This week: Admiral and USS Spruance; Halsey, King, Nimitz and …Franchetti?; Jersey cops smokin’ doobies; Talk like a Hemingway; Midnight in Paris; Ed Wood and Orson Welles; Trump’s Insults and the The Dobbs Decision — All this and so much less on this week’s edition of Right Angle: Backstage!
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Right Angle: Backstage 10/24/23
This week: admirals, cops, Hemingway, and Ed Wood vs Orson Welles.

37 replies on “Right Angle: Backstage 10/24/23”
You said, “it looks really modern” as if that was a good thing.
Re: New Jersey cops smoking marijuana. Your points may be well taken, but perhaps your low-level discomfort with the idea might be because, despite state drug leniency, you can’t legally buy a firearm if you use recreational drugs. And, like with domestic battery convictions, where military and law enforcement personnel may not be able to keep their jobs because they’re not allowed to own weapons if they’ve been convicted of domestic battery, I would think law enforcement officers wouldn’t be able to use firearms if they’d have to truthfully answer “Yes” to the drug use question on the 4473. . . .
There is a good 1960 movie about Admiral Halsey starring James Cagney as Halsey. From IMDB: A semi-documentary dramatization of five weeks in the life of Vice Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, Jr., from his assignment to command the U.S. naval operations in the South Pacific to the Allied victory at Guadalcanal.
Highly recommend.
On senior military men and journalists, there is a story about Lord Kitchener, the victor of Omdurman in 1898, who ended up as Field Marshall and Minister of War 1915-1916.One day journalists mobbed around him as he left a building in Whitehall. They asked him “Do you have any words for the gentlemen of the Press?” He bristled and replied. “Yes! Get out of my way you drunken swabs!”
Scott makes a very good point about how to sell people on an idea you want to advance. You have to consider what interests and motivates the other person because no matter how much they might think of you, your interests and motivations are not a driving consideration for them.
When the time came where it was obvious I and my family (my mom, sister and her family) needed to unass the Soviet Socialist Repooblik of Kalifornia this was a major tool for me to use in prying them out of their comfortable lifestyle.
I didn’t say “I really, really want to get out of here. Life here sucks. Let’s go before something terrible and irreversible happens to one of us.”
I said “You need to get your son out of this toxic wasteland. Look at our cousin’s kids, who have every possible advantage and have become nothing but wasted oxygen conversion generators. If you want your kid to end up like that, or you’re willing to take the chance that he might, then staying here is a damn good way to go about achieving that.”
There was a lot more to it than that but the point is that I didn’t lie, I didn’t manipulate them, I didn’t do anything more than approach the issue from the point of what concerned them most. I saw and still see this as a vital transition in all our lives but had I not done it the way I did the people I love most would still be in Kalifornia living less then their best possible lives. I was leaving either way. I wanted them to come with me. It was in their best interest to come with me. So I had to present my case in a manner that had the most chance of being successful.
This is the ‘salesmanship’ that Scott is pointing out. Not everyone is adept at this because many if not most people think that what interests and motivates them must also apply to everyone else. It does not.
My sister is one of the best people I’ve ever known in my entire life but she’s terrible at this sort of thing. I’m constantly reminding her that the arguments she uses don’t get her where she wants to be because they only reflect her concerns and do not cause others to share them.
I.E. Two days ago I had to tell her that the roofer she’s hiring doesn’t give a flying rat that she has a deadly allergy to bee, wasp and hornet stings. She was trying to convince him that the new soffit vents had to be screened to prevent insect entry. He was saying that they don’t usually do that. She launched into a long, rambling account of why they had to be screened so that she would not die (which to be honest is pretty freakin’ unlikely in the first place).
I told her that if she wants insect proof soffit vents she needs to tell the contractor that they’ve had a serious problem with paper wasps nesting in the attic in the past and the new vents need to be of a type that will prevent them from getting in. The contractor doesn’t care about her hypochondriac fear of stings. That’s irrelevant to him and he will just try to convince her to go with the most economically suitable vents. If she leaves out all that drek about dying and just tells him the problem and what needs to be addressed to fix it he won’t argue and will just include that cost in his bid. He wants to please his customers and he’s the ‘expert’ on his sort of work. Tell him about the problem and trust him to know the best way to fix it.
Make sure that he understands the problem and insist that he takes that into account. Don’t go on and on about how if he doesn’t you’re going to die a horrible death by allergic asphyxiation. As soon as she started in with that I could see the guys eyes glaze over as his mind went down a rabbit hole trying to understand what and who he was dealing with.
He wasn’t trying to solve the problem, he was trying to solve my sister. Among other things he was probably thinking he might lose the bid if he included additional expenses not normally part of his known, previously successful bidding process.
I stepped in, explained the problem in terms the contractor could relate to and asked him to please include the solution in his bid. Then he understood what was being asked of him without all that crap about my sister dying.
This kind of thing is vital to achieving your goals. The Daily Wire does not care about giving us free access to Bill’s work. Why would they? They’ll nod, be polite and say they’ll consider it. That’s all they’ll do and that will be the end of it.
If Bill comes at it from the angle that the Daily Wire will likely pick up some subscriptions from Bill’s subscribers and that Bills subscribers are from the pool of people who would also be likely to subscribe to the Daily Wire — That gets us all to the same place. It’s a win-win but it must be ‘sold’ that way or it doesn’t happen.
Bill cares about us and wants to do the right thing by us. The Daily Wire cares about The Daily Wire. If those two interests align then it has to be presented to The Daily Wire in a way that motivates them to accede. They still may not, there are other considerations and expenses.
Best naval victory ever: Midway, Salamis, or Lepanto? Discuss.
For the significance of the victory I’d have to say Salamis.
Midway was a hugely significant turning point, but really and truly, Japan lost the war before their aircraft got back from Pearl Harbour, they were never going to beat the US.
Lepanto is hugely satisfying of course, and it did curtail Turkish power in the Med. Nevertheless, it came too late to save Cyprus and the Turks made up their losses swiftly.
If the Greeks had lost at Salamis then the Persians might well have snuffed out Greece’s flame. That would have had incalculable repercussions. The whole of history from 480 BC would have been different.
Regarding the WWII Pacific War, I’ve been watching the youtube channel “Unauthorized History of the Pacific War Podcast”. An absolutely awesome series. Packed with personal stories, and inside, in depth information.
Two points. 1st – There is a video sync issue happening. Noticed it on the last backstage, and this as well. By the end of the video Steve was 2-3 seconds in the future compared to Bill & Scott. He’d reply to one of Bill’s comments just before Bill said it, and then would say something – only to have Bill and Scott nod for several seconds listening to him, long after he was done. And yes, it also results in Steve talking over Bill and Scott quite a bit by the end of the video as it gets farther out of sync.
2nd – The Cop/Grass thing might be because of federal law. Regardless of state laws the ATF and Feds are sticking to the “you can’t own or touch guns if you smoke weed,” rule. Could be what is prompting the legal actions.
Bill’s two existing “What we saw” shows on Daily Wire are worth the cost of a Daily Wire membership on their own. Then you also get all the great Daily Wire shows, ESPECIALLY the entire Jordon Peterson collection.
Bill!! Bill!!! Can you do an interview with Jordan??
Drachinfeld has an episode on Admiral King called Semper Irate..
T
I’m totally stoked for “An Empire of Terror”!
I always enjoy these, but if I may offer one point of critique; Steve needs to stop talking over Scott. Trying to insert a comment is one thing, but powering over someone until they give up is kind of rude. This is said with the greatest intentions. I love all three of you.
Regarding “hacks” and hacks not knowing they are hacks ….
I’ve been accused of having talent in many disparate types of artistic expression. I’m convinced that this is ridiculous, indeed I consider complements nearly always fraudulent. As a matter of fact, I’ve been counselled that nearly all of us “normal” folks feel like our talents are fraudulent. The feeling even has a name; Imposter syndrome. I’ve done innumerable arts and crafts, writings, woodwork, and even baritone sax, all because I don’t like sitting still, always knowing I’m not really good and am a fortunate imposter. Most people keep telling me otherwise.
I’ve come to the conclusion that people’s idea of what is good has been so eroded, misnamed, and disguised that even a hack like me seems good. There is so much talent out there that, I guess, is just not supported enough to be recognized, and we are elevating and acknowledging hacks, and it is a sad, sad thing.
No ties , and possibly no pants!
Maybe Daily Wire could copy Bill’s shows to dvd, and sell them in the merch store.
That would be great except … I don’t own a DVD player anymore. The one I had died just recently and I realized I had not used it in years so there’s no point in replacing it. I may, someday, anyway, just because my AV setup looks a little anemic without it.
In the context of DVD players, it’s quite amazing what $50 can by these days.
Yeah, I looked at some when the one I have died. It won’t power on and while I could probably fix that, by the time I get parts and my labor into it I’m well over the cost of a new one. Then too, I’d just have an old one that had been repaired and is waiting for the next thing to fail.
The one I have is a Toshiba DVD RW that I bought at Costco or Sam’s around 2002-2003. So I guess 20 years of service isn’t really anything to complain about. I think it was around $50 back then but I can’t remember for sure.
It got a lot of use at first because I was using it to capture security camera feed. After a few, maybe three, years of experimenting with various camera systems I switched everything over to Blue Iris. Which I’m still using and think is the best bang for the buck in camera software, btw. After the switch it didn’t get used hardly at all. I’ve maybe played 5 DVDs on it in the last 3 years.
I’ve never owned a Blu-ray player so I’m curious to see how that compares to various other file formats in my archives. I don’t know how my digital collection compares to Steve’s but I’ve got terabytes and terabytes of music, movies and TV episodes on hard drives. A Blu-ray player would be more for the benefit of friends who might bring a disk over and want to watch it.
So an optical player might not get a lot of use but you’re right … For $50 there’s really no good reason not to have it in case it’s needed.
The nice thing about bluray players is that they can up-sample a DVD signal and provide a slightly better resolution for the typical HD panels we have anymore. The up-sampling is not perfect, but it is an modest visual improvement.
The downside to bluray is the programmability of the bluray format that allows the manufacturer to reprogram button behavior. For example, don’t want to allow the audience to use fast forward during the FBI warning or the credits? No problem. Very frustrating at times. Kinda lie what’s coming with the digital currency: Programmable money that can prevent unapproved purchases. I digress.
Have fun regardless.
My Yamaha AVR (Audio-Video Receiver) does a great job of upsampling. So much so that on a 65″ Samsung OLED panel at the normal 10′ +/- from my chair I can hardly see any difference between 720, 1080 and 4K.
I’ve compared those resolutions to see what the difference was and if any it’s insignificant. Of course my eyes are probably not what they used to be but I can pass the eye test at the DMV and don’t need glasses to drive. So they’re not that bad either. I still wear my glasses when I watch TV so there’s that too.
The AVR substantially improves a 480i picture too. I watch a lot of old stuff like Beverly Hillbillies, Combat!, Green Acres, Rat Patrol, the original Lost in Space, Merry Melodies and Looney Tunes etc. While the picture obviously cannot be magically converted to 4K all those are very watchable. Of course a lot depends on the data density of the file being played too.
If a file is UHD 4K it looks amazing, if it’s not it’s still very good.
All the heavy lifting is done by my AVR. Everything is plugged into it — streaming device, computer, DVD player (when it was still working) with just a single super high speed HDMI cable from it to the back of the TV using the eARC ports on both TV and receiver. That puts everything on my very best, highest powered device which is the Yamaha AVR*. The computer has both an HDMI connection for the display and a TosLink optical connection for listening to music. I could and have run the computer audio over the HDMI too but it’s finicky and I can’t be bothered to upgrade one of the three video cards to make that work better.
It’s taken years and years of fiddling, adusting, tweaking, adding hardware, testing software etc. to get this all working the way I want it to. If I had to buy all the gear all at once there’s no way I could afford it. That said, I now have a fairly decent home theater (with Dolby Atmos 7.2.2) and not quite audiophile grade music system. This all started out years ago as a way to replace a Tivo box but as my mobility showed signs of being a serious problem I embarked on a course of building an acceptable home theater setup because I knew that a lot of the other stuff I love to do would become problematic.
I can get anything as soon as it’s released to DVD or streaming (and rarely but sometimes while it’s still in theaters) so I don’t really need a DVD/Blu-ray for entertainment viewing. I stopped paying for cable TV years ago because that wasn’t doing anything I needed either. Content is not a problem without buying/renting optical disks.
*(My Yamaha is a mid-priced AVR. I could spend less but I’d get a lot less if I did. I could spend a LOT more without getting much more unless I wanted to do some major structural work on the room everything is in, to take advantage of increased capacity. It’s a happy balance between cost and performance for me. I highly recommend Yamaha’s line of AVRs. Denon is a good choice in receivers too, the deciding factor for me was features vs. price. Yamaha gave me more bang for the buck. When it comes to this stuff it has been my experience that it’s best to stick with major name brands. The other stuff, like Pyle for instance, has decent performance too. It’s longevity that’s the problem. I only want to go to the expense and do the work once and then have everything last as long as possible. The cheaper stuff isn’t really cheaper in the long run if you have to buy it more than once. That’s bad enough but tearing everything down to install a new component is a serious PITA for me. Like I said, I’ll probably get another optical player but I don’t need it. I’d do that just to have it even though it probably won’t get much use. Installing it means some very inconvenient work though so I’m in no hurry.)
Loved the ranbling discussion looking forward to the new website design.
someone mentioned Putin, he MUST lose, support Ukraine
Putin must lose for exactly the same reasons Hamas must lose. They are both the bad guys in their regional instability and violence.
Nominal Conservatives who can’t see that are a puzzle to me.
I care about Israel but I don’t really care about Ukraine. That said, If Ukraine is brought into the EU the corruption and other problems will eventually solve themselves. That’s never going to happen if Putin takes Ukraine away from Ukrainians.
Ukraine feeds Europe, so if we let Putin win he will control the food supply for the European continent. What he cannot win by force of arms he can win using food as a weapon. The same way he used energy as a weapon.
That’s reason enough to support Ukraine.
The other side of that coin is Russian aggression cannot be allowed to prosper unless of course you want even more Russian aggression. I cannot understand for the life of me why any Conservative would be foolish enough to want that.
Bill,
You’re not wrong in your prejudice against pot. The compounds in marijuana that cause the ‘high’ stay in the body longer than alcohol. In fact, they store in fatty tissue, and if a chronic user does heavy exercise they can experience a ‘flashback high’.
You don’t get that with alcohol, so yeah, pot is worse overall.
I fell in love with Tom Hiddleson when he did those Jaguar commercials: “It’s good to be evil….”
GMTA
I’m really happy to see someone else that knows something on this topic. For whatever reason the damages of smoking pot to the human body and to society as a whole get swept under the rug. The truth should be widely covered common knowledge and for purposes I cannot fathom they are not.
The truth about tobacco is widely known but smoking pot isn’t. Besides what you said and what I said on the topic, a joint (marijuana cigarette to any un-hip types out there) contains orders of magnitude more tar than a tobacco cigarette. Tar is what damages your lungs and causes lung cancer. Nicotine damages your heart and causes heart disease so pot doesn’t have that. It does have an awful lot of tar.
You’re absolutely correct in what you say. I covered the topic from a physiological angle as it affects behavior and in detail I hope is enough to get across to people that they really need to look into this. Before saying anything positive about marijuana as a recreational drug.
What about edibles?
Just thought I would mention that the only reason I decided not to cancel my Daily Wire subscription was so I can see Bill’s work for them. With out Bill I would have canceled Daily Wire.
Still not enough….. I have like three more weeks before the DW subscription lapses.
NO! It is NOT alright for people who are responsible in any way for the safety of others to smoke pot. The THC active ingredient in marijuana has a half life of 90 days. It acts to distort the signal between neurons in the brain by accumulating in the myelin conductor between brain cells. It stays there distorting the electrical signals, which is your thought process, for 90+ days. When you “sober up” from a pot high it’s not that you are sober, it’s that your brain has adjusted to this signal distortion in an attempt to negate it.
An example of how the brain does this adjustment is how you perceive things via your vision. The image hitting the rod and cone cells on the retina at the back of your eye is upside down. It’s inverted. Your brain turns it right side up by reinterpreting that image. There was an experiment done years ago to see if this was solely a function of the brain by having people wear glasses that turned that image right side up on the retina. Which their brains then interpreted as upside down because it was the opposite of what the brain was accustomed to ‘seeing’. After several hours of confusion and disorientation the subjects in the study suddenly began seeing the world in the correct orientation again. Their brains had figured out what the problem was and corrected it. Then when they took off the glasses they had to go through the whole process again.
This is exactly what happens when you smoke pot. Your brain gets “high” until it manages to overcome the signal interference across the neuron cell gap. Just like wearing those glasses that cause a realistically oriented image to hit your retina.
The difference is that the chemical in pot is STILL acting on your neurons whereas the thing with the glasses was just changing the way light hits your retina. If you take off the glasses you go back to normal in a few hours, about the same amount of time it takes to come down from a pot high. If you stop smoking pot you stay high until the chemical is flushed from your system.
Worse yet, it’s not just that the chemical is distorting the signal and the brain is adjusting for it. The effect is cumulative over the drug’s half life. So if you keep smoking pot you get more and more and more of this stuff embedded in the electrical conductors in your brain. The more and more often you smoke, the more THC builds up in your brain.
This means that you STAY high on a more-or-less permanent basis. That signal is still being distorted and it’s being distorted more as more accumulation occurs.
This has the effect of slowing reaction time, negatively impacting judgement, sapping initiative and creativity, decreasing problem solving ability and general enervation.
To put it more simply, people who smoke pot make themselves lazier and stupider the more they smoke.
Does THAT sound like someone you want wandering our streets, armed with a gun and a badge and the authority of the State? Do you want that kind of person flying the airliner you use for travel? Or operating the train engine you’re a passenger on? Or responsible for the operating of a nuclear power plant?
Recreational marijuana use is not the moral or physiological equivalent to drinking alcohol.
Either alcohol or marijuana can be abused. Having a drink with friends in responsible quantities is not abuse. You do not necessarily aim to drink yourself to drunkeness. The purpose of smoking pot IS ‘drunkenness’, to get high on pot. The first puff of pot is abuse no matter how you look at it.
It always scares me and ticks me off when people try to say that alcohol and pot are the same except for being different choices. They’re not even close.
If someone wants to smoke pot AND they are not responsible for the lives of anyone else, then I don’t care if they do or not. That means not operating a motor vehicle of any kind also. You don’t want that kind of impaired person having to make the split second decisions and reactions required if a child runs out in the street in front of him.
So that kind of person needs to stay in his mom’s basement and never come out except to ride his bicycle to the local pot dispensary or dealer. Because that’s the only way to be a “responsible” pot smoker.
NOR is it alright for people who are responsible in any way for the security of sensitive information to smoke pot.
As someone who is employed by a federal contractor, I’m quite attuned to consequences of violating these taboos. Even the use of cannabidiol (CBD) is forbidden, because the THC concentrations in such products are likely to exceed the federally-legal levels of 0.3% tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is present in hemp at much lower concentrations than in marijuana. Due to a lack of regulation of CBD products, the 0.3% THC concentration can never be guaranteed.
I completely agree with your assertions, but I would take it further by stating that only people who are locked in mom’s basement should be allowed to use such drugs. Pot mules for such shut-ins could become a decent side hustle. Keep the drug-addled humans away from other humans, because even an inebriated bicycle rider can kill/maim an unsuspecting pedestrian.
Agreed. Frankly I’m a little but surprised that Bill has bought into the “pick your poison, they’re all basically the same” fallacy. I’d have thought he’d know better.
He has a sort of a premonition for why pot smoking isn’t a good idea so I hope he reads this page and finds out the facts. Pot isn’t the wine or whiskey of the Left, pot is a long acting, long term issue that your liver is not going to purge in 12 -18 hours.
Like pretty much everything else the Left promotes, marijuana is harmful. That’s probably why they promote pot use. The god of the Left hates humans and takes joy in harming us. If ol’ Nick can lie to us about it, so much the better from his viewpoint.
So this answers my previous question about edibles. Thanks.
Sorry, I didn’t see your previous question about edibles. The method of consumption makes no difference to the problem of long term impairment due to THC ingestion. Smoking it gets it to the fatty myelin insulator sheath between nerve cells faster, eating it is slower but the same result. Even if digestion neutralizes some of the THC, the “high” is still caused by the distortion of electrical signals between nerve cells so if the person consuming the edibles gets a buzz, that’s because it’s doing the same thing to their nervous system as smoking it does.
I haven’t used any of that stuff since as a young man decades ago I realized it was taking my edge away from me. “Edge” as in the sharp part of a knife, not as in being edgy or nervous. Back at that point in my life that edge could mean the difference between survival and going home in a body bag.
I knew people who used marijuana and its derivatives (mostly hashish, this was the Middle East) and personally witnessed what it did to things like their reaction times and focus when under maximum stress. When people are enthusiastically and vigorously trying to kill you, reaction time and focus are pretty important.
Later when I was back in the States I did considerably study on the effects of cannabinoids on human beings because I wanted to understand what I had seen. I knew what that stuff did because I’d seen it, then I wanted to know how and why it did that so I looked into it pretty deeply. This information is not particularly easy to find, I don’t know why that is. I’d think it should be as commonly well known as the fact that smoking cigarettes is a primary contributor to lung cancer. But it’s not.
Bill, where can I see your project, Daily Wire? nelson
You don’t have to sign your name at the end of your posts. We can all see “Nelson Guzman” at the top of the text box containing your comment. You can do what you want of course, but that just makes it clear you’re on the very bottom end of the technical spectrum Scott mentioned in this video.
The answer to your question, Nelson, is yes, at the Daily Wire. I’m sure if Bill does wrangle free trial memberships for BWDC members, he’ll promo that big as well.