The Hollywood Reporter story confirms that the tweet that got Gina Carano fired was not wrong.

Gina Carano will not be returning to The Mandalorian or the Star Wars galaxy after sharing a post on social media implying that being a Republican today is like being Jewish during the Holocaust.

“Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future,” a Lucasfilm spokesperson said in a statement. “Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

Carano has also been dropped as a client by UTA, an agency spokesperson confirms.

On Wednesday, the hashtag #FireGinaCarano was trending following an Instagram post from the outspoken conservative actor and former mixed martial artist that was met with severe backlash. The post has since been deleted, but screenshots were widely shared by users on social media who called for her firing from the hit Disney+ Star Wars show.

This is not the first time Carano, who played former Rebel Alliance soldier Cara Dune on The Mandalorian, has been the focus of social media ire for her political comments. Last November, she issued contentious tweets, one in which she mocked mask-wearing amid the novel coronavirus pandemic and another in which she falsely suggested voter fraud occurred during the 2020 presidential election.

“They have been looking for a reason to fire her for two months, and today was the final straw,” a source with knowledge of Lucasfilm’s thinking tells THR.

RTWT

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Here’s the (later deleted) tweet that got her cancelled.

BBC:

Raven chicks have been born at the Tower of London for the first time in 30 years.

The four new arrivals began hatching on St George’s Day following the arrival of breeding pair Huginn and Muninn at the end of last year.

The Tower usually has six ravens at any time and, according to legend, if they ever leave both the fortress and the kingdom will fall.

Ravenmaster Yeoman Warder Chris Skaife said he felt “like a proud father”.

It is not known how long ravens have lived at the Tower but it is thought Charles II was the first to insist there must be at least six.

There are currently seven based at the 1,000-year-old fortress, not including the new family.

RTWT

In one hundred years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college.

— Joseph Sobran (@joesobranquotes) February 8, 2021

Jacopo Vignola (1507−1573), Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura (Rules of the Five Orders of Architecture), [Rome: s.n., 1562–64]
The Morgan Library & Museum, Purchased in 1960; PML 51314.

Claude III de Laubespine commissioned the binding, executed in Paris circa 1567–68 by the Atelier au Vase. Morgan Library director Frederick Adams declared that this elegant example “sends a tingle of pleasure down the spine.”

The Morgan Library in New York will be exhibiting through May 16th extraordinary bindings from the Laubespine-Villeroy Library.

Young, handsome, and highborn, Claude III de Laubespine lived in luxury after marrying an heiress and obtaining the favor of King Charles IX. His brilliant career at court was cut short in 1570, when he died at the age of 25. He left behind a splendid library, which was dispersed, and only recently have his books been identified and properly appreciated for their superb quality and fine bindings. Laubespine now ranks among the great collectors of the French Renaissance.

For the first time in more than 400 years, this exhibition brings together some of the most spectacular bindings in that collection, exquisite examples of Renaissance ornamental design. They will be shown along with related artwork and literary memorials of Laubespine. He left his books to his sister, a patron of the poet Pierre de Ronsard, who praised her country estate, the library, and its perfumed bindings, which, he said, “smells as good as your orange trees.” This exhibition will evoke the sensual pleasure and literary connoisseurship implicit in a noble library of that era.

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The snow was too deep for Cadet our basset hound.

Our first winter in our Virginia home atop the Blue Ridge, the heavens opened and it snowed two feet. I had inherited an old John Deere riding mower from the previous owners that could have a plow blade mounted on front, but that little garden tractor could not remotely handle that magnitude of snow.

My wife and I were already no longer young, and our driveway was long. We were wondering how long we’d be trapped when we heard noises outside. A neighbor, from a long way down the road, owned a Bobcat, and he was digging out everybody along Raven Rocks Road.

That kind of thing is both extraordinary and yet typical of life in rural America. Our neighbor had the right tool for the job and he knew perfectly well that almost nobody else was similarly equipped. He knew, too, that we were a long way from town, and the chances of anybody obtaining professional assistance were slim. So he just went down the whole road and dug everybody out.

I ran out and offered money, and he naturally refused. A few days later, I went to his house and dropped off a pretty good bottle of Bourbon.

One of the really nice things about living in the country, in red state, fly-over America is that people are neighborly. They believe in helping out other people who need a hand, and they regard it as their own responsibility to do that, not somebody else’s or the government’s.

So, try reading this piece on a similar experience had by Virginia Heffernan (Wikipedia profile) for the LA Times:

Oh, heck no. The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.

How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?

Of course, on some level, I realize I owe them thanks — and, man, it really looks like the guy back-dragged the driveway like a pro — but how much thanks?

These neighbors are staunch partisans of blue lives, and there aren’t a lot of anything other than white lives in neighborhood.

This is also kind of weird. Back in the city, people don’t sweep other people’s walkways for nothing. …

What do we do about the Trumpites around us? Like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who spoke eloquently this week about her terrifying experience during the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Americans are expected to forgive and forget before we’ve even stitched up our wounds. Or gotten our vaccines against the pandemic that former President Trump utterly failed to mitigate.

My neighbors supported a man who showed near-murderous contempt for the majority of Americans. They kept him in business with their support.

But the plowing.

On Jan. 6, after the insurrection, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) issued an aw-shucks plea for all Americans to love their neighbors. The United States, he said, “isn’t Hatfields and McCoys, this blood feud forever.” And, he added, “You can’t hate someone who shovels your driveway.”

At the time, I seethed; the Capitol had just been desecrated. But maybe my neighbor heard Sasse and was determined to make a bid for reconciliation.

So here’s my response to my plowed driveway, for now. Politely, but not profusely, I’ll acknowledge the Sassian move. With a wave and a thanks, a minimal start on building back trust. I’m not ready to knock on the door with a covered dish yet.

I also can’t give my neighbors absolution; it’s not mine to give. Free driveway work, as nice as it is, is just not the same currency as justice and truth. To pretend it is would be to lie, and they probably aren’t looking for absolution anyway.

But I can offer a standing invitation to make amends. Not with a snowplow but by recognizing the truth about the Trump administration and, more important, by working for justice for all those whom the administration harmed. Only when we work shoulder to shoulder to repair the damage of the last four years will we even begin to dig out of this storm.

That neighbor ought to go right out and plow this arrogant liberal cow back in.

Mashable:

You might not have thought a local English council meeting would be your essential viewing this week, but here we are.

On Thursday, footage of a chaotic Zoom call from Handforth Parish Council’s Planning and Environment Committee in Wilmslow, Cheshire, went viral on Twitter, racking up 3 million views and proving definitively that just because a meeting has the words “planning” and “committee” in its title, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be dull.

We could try to set the viral clip up a little more, but frankly it’s best if you see the thing yourself first.

RTWT

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The parish council meeting has since yesterday become the inspiration for a musical and an indie song.

click on image for larger version.

From a new Facebook Yale Alumni group.

It’s called “Cedarhurst,” built 1857, in a small town in the Hill Country of Northern Mississippi. This region is the home country of William Faulkner and of the great Memphis sporting author Nash Buckingham.

The property has ten acres and is located near the territories of two fox hunts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Steve Smith at McSweeney’s has a go at briefly capturing the typical student character and personality.

Harvard: I would shiv someone to answer a question in class.

Yale: I wrote a Pulitzer-nominated play about the time I shivved someone to answer a question in class.

Princeton: I’ve structured a derivative, the Shiv Swap, whose price reflects the probability that a given shivving is successful in allowing one to answer a question in class.

Brown: We must ensure equal distribution of shivs across all socio-economic strata of American society.

Cornell: GO BIG RED. …

RTWT

The New York Times has determined that people who disagree with it are out of touch with reality, and SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

Several experts I spoke with recommended that the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a “reality czar.”

It sounds a little dystopian, I’ll grant. But let’s hear them out.

Where do you suppose they will erect the re-education camps?