news. It used to be I'd wait the first 48, then 72 hours, to say a damn thing. Because all the bleeders are leaders folk would fuck up their facts all over the place in the first day.
Only now everyone's got their own facts. If I wasn't retired, I'd be spending the first 24 hours screencapping and downloading as fast as possible because motherfuckers are not shy about lying, deleting, and banning to fit the narrative they want. Even as out of the loop as I was, there's some serious shit in the buffalo shooters manifesto that does not fit the narrative at all, and that's where I'll stop.
I got no solutions.
I wish I fucking did.
All I got are stoppers.
People smarter than me are out their busting their brains trying to figure out the hows and whys of those who take the step to do this without running into "best indicator of present behavior is past behavior" and I don't have any magic gunman cheat code to help there or any other kind of prevention.
All I know is what treatments work when it begins.
Along with a prayer it doesn't happen again.
And another that it's stopped swiftly by someones who know what I know.
The speed bumps and the patch ups.
Take care of yourselves out there.

Roger Rabbit just made my head explode again

4/30/2022

Specifically, how deep the rabbit (pun intended) hole goes.
Specifically, looking at Betty Boop's cameo at the Ink & Paint club.
At first glance, it's a take on Hollywood's ageism, where men are allowed to age gracefully and women are allowed to age away from the cameras. Betty, a black-and-white toon a decade past her heyday, is stuck hawking cigarettes for all-human audiences to get by while technicolor ingenues like Jessica Rabbit headline night after night and marry movie stars like Roger. Her "what a lucky girl" line comes off as funny, since now two generations of starlets consider a goofball like Roger to be a memetic sex god.
But if you look back at Betty's career and Hollywood history?
It gets real dark real fast.
See, Betty got her start as a sidekick of a Fleisher studios character named Bimbo the dog (who was himself a fairly obvious dollar store version of Mickey Mouse). Bimbo was intended to be the cigar-chomping, wisecracking star. Betty, while always sweet on Bimbo, upstaged him so completely that she was the title character of the shorts they appeared in within two years.
Unfortunately, her character would only remain at its height for two years after that. Still in a relationship with Bimbo, Betty established her bona fides as the girl looking for a good time with a heart of gold. She was THE animated sex symbol of her time.
Then the Hays code went into effect in 1934.
Bimbo was immediately fired (because God forbid a human be in a romantic relationship with an animal), and Betty had all of the innuendo and sensuality that formed her act taken away by the censors. While she made do as best she and the animators could, it wouldn't be enough.
She headlined her last short in 1939.
Now take all of that, and watch that scene at the Ink & Paint club again.
Betty's not only seeing Hollywood ageism in the new generation of starlet hitting the spotlight.
She's seeing a technicolor toon being allowed to publicly keep her marriage to an animal toon. When Betty wasn't.
She's watching a toon at the height of sexualization bring down the damn all-human house. When Betty wasn't.
Jessica has EVERYTHING that the industry took from Betty over a decade ago.
And she sums it up in a wistful, "Yeah, what a lucky girl." Then shuts Eddie's mouth before it draws flies and gets back to work.
And as a last little stick it in and twist?
The one and only Fleisher studios character that didn't get so much as a background appearance in WFRR?
Bimbo.
"What a lucky girl."
Holy fucking shit, Betty.
I did not plan on you making me cry tonight, but here we are.

sighs

4/27/2022

Godsdammnit...
I don't care about him or it.
But I stubbornly keep caring about smart people being duped.
Going around is some variant on the theme below:
"Friendly reminder that Musk told the UN that if they gave him a budgeted breakdown of how $6B could end world hunger, he would do it. Then they gave it to him and he didn't. Then he bought Twitter for $45B."
Yeah, about that plan.
The UN gave him a breakdown of how that much would feed those the UN determined "most in need."
For one year.
That's not ending world hunger.
That's growing existing programs that say they will do so in a year.
(Source in the first comment.)
So yeah, Musk didn't fund it. Because it was bullshit. I guess when you don't even pay your parking tickets, people get suspicious of what you say you can do with their money. Funny how that works.
How much bullshit?
The USDA spent $122B on their own nutritional and hunger programs just in the US alone, and doesn't seem to have done much, despite being the most that department has ever spent.
(source in the second comment)
So, to sum up: The UN is full of shit and the feds are wasteful.
But a whole lot of people fell for a line of fine-spun bullshit anyway.
And it's not even well-hidden bullshit either. That took me five seconds of WTF and thirty seconds of googling.
You are all smarter people than this. Stop falling for it.
Look, I get it. Billionaires with names and faces you can recognize are easy targets, especially when you're struggling yourself, I get that.
A snarky soundbite when you're convinced you're right is another dopamine hit in a day when you need every one you can get. I get that.
It's still falling for bullshit.
Bullshit that someone spun for a reason.
And every time an otherwise smart person falls for something like that, they end up acting like just the sort of dirt-scrabbling, witch-burning, hat-in-handing, pathetic little useful idiot peasant the bullshit spinners think they are.
Stop rewarding the bullshit spinners.
They're saying what you want to hear. But if they had to lie that clumsy to do it, do they really have your best interests in mind?
I'm probably preaching to a choir and empty pews, but fuck it.
Stop rewarding the bullshit spinners.
Think for five seconds. Especially when it's telling you what you want to hear.
Start by pondering the idea that if you're screaming bloody murder about the fact that a free speech absolutist is buying a venue that you yourself use to speak freely, you're not the good guys in that particular story.
*Gibbs slap*
Don't reward them again. No matter where they come from.
Take care of yourselves out there.

What I'd rather discuss

4/27/2022

Rather than talk about things I don't give a shit about, like Twitter and Elon Musk, I wanna talk about things I do give a shit about, like moviemaking and living in Georgia.
Over the weekend, an actor and a casting director got into what they call an exchange on Twitter. Point of contention being pay inequality between actors from Atlanta vs those in other markets, often for the same roles.
TLDR: blaming casting for your problems is barking up the wrong tree.
Just to establish bona fides: I didn't focus on acting until 2015, and I didn't really start getting noticed for it until 2018 when I retired from fight choreography. But I've been in the Atlanta market since 2009, when I left active duty. And my toes were dipped in the water even before I enlisted.
And through that decade and change since the tax incentives kicked in, there has always been points of contention between Atlanta and LA.
Frankly speaking, we stole their lunch money on a large scale.
I know "I suffered so you should too" is a bullshit argument. But saying that to actors who actually had to live in LA, pay four times the rent for half the space, be in the room every time (and pay a lot of money in parking tickets over the years as a result), not to mention deal with the rest of the bullshit inherent in living there, is not a winning strategy.
A roundabout argument kicked in where LA actors were stuck up and no better than those in Atlanta, and Atlanta actors were cheap and lazy upstarts who wanted to make it big overnight without paying their dues.
And to be honest, there were solid examples on both sides.
That said, this was happening to the whole industry, who rooted for the home team when possible. For the early years, when an LA actor was late, or showed up unprepared, or went off the rails, well, that was a crappy actor. But when an Atlanta actor did the same thing, all of Atlanta's talent pool got tarred with the same brush.
The learning curve was steep and painful and yeah, I climbed it too.
Breakdowns nowadays say "keep it real and grounded" like a tent revival preacher says "Amen" for a fucking reason, folks.
(Then there was the wonkiness of people who tried dual residency to game the system. Some people are always looking for cheat codes, I guess. I've never seen any that worked for more than one person, so I haven't bothered.)
But in Atlanta's corner the entire time, championing the Atlanta talent pool, were the handful of casting directors who are based locally and believed in local talent.
Then the pandemic hit, and the one big weakness in the Atlanta talent pool became the gold standard nationwide.
I'm talking about self-taping.
L.A. hated it for years. They wanted in the room. Wheras Atlanta had been doing self-tapes regularly since they became a thing in 2010 or so. So when work started up again, nobody wanted to be in any room, self-taping became a gold standard, and the industry was waiting.
It didn't seem that way, because the return to work protocols also meant a sharp drop in costars and day players, which were and are overrepresented in Atlanta. But they're also the majority of available roles in every market, so what you gonna do?
So yeah, there probably is a pay disparity. And it's not like the union's being any help there (who was it that called Georgia a right-to-freeload state again?) Adjusting territorial lines might be worth bringing up at the next round of negotiations.
But again, casting isn't the culprit.
Casting is one department among many, answering to a producer and responsible for their budget. And in the case of location casting, the person who sees you might not even be a department head. I have yet to see a casting director that won't fight for an actor. But there's only so much they can do. We all pick and choose our battles every day.
Maybe there's some movement for transparency at the producer level that would shine some light on it some more. But I'm not holding my breath.
At the end of the day, we're all mercenaries fighting for our piece of the action. We all step into the room alone with our preparation, our training, and our instincts, and what happens happens.
Take care of yourselves out there.

Huh. That's interesting.

4/7/2022

If we weren't living in interesting times, I'd say the Dems were going to get their asses handed to them in the midterms. While not everything that's gone wrong in the last two years is their fault, it has happened on their watch: supply chain problems, bungling covid response, everything to do with schools, Afghanistan, Ukraine, the list goes on.
The Mayonnaise left (mostly white, rich, thick, and oily. Apologies to Terry Pratchett.) are keeping their heads down nervously with every new development. The ctrl-left still screams at every blunder from Biden, knowing damn well they'll be supporting him and everyone else with a D after their name when the primary clears. Any more or less united GOP would mop the floor with the pack of 'em.
But that's not what describes the GOP. The Trump cult is awaiting his return about as eagerly as the death eaters awaited Voldemort, while the old grifters and wannabe libertarians are trying not to speak his name in the hopes they can get back to business as usual. Which is why you never hear from the latter, and only hear about the former when they're doing stupid shit: banning books, throwing their weight behind draconian antiabortion laws, suddenly giving a shit about women's sports, and the like. The old school playbook that gets the cult base excited but nobody else.
And it's a race to the bottom when it comes to schools. Everybody gave teachers the short end of the stick, from both parties to their unions to parents that suddenly had time to notice. Normally, accusing genuinely concerned parents of terrorism would be something we'd still be talking about today. But the GOP had to top that with every flavor of discriminatory bullshit we thought we'd ditched in the 90's.
Look, the idea that parents shouldn't have a say in how their kids are educated is such a bad idea you should be able to hear the whistle of the unintended consequences train just mentioning it.
I've said it before and I've said it again. Kids need parents, teachers, and cops in their lives. But when any of those three don't measure up, the problem gets worse because each one of those three suck at doing the job of the other two.
That said, parents? If your kid doesn't trust you enough to come out to you as LGBT?
That's YOUR fuckup as a parent. Own it.
Hiding behind fucked up mandatory reporting laws is cowardly bullshit.
Like I said, if we weren't living in interesting times, I'd say the Dems were due for a shellacking in the midterms.
Then yesterday, Biden extended the student loan repayment moratorium through the end of August.
Which gets me thinking...
Imagine over Labor Day Weekend, Biden stops being a tease and declares full student loan forgiveness across the board.
It would be a massive boon in a key general election demographic: suburbanite professionals.
People living well for themselves, but with student debt as an albatross around their necks.
Would that sway the numbers to the Dems?
Possibly.
Two factors complicate it.
One is inflation. Which the Dems denied was happening until even I was noticing the cheap shit frozen pizza in my shopping cart had gone up.
With the war in Ukraine still going on, spring planting is probably fucked both there and in Russia.
And there's already a fertilizer shortage.
Add in oil problems.
You can't run or hide from global commodity problems. We probably won't have no-shit famine within the U.S., but food prices aren't going down anytime soon.
And our suburbanite professionals will be experiencing that.
The second is that the immediate impact is already gone. The current moratorium is already two years old. Repaying these loans haven't been a part of a lot of budgets for two years. And they're STILL getting hit with inflation in commodities. In that respect, forgiveness won't make their lives noticeably better, just supposedly keep them from getting worse.
We live in interesting times, is what I'm saying.
Take care of yourselves out there.