…is available for pre-order. At half price, until July 11th.
The Cultural Imperialists
…of the leftist feminist movement:
The trust-fund ladies and their friends in Hollywood go to Iran talk to hand-picked Iranians while their “travel handlers,” who are plain-clothed Revolutionary Guards, assigned by the regime, are watching every move people make and every word they utter to the visitors. The ladies of leisure take publicity photos in the mandatory Islamic robes and head covers and come home to talk about their visit to the “exotic Islamic third world.” Iranian women call them “Cultural Imperialists.”
Cultural Imperialists attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, praising the woman selected by the Islamic regime, but they will not utter one word of support for the real activists, the women who are in prisons, getting tortured and hanged, trying to take back their place among the respected people in the world.
It is a fact that the feminist American culture, the culture of Hollywood, is one of the major issues that Islamists like Khomeini, Bin Laden, Hezbollah, the Muslim brotherhood, and the Taliban have against America and the West. But this culture supports the Islamists by its silence and indifference to the issue of human rights. The Stoning of Soraya M. should have received many academy awards, many Cannes awards, and many movie reviews. It is the least this culture can do for the Iranian women suffering to gain the same human rights that American feminists exploit.
What can you do, though, when you live in the second-worst country in the history of the world? Be thankful you don’t live in Israel, I guess.
The Climate Change Climate Change
Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as “deniers.” The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.
In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country’s weeks-old cap-and-trade program.
The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)
Meanwhile, we have a bait and switch:
The stink surrounding the Pelosi-Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax bill has become vomit-inducing overnight. Representative Waxman has decided to replace the 1091-page bill with a 300-page bill that will be debated for no longer than three hours today. So your elected representatives will have virtually no time to debate the merits of an economy-spanning bill they will not have had time to read. Speaker Pelosi and her sidekick Waxman are displaying nothing more than complete contempt for the democratic process.
If you’re as utterly disgusted by this as I am, you can send a message to Pelosi and her cronies by telling your Congressmen to vote against this bill. You can e-mail them, call them (202-225-3121), or text the National Taxpayers Union on 54608 and they will help.
Calling the Democrats the “Democratic Party” is the biggest fraudulent advertisement since The Never-Ending Story.
Tar. Feathers. Rail.
We called this morning.
[Afternoon update]
Fifteen reasons to oppose the bill.
The “Debate” In Iran
Iowahawk has full coverage, with commercials.
The Blue And The Green
[Via GeekPress]
The Evolution Of Good And Evil
As Joe Katzman says, it’s hard to know whether this should be comforting, or frightening:
Within fifty generations of this electronic evolution, co-operative societies of robots had formed – helping each other to find food and avoid poison. Even more amazing is the emergence of cheats and martyrs. Transistorized traitors emerged which wrongly identified poison zone as food, luring their trusting brethren to their doom before scooting off to silently charge in a food zone – presumably while using a mechanical claw to twirl a silicon carving of a handlebar moustache.
You might be upset by this result, scientific proof that those who say “Evil is utterly fundamental to human nature” actually understates the scope of the problem, there were also silicon souls on the side of the angels. Some robots advanced fearlessly into poison zones, flashing warning lights to keep other robots out of harms way.
This seems to be congruent with Axelrod’s work. I wonder if the successful ones use Tit for Tat?
So, do they have free will?
WordPress Bleg
In Moveable Type, on the front page, there was a separator between one day’s posts and the next with a day/date (see The Corner for an example). There should be one between the two posts below this one. It seems like it ought to be a standard feature, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do this in WP at all, after scouring the documentation. Does anyone have an idea?
Forget Personalities
Find some principles, Republicans:
The genius of America is the creativity and energy of a free people, and conservatives must never forget that it is federalism that encourages that genius to flower across the entire country.
But you can’t just be a fair-weather federalist. You have to be consistent.
Michael Jackson
I don’t know why he is important enough to interrupt serious news. Sorry for his family, but I won’t miss him, and I don’t want to hear about his condition. The Congress is about to pass the biggest tax increase in history tomorrow, but the cable channels are talking about this circus freak.
[Update Friday morning]
Michael Jackson. Oh, I don’t know. Some of the songs were nifty little pop classics; “Thriller” really had it all as a work of Pop in the Warhol sense – Vincent Price narrating, a long-form video that made that brought that new art form up to a dee-luxe level, and a great deadly beat. But after that the videos got bigger, the hooks got smaller, and the idea that each new song / video was somehow a cultural event overshadowed the shrinking ideas and insular, off-putting persona. I had to watch a few tonight to put together a bit for tomorrow’s NewsBreak at startribune.com, and saw “Scream” – MJ and his sister in a white spacecraft, walking around and looking angry. So angry. Rich successful people snarling and sneering and kicking the camera and breaking things.
Charming. Apparently her previously cheerful persona was insufficiently REAL, and REAL is the thing that WE MUST BE KEEPING IT. I actually remember when the video premiered, back when they had premiers, and we all looked at each other and thought: more good hooks in a Nerf tackle box.
Then came the scandal years – the lawsuits, the hideous surgeries. It was almost like watching the Joker carve up his face in the mirror, without the Joker’s delight in his own depravity. He thought he was sculpting something supremely beautiful, but to the outsider who watched his face change as the stories of his personal life came out, it was like watching Dorian Grey walk around holding the picture from the attic before him, convinced it was lovely.
I debated his influence on the Hugh Hewitt show with Jude Thursday night, and I wondered how influential he was – no one else could do a moonwalk, after all, and while a few artists grabbed their crotches after he did (something that never seemed convincing; more than anything, he seemed to be reassuring himself that there was something there) I can’t say he influenced Dance. Don’t know enough to say, to be honest. But musically? As I said, Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam had a far greater influence, and Prince a greater talent. Yes, he’s odd – a smaller, more agreeable set of demons, though, and he has an inexhaustible desire to create without freeze-drying every note into a crystalline framework, with every manufactured Yelp and Yip dropped in at the expected perfect moment.
I wouldn’t have felt any of this if the event wasn’t being treated as a near-fatal blow to Western Culture in some quarters. He called himself the King of Pop – after which fame and sales ebbed. Of the many lessons in his life, that may be the oldest.
Of course, I didn’t think it was a big deal when Elvis died, either.
[Update an hour or so later]
More thoughts from Jonah Goldberg, with which I agree:
I know that Michael Jackson wasn’t convicted of the despicable crimes he was accused of. And that’s why he never went to jail. Three cheers for the majesty of the American legal system. But in my own personal view he wasn’t exonerated either. Nor was he absolved of his crimes because he could sing, moonwalk or sell 10 million records. (Though many of us suspect the money and fame he made from those things is precisely what kept him out of jail).
And, while I merely think he was a pedophile, I know he was not someone responsible parents should applaud, healthy children emulate nor society celebrate.
And while we’re at it, his relatively early death wasn’t “tragic.” He was one of the richest people in the world. He spent his money on perpetual childhood and he was perpetually with children not his own.
Meanwhile, in the last ten days, we’ve seen or heard of remarkable people who’ve given their lives for freedom in Iran. We’ve heard of innocents killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the last decade, America has lost thousands of heroes in noble causes and thousands of innocent bystanders who were denied the simple joys of life through no fault of their own. Those deaths are tragic, and we’re hard pressed to think of more than a handful of names to put with the long line of the dead.
If anything, Michael Jackson’s life, not his death, was tragic.
Every year at the Oscars they show a montage of people who died over the previous year. Invariably, the audience only applauds for the really famous people. This has always offended me. Not necessarily because the famous people don’t deserve praise but because it’s so clear that the audience is clapping for the fame. Michael Jackson had many accomplishments. But the press is sanctifying him because he was famous, deservedly so to be sure, but not because he was good. So much of the coverage seems to miss this fundamental point, as if being famous made him good.
I feel sympathy for Jackson’s family and friends who understandably mourn him. But I can’t bring myself to mourn him any more than I mourn the random dead I read about in the paper everyday. Indeed, I confess to mourning him less.
I confess to not mourning him at all.
No Fireworks For The Fourth
In Flint, Michigan.
We used to go to Kearsley Park when I was a kid — I don’t remember them having them downtown. It must be a new thing.