Soderbergh’s ‘Che’ and Historical Accuracy
by Humberto Fontova, BH:
Well, Soderbergh and Del Toro’s Che was just released on DVD-Blu-ray. As a bonus, the Criterion release contains a behind-the-scenes “Making Che” section, featuring interviews with Soderbergh, Del Toro, the screenwriters, along with audio narration by the film’s chief consultant (except Fidel Castro), author John Lee Anderson.
An obsession among all involved with this monstrosity (271 minutes), we learn, was “historical accuracy.” As a professional duty, last year I sat through this thing. For the sake of this review let’s forget the films’ “omissions,” namely the only success in Che’s life: the mass murder of defenseless men and boys. This being a shoot-em up war movie, we’ll instead focus on the battle scenes and the attendant dialogue.
[...]
The True Meaning Of Inflation
John Tamny, FORBES:
Getting back to inflation, rather than a measure of prices that change for various reasons that have nothing to do with currency policy, inflation is at its core the painful process by which capital flows to the hard assets of the earth and away from innovative, wage-creating industries. As individuals we don’t so much hate inflation for the rising prices as much as we balk at it because our chances to capture good jobs and good wages are compromised for capital essentially hiding.
As the rising price of gold has revealed throughout the decade we’ve been inflating, no matter what the more quiescent government measures of consumer prices have been telling us. A weak dollar explains our economic unhappiness because a weak dollar is what has made capital disappear.
At this point the only question is which political party will pick up on inflation’s true meaning. Money quantities, economic growth and consumer prices are decidedly poor measures of inflation, but the dollar’s price in terms of gold is. Right now inflation is delivering pain throughout the economy as it always has through reduced investment in our economic future.
[...]
Clamping down on Canadian Christians
Adrian MacNair, NP:
According to an article in Maclean’s Magazine’s “on campus” website, an organization called the Canadian Association of University Teachers [CAUT] is alleging that Trinity Western University, a Christian University, violated academic freedom. The reason? Because TWU describes itself as a “a faith-based institution, one inspired by Christ’s life and guided by his teachings.” More than that, it requires faculty to sign a “Statement of Faith” annually, in a document that outlines the “philosophical framework to which all faculty, staff and administration are committed without reservation.”
[...]
The Maclean’s article concludes that CAUT does seem to be targeting Christian schools. It’s just that TWU is the first. They are currently investigating whether other Christian Universities in Canada are “in violation” of academic freedom, including the Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Crandall University in Moncton, and Redeemer University College in Ancaster. Religious persecution in the New World has arrived in the form of secularism seeking authority even in the halls of faith-based institutions.
The Intergovernmental Perjury over Climate Catastrophe (ctd)
Melanie Phillips:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is seeing its reputation disappear faster than a fish down a polar bear’s gullet.
Christopher Booker reports in the Sunday Telegraph that, following the IPCC’s grovelling admission that its 2007 statement that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 had no scientific basis and that its inclusion in the report reflected a ‘poor application’ of IPCC procedures, more has come to light about the bogus ‘research’ on which the IPCC based this claim – which came from a report in New Scientist which was in turn merely drawn from a phone interview with a little-known Indian scientist, and that scientist’s links with the IPCC’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri:
[...]
Launch of Explore Evolution “Further Debate” Website
ENV:
Since its publication in 2007, the innovative science textbook Explore Evolution: The Case For and Against Neo-Darwinism has helped trailblaze a new way of teaching about evolution, one based on Charles Darwin’s own acknowledgment that
“a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.”
The original goal of Explore Evolution was to provoke discussion about Darwinian evolution, and provoke discussion it has!
[...]
Glenn Beck Show – January 25, 2010 – Pt 1 of 7
Glenn Beck Show – January 25, 2010 – Pt 2 of 7
Glenn Beck Show – January 25, 2010 – Pt 3 of 7
Glenn Beck Show – January 25, 2010 – Pt 4 of 7
Breaking the Obama astroturfing story
Phil Boehmke, AT:
Sabrina Eaton at The Cleveland Plain Dealer broke the Ellie Light story on Friday, revealing that more than a dozen different newspapers featured strikingly similar letters to the editor in support of President Obama.. Each of the pro-Obama letters was written by an area resident named Ellie Light. Having noticed this anomaly Ms. Eaton started digging and in the course of her investigation she tracked down the person known as Ellie Light. Ms… Eaton and Ellie exchanged a number of emails and eventually Ellie confessed.
So the reason why I expanded my submission was because I found that editors were eager to present a point of view on the topic that wasn’t so overheated and angry. Indeed, I think the viewpoint that my letter expressed was less important to the editors than the even and non-emotional tone.
No explanation was offered for the subterfuge in using multiple false addresses in shot-gunning her Obamaganda across the country.
In the days since the article first appeared, the news has spread at light speed across the Internet. Bloggers and tweeters have uncovered 64 letters to the editor (so far) from Ellie Light. From Philadelphia to San Francisco and all across the fruited plain Ellie’s letters have been uncovered.
[...]
None Dare Call it Genocide
By Cliff Kincaid:
Dennis Howard told EWTN television network on the day of the March for Life in Washington, D.C. that legalized abortion is the equivalent of 260 Haiti disasters on American soil. The death toll from abortion in the U.S. is over 52 million.
One of the differences is that Haiti is the result of a natural disaster. Abortion is man-made.
Another difference is that we search for the victims in Haiti and rush assistance to those injured from the earthquake. The victims of abortion are not worthy of sympathy or attention because they are the product of a “woman’s right to choose.”
This year’s March for Life featured a line of women carrying signs that said, “I regret my abortion.” They represented the “Silent No More” awareness campaign, where their testimonies about having abortions are available.
If you aren’t accustomed to hearing abortion described in the terms of genocide, then you have either (1) never been to a March for Life or (2) not bothered to visit the website of the abortion-related Genocide Awareness Project.
[...]
Public Media Bias and Climate Change
By Dr. Tim Ball:
Americans are lucky left wing radio station Air America crashed before Obama and founder now Senator Al Franken found a way to turn it into public radio.
Ironically, Saul Alinsky, father of US radical socialism wanted to break control of the media because it was used by power elites. Obama doesn’t need to break the control as the mainstream media act as a state media.
Bernie Goldberg wrote about this in his book “A Slobbering Love Affair.” Hypocrisy is the problem with mainstream media bias because they claim they’re unbiased. Public media practices similar hypocrisy. My worst experiences with bias and personal attacks in the media were with public media including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). They should be unbiased and apolitical but they are not. Funding by all taxpayers demands neutrality, but it doesn’t happen and it’s always left of centre.
[...]
United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror
by Jonathan Schanzer, FrontPage:
Dr. Jamie Glazov, editor of FrontPageMag.com, exposes the hypocrisy of leftists and liberals who claim to champion the principles of freedom, democracy, liberalism, and feminism yet support both communist and Islamist dictatorships, which implement none of these principles.
David Horowitz, Glazov’s boss, also wrote a book in 2004, Unholy Alliance, on this subject, but Glazov digs deeper. The author, who fled the Soviet Union as a child and earned a PhD from York Univeristy in Toronto in Soviet studies, points in the first 100 pages of the book to a nucleus of American apologists in the 1930s who heaped praise on communist strongman Joseph Stalin, including Walter Duranty of The New York Times and author Upton Sinclair. In the generation that followed, intellectuals including novelist Normal Mailer and feminist activist Simone de Beauvoir continued to apologize for communist regimes in Cuba, China, Nicaragua, and Vietnam.
With the decline of communism, the Left began to support Islamism. Whereas journalists, novelists and activists led the charge in the first wave, Glazov explains in the second half of the book, the most vociferous defenders of Islamism now come from the Ivory Tower.
[...]
Eyeless in Gaza
by Anav Silverman, FrontPage:
The past year brought a fresh wave of anti-Israel rhetoric and accusations, most of which cited Israel’s “siege” of Gaza during last winter’s Operation Cast Lead as evidence of Israel’s injustice toward the Palestinians. The international press frequently echoed calls by human rights groups and activists to “end Israel’s illegal blockade” and “liberate Gaza.” Such messages have been conceived to undermine Israel and present a very misleading picture of the actual Gaza conflict.
In a typical blockade, no supplies would be allowed to enter into enemy territory. Similarly, most English dictionaries define siege as an “act or process of surrounding and attacking a fortified place in such a way as to isolate it from help and supplies.” But in fact Israel has allowed substantial shipments of aid into Gaza. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website has reported that in 2009 alone, Israel allowed 703, 224 tons of humanitarian aid and 105,600,128 liters of fuel to be delivered into the Gaza Strip following Operation Cast Lead.
“The IDF invested major resources to enable the flow of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip,” said Col. Moshe Levi, the head of the IDF’s Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration, in November 2009. According to Levi, humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip increased by 900 percent compared to the previous year. Over 22, 893 humanitarian aid trucks entered into Gaza throughout 2009.
All of this has been pointedly ignored by Israel’s critics.
[...]
[Israeli] PM to world: Fight threats on Israel
THE JERUSALEM POST:
On the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu urged the international community to fight anti-Semitism by warning that those who hate Jews and want to destroy Israel will eventually move on to the rest of the world, too.
“There is an evil that can spread and threaten the security of Jews,” he said during a ceremony at Yad Vashem on Monday. “We know that this just begins with Jews, and then continues on to the rest of the world.”
[...]
Precisely correct.
Mort Zuckerman and the Obama Kool-Aid Drinkers: America’s Fourth Great Awakening
Posted by Frank Ross, BJ:
Some among the heaviest of Obama Kool-Aid drinkers are awakening to the performance gap between the campaign myth of Obama versus the reality of his inability to govern. America’s Fourth Great Awakening has begun.
Historians widely recognize three Great Awakenings. The First Great Awakening (1730’s-1740’s) spread across the United Kingdom and the Colonies with a religious fervor among what became the mainline Protestant denominations: Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, etc. The Second (1790-1840’s) witnessed Christian conversions, camp meetings, and evangelical excitement giving birth to the Holiness movement and, indirectly, the spread of a new sect – the Mormons. The Third (1840’s-1900’s), interrupted by the Civil War, was a period of religious enthusiasm that fostered social activism, as illustrated by the Social Gospel Movement.
Today, we’re entering the Fourth Great Awakening. It’s the revival of the Obama Kool-Aid drinkers from their stupor of infatuation with candidate Barack Obama. Mort Zuckerman is their new poster boy, and his newfound sobriety is clearly painful for him.
Zuckerman’s article entitled “The Incredible Deflation of Barack Obama,” appearing on-line January 21, 2010 in his magazine U.S. News & World Report, is the confession of a reformed Obama Kool-Aid drinker. Mort knows what it’s like to be conned; he lost millions to Bernie Madoff. Now he’s appearing on news shows testifying to his awakening.
[...]
Obama spoils for a “fight” when self-reflection is in order
By JAMES TARANTO:
How did Barack Obama manage to kick off his presidency by making exactly the same disastrous mistake Bill Clinton made 16 years earlier? One answer is that Obama thought Clinton’s health-care errors were tactical rather than strategic, and that correcting these–by letting Congress write the bill, or by cutting deals with industry groups in exchange for their support–would be sufficient to ensure success.
But if Rep. Marion Berry is right, the answer may be as simple as sheer hubris. Berry, an Arkansas Democrat first elected in 1996, announced over the weekend that he won’t seek re-election. In an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, reprinted by Politico, Berry, who was an “aye” in the House’s 220-215 vote for ObamaCare Nov. 7, recounts his unsuccessful efforts to persuade the White House to pursue more moderate policies:
Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home.
“I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.”
“You’ve got me.” In fairness, one can see why Obama might have been overly impressed with himself. Here’s a guy who became president of the United States just four years out of the Illinois Senate, and along the way developed a cultlike following. It sounds as though Obama became a follower as well as figurehead of his own cult of personality. He overestimated the degree to which he was special as opposed to lucky–a very human failing.
[...]
How Hugo Chavez’s revolution crumbled
By Jackson Diehl:
While the world has been preoccupied with the crisis in Haiti, Latin America has quietly passed through a tipping point in the ideological conflict that has polarized the region — and paralyzed U.S. diplomacy — for most of the past decade.
The result boils down to this: Hugo Chávez’s “socialism for the 21st century” has been defeated and is on its way to collapse.
[...]
Five Easy Questions for Obama
By Randall Hoven, AT:
President Obama, I know you’ve given lots of speeches, briefings, and statements. And you’ve schooled us well on subjects ranging from how to create or save jobs to how to change climate and achieve world peace. But there are just a few things I’m still fuzzy on, and no one else seems to be asking you about them.
So if you please, could you answer just a few simple and straightforward questions? I promise that there are no tricks. Here are five questions, four short-answer and one essay.
[...]
Call For An Audit of Obama’s Campaign Finances
by Pamela Geller
In light of the long-overdue ruling by the Supreme Court to throw out the free-speech-killing and unconstitutional McCain-Feingold finance law (was there ever a more destructive, corrupting influence on elections ever?), it is a good time to revisit the active complaint to the Federal Elections Commission over Barack Obama’s campaign finances.
[...]
Compare and contrast; Israel response to Haiti earthquake and the terrorists
Joseph Finlay, AT:
While the world – led by the United States and Israel – rushes to the aid of the devastated nation of Haiti, Osama Bin Laden has chosen to take credit for the failed Christmas Day attack in the US and has vowed future attacks on the US and Israel:
[...]
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