'We heard this cannon sound"

A post shared on Facebook claims there are no prisons in Iceland and that electricity is free. Verdict: False Iceland currently operates four prisons, according to the State Prison Service’s website. Likewise, data from Statista shows electricity prices Icelandic residents pay vary depending on how many kilowatt-hours they consume. A criminology expert confirmed Iceland has […]

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Viewpoint-based censorship

The image actually comes from the 1975 movie "Jaws."

There was no shortage of wild commentary following the first presidential debate. President Joe Biden’s performance was so disastrous that the press had little of their usual bluster left over for Donald Trump. With rumors circling all weekend whether Biden will even run again, for once, it’s actually appropriate to say Republicans “pounced.” After the […]

The Sixers ain't playing around, that's clear

Column They Don’t Know Nothing About the Jersey Devil: 13th Child (2002) With the amount of star power in the cast, it should be a better film than it is… By Judith Tarr | Published on July 1, 2024 Credit: Unipix Entertainment Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Unipix Entertainment Whenever I see the phrase “Inspired By,” I know I’d better not be too invested in the source material. Sometimes this is a good thing. In the case of 13th Child, which is subtitled The Legend of the Jersey Devil, I’m not so sure. With the amount of star power in the cast, it should be a better film than it is. Oscar winner Cliff Robertson stars as Mr. Shroud. Emmy winner Robert Guillaume plays his opposite number, ex-cop and current Mental-Health Hospital inmate Riley. Familiar faces Lesley-Anne Down and Christopher Atkins do their best to move the plot along, Down in a scene as the New Jersey Attorney General and Atkins as the intrepid Ranger Ron. Along with the rest of the cast, they manage to not quite equal the sum of their parts. Down is especially overwrought as the daughter seeking revenge by proxy for the murder of her father twenty years before. She gender-bends the fridging trope, which is something, I guess. The young Assistant DA she assigns to the case, played by Michelle Maryk (no relation to co-writer Michael Maryk), comes across as a kind of Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs-lite. Which lets Cliff Robertson do a low-key riff on Hannibal Lecter, complete with villainously flat affect and gnomic utterances (which he may have written himself—he shares the writing credit with Michael Maryk). Or maybe he’s supposed to be the priest in The Exorcist, with the overcoat and the fedora, pacing ominously through shadowy settings. The Jersey Devil is a devil, after all, though whether that means a demon in the religious sense, or more of a horror-movie monster, is ambiguous. Mother Leeds gets disappeared in favor of a Lenni Lenape named Matongwa (which ADA Tatum rolls her eyes at: “That’s a name to conjure with”). He is a shaman’s thirteenth child, and he has superpowers, including the ability to shapeshift. There’s a curse, and the Shroud family is linked with it, in the person of Cliff Robertson’s character. They’ve been connected for over 200 years; their ownership of the land predates the British. There’s an echo of a variation on the legend, the story of the local girl who fell in love with a British soldier and bore a cursed child. Here, there’s no mother in the picture. We first encounter Matongwa at the end of his life, when a British major hanged him. He transformed into a monster and slaughtered the major. Whether he was born with the ability to transform into that shape, or whether it’s the hanging that precipitated it, we aren’t told. This was the first murder of a centuries-long spree, which kind of points toward the latter possibility. The monster’s signature is “gruesome decapitation and mutilation murder.” He’s been doing it with apparent regularity since the day he was hanged. The main plot involves ADA Tatum, who is investigating the gruesome decapitation with mutilation murder of an escaped convict, interwoven with the story of the AG’s father and his partner, Riley. Riley claimed to have seen the Jersey Devil, and became obsessed with finding it again. Officer Murphy finally agreed to help him hunt for it, but if they didn’t find it within a week, Riley would have to give up and move on. After three weeks, Riley was found in the Pine Barrens in complete mental collapse. Murphy was never found at all. But we know that Riley did find his mutilated body, and a great deal of blood. Twenty years later, Riley is now in the New Jersey Mental Health Facility (it says so on the sign), and the Jersey Devil is doing what he does. He gruesomely murders a deer hunter and rips up the deer carcass, and later he’ll go after a pair of kids having hot teen sex in a beat-up RV in the woods. Riley claims to be the only person who knows the truth about the Jersey Devil. He has a meltdown after watching a television documentary on the legend (in which we learn about the major and Matongwa), and is hauled off to his very bare, very poorly maintained room. He’s injected with a sedative, over his vehement protests, and the staff take a small fur-and-bone talisman from him and hand it to the security guard outside. The guard ignores it, but we see that it starts to glow. Later we’ll learn that it’s made from the bones of Indian ancestors (and we learn whose they are), and it protects him against the Jersey Devil. We also see that he has company in the room. It’s tiny, but deliberately scary, if you’re phobic. Which Riley seems to be. Or is he? We’ll learn the answer to that by the end of the film. There’s a whole lot of plot-foo in between, with a couple of decapitated torsos, an ongoing motif of deer carcasses, an occasional lake of blood, and plenty of weird witchy stuff in the Shroud house (which was built, Shroud tells us, in 1760). The barn is notably bigger than the house, full of drying bunches of (poisonous?) herbs and animal skulls and bones and the odd, very stinky snake carcass. There’s a tower, too, with alarming contents of the bleeding-offal variety. Mr. Shroud is openly eccentric. He has a poison garden, because of course he does. He has his own vineyard, though the wine doesn’t appear to be toxic, and a collection of live reptiles. And he has a pet tarantula named Bruno. “I study things shunned by man,” he intones. “I intend to protect them anywhere, any way.” That’s his life’s work, and his constant purpose. We gradually get to see the actual Devil, at first by what he does to his victims, and then through shadows and glimpses. He ticks most of the boxes: bipedal, standing on hooves, with clawed hands, a torso consisting primarily of skeletal ribs, and horns (deer antlers in the opening scenes, bovine toward the end, which is either a continuity problem or a plot point that doesn’t come through). He has a T. Rex-like head with glowing red eyes and a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth, and he drools slime. What is it with movie monsters and slime-drool? I have to hand it to the film for giving us an unusual take on shapeshifting. The seven-foot-tall Devil is the form that gets all the publicity. The other one, which may be the base form, is not what you would expect. Or maybe the Devil is the base form and the other one is what it turns into when it needs to fly under the radar. We never get an explanation. We just know that Shroud calls the Devil his “brother,” and he has devoted his life to protecting the creature from humans. It’s humans who are evil, he maintains. They fill the world with their poisons and their unkindness. The Devil, like the rest of its deadly relatives, is only being itself. One thing we do learn is that in Devil form, the creature is a five-way chimera. This is thanks to one of the more distinctive fantasy elements, the instant DNA analysis. Throw a claw in a jar, get your result: “Equal parts goat, bat, reptile, and are you ready for this? Spider, and human.” It appears to be a clone. Instant DNA Tech declares that the two claws he analyzed (one from the latest murder scene and the other stolen from Shroud’s house by ADA Tatum) are identical, but one is 200 years old. Apparently he can do instant dating, too. Fantasy science for the win. We get some Monster POV here and there, in case we were missing a chance to be the Devil. It’s blurry, red-tinged, and out of focus. Except when it zeroes in on a victim. Then we get it sharp and clear and in living color. It’s just doing what it’s made (or cursed) to do. And Shroud is paying the price that his family was made (or cursed) to pay in return for the land he lives on. Shroud has embraced his destiny. He’ll do anything to protect the creatures he regards as his own. Anything. At any cost.[end-mark] The post They Don’t Know Nothing About the Jersey Devil: <i>13th Child</i> (2002) appeared first on Reactor.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Donald Trump’s favor in the presidential immunity case, complicating at least two prosecutions against the 45th president.   “Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of presidential power entitles a former president to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” Chief Justice John Roberts ruled. “And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.” The ruling, issued Monday, involves the federal prosecution of Trump for challenging the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, but it also could affect a case in Fulton County, Georgia, in which Trump faces charges of conspiracy to overturn the results of the race in the state.  Trump’s lawyers argued that the 45th president—and any president—has absolute immunity from prosecution for official acts pertaining to his office. In this case, Trump’s attorneys contended that he was acting in his official capacity as president—not simply as a candidate—in fighting what he believed was a dishonest election.  The ruling complicates special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump centered on the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, as well as the Fulton County case against Trump for challenging the election outcome in Georgia.  “The president enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official. The President is not above the law,” Roberts asserted in the majority opinion. “But under our system of separated powers, the president may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for his official acts. That immunity applies equally to all occupants of the Oval Office.” Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote the dissent. “Today’s decision to grant former presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the presidency,” Sotomayor argued. “It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of government, that no man is above the law.” The high court’s ruling also comes after amid Trump’s conviction in New York over “hush money” paid to former porn actress Stormy Daniels–based on charges from before Trump was president. A second federal case in Florida, run by Smith, over the former president’s possession of classified documents regards alleged conduct after leaving office. These cases won’t likely be affected by the high court ruling. Across four separate indictments, Trump faced a total of 91 state and federal charges. Trump’s attorneys argued that the only exception from presidential immunity would be if Trump were impeached and removed from office, in which case he then could be charged with the offense in a separate criminal case.  That’s because what is known as the Constitution’s impeachment judgment clause stipulates that a president “convicted” by the Senate in an impeachment trial is “subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment, and Punishment, according to Law.” Although the House impeached Trump a second time shortly before he left office in 2021, the Senate acquitted Trump in a trial after he left office.  During questioning, Justice Amy Coney Barrett had suggested that the solution might warrant a legal test to set parameters for what is a private and what is an official act.  In oral arguments April 25 before the nine justices, Michael Dreeben argued the case on behalf of Smith, the government’s special counsel, while lawyer John Sauer argued on behalf of Trump.  Sauer argued that “there can be no presidency as we know it” without immunity, since presidents would be reluctant to carry out their duties for fear of prosecution by a subsequent administration.  The immunity is based on the Constitution’s executive vesting clause and the corresponding principle of separation of powers, he said. The Justice Department, which appointed Smith as special counsel, argued that a president isn’t entitled to immunity from prosecution even for official actions. During oral arguments, however, Dreeben qualified the argument by saying presidents have some “special protection” and could raise it as a defense if prosecuted.  The Supreme Court ruled in its 1982 Nixon v. Fitzgerald decision that presidents have absolute immunity in civil cases for official actions taken as president.  In February, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected Trump’s immunity claim.  Separately, the high court is considering a case involving defendants charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. At issue is whether a federal statute used to prosecute them may be used under a broad reading or instead was designed to cover narrower acts.  The post Supreme Court Upholds ‘Absolute Immunity’ for Presidents in Trump Case appeared first on The Daily Signal.

I Am Tired of the 'Trump Lies' and 'Biden Has Integrity' Meme