The American Culture

The romantic vampire movie Twilight is all the rage among the teen girl set, having accumulated $70 million in U.S ticket sales during its first weekend, which might just prove that unconsummated teenage sexual tension sells. But some critics, such as a certain New York Times writer, think sexual tension is just so passe, arguing, let’s just get on with the sex! This salutary message is intended to apply to teenagers as well.

After all, don't we know that's what all normal teenagers do? The writer even throws out the “V” word, because of course there cannot be anything much worse than being perceived as a Victorian prude.

Those who have the stomach to read the Times critic's pathetically snarky drivel will see the potential blinding power of a secularist worldview (and religious people can fall into the same kind of trap—it’s a matter of human nature, alas). Because the movie doesn’t comport with the Times critic's provincial, oh-so-New York view of things, she cannot see beyond her ideology and hence cannot see what is perfectly obvious in the film, that refraining from sex in the context of the story is done for a much greater good, namely the very life of the one the character loves.

No, what is obvious to a sensible person strikes the New York Times critic as a prime opportunity to be snarky and self-righteous:

Though Edward and Bella reach certain heights in “Twilight,” notably during a charming scene that finds them leaping from piney treetop to treetop against the spectacular wilderness backdrop, the story’s moral undertow keeps dragging them down. If Ms. Meyer has made the vampire story safe for her readers (and their parents)—the sole real menace comes from a half-baked subplot involving some swaggering vampires who like their steak saignant and human—it’s only because she suggests that there actually is something worse than death, especially for teenagers: sex. Faced with the partially clad Bella (who would bite if she could), Edward recoils from her like a distraught Victorian. Like Ms. Hardwicke, the poor boy has been defanged and almost entirely drained. He’s so lifeless, he might as well be dead—oops, he already is.

Fortunately, as is evident in the following comment on the critic’s rant, not all self-described liberals are so captive to their ideology:

If you actually read the series, you'd understand why poor Edward must contain himself sexually. Besides being from a different time (1918) when sexual mores were quite different—her blood and smell is particularly attractive to him (for FOOD!) As he says, "your scent is like my own special brand of heroin" . . . if he allows himself to get sexual with her, he doesn't know if he would be able to keep himself from killing her. So, the idea that somehow this book is saying sex is worse than death is, well, immature. I am very liberal and certainly NOT an "abstinence only" kinda person; but to assume that Edward must be more sexually aggressive is actually pretty sexist. I absolutely LOVED the movie as it managed to stay true to the story—4 stars for me. Can't wait for the next one. . . . I already know what happens and it will be even BETTER!!

I’ve not read the books or seen the movie, but I have a teenage daughter who is a big fan, and she happens to prefer that the media show a bit of self-control in the name of love. Unfortunately, most of the nation's popular culture isn’t very kind to that message. Abstinence, shmabstinence, they say—just use birth control, and if that doesn’t work, get rid of the evidence. And by all means, don’t tell your parents!

If anything, the events in question in the book and movie seem to be suggesting that sex is something special, and that abstaining may in fact may be a much fuller and more real expression of true love than intercourse and orgasms. The idea that sex is more than just a means of momentary pleasure is not some crazy fantasy dreamt up by fundamentalists since the invention of the Pill; it's a notion that not only has a long history in much of human civilization but also has strong roots in science.

In such a narcissistic and self-centered culture as ours, it's surprising and pleasing that a movie and book series so popular with hormone-ravaged teenagers may have a much more sophisticated, compassionate, and scientific point of view than the average New York Times critic (admittedly a rather low standard to which to aspire). Maybe there is hope for the coming generations after all.

—Mike D'Virgilio is Executive Director of The Culture Project.

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Richard Raddon, director of the Los Angeles Film Festival since the year 2000, resigned his position after coming under fire for supporting California's Proposition 8, a referendum that passed earlier this month and prevents the state's courts, legislature, and executive from forcing citizens to recognize same-sex marriages with citizen approval.

Raddon, a Mormon, came under intense attacks from supposedly openminded homosexual activists who preach tolerance toward themselves but direct intense hatred and invective toward those who disagree with their sexual-activist agenda.

The attacks began a few days ago, after his $1,500 donation to pro-Prop 8 forces was revealed in a movie-industry blog.

Representatives of Film Independent, the nonprofit organization that sponsors the annual festival, praised Raddon's job performance and years of faithful service and gave him a unanimous vote of confidence when the attacks began. The attacks intensified, of course, and the board later said in a statement that they had accepted his resignation "with great reluctance."

Translation: They're well aware that they could have stood up for him and talked him out of resigning, but they were direly afraid to offend the powerful, angry, homosexual activist groups in Hollywood.

In a press statement, Raddon attempted to lay the groundwork for resuming a career in the industry by pledging his support for the homosexual activists' agenda:

I have always held the belief that all people, no matter race, religion or sexual orientation, are entitled to equal rights. As many know, I consider myself a devout and faithful Mormon. I prefer to keep the details around my contribution through my church a private matter. But I am profoundly sorry for the negative attention that my actions have drawn to Film Independent and for the hurt and pain that is being experienced in the GLBT community.

The forced resignation of Raddon is part of a much greater plan on the part of homosexual activists in Hollywood to punish Prop 8 supporters and intimidate all opposition, according to the Los Angeles Times:

Ever since the passage of Proposition 8, liberal Hollywood has been debating whether and how to publicly punish those who supported the controversial amendment to the state constitution. Scott Eckern, the director of the nonprofit California Musical Theatre in Sacramento, recently resigned amid a flurry of condemnation from prominent theater artists. There have also been calls for boycotts of the Cinemark theater chain, whose chief executive, Alan Stock, donated $9,999 to "Yes on 8."

The ability of people to employ stormtrooper tactics while characterizing themselves as oppressed and their opponents as intolerant is vivid evidence of the pro-homosexual bias of the U.S. mainstream media and the absurdity of the homosexual activists' claims of needing to be protected from oppression.

In point of fact, the very opposite has consistently proven true in the past two decades and is increasingly evident.

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TV comedian Steve Colbert's Christmas special is pleasingly nonpolitical, though not particularly funny. It has its moments, however, including a brief but surprisingly sincere reflection on the meaning of the season.

Much admired for his popular Comedy Central series, The Colbert Report, in which he portrays a blustering right-wing talk-show host in making fun of both left and right (but mostly the right), Steve Colbert has gone in a different direction with his new Christmas special, A Colbert Christmas, which premiered Sunday on the Comedy Central channel and is available on DVD today through Comedy Central and on Dec. 8 at other outlets.

The special avoids politics and sticks to silliness, surely the right choice given the surfeit of the former we've had during the past eighteen months. The show sticks largely to one set, a cabin in the woods where Colbert is trapped during Christmas because he believes a ferocious bear is waiting outside the door to kill him.

In the charming cheapness of the setting and the generally ditzy tone of the humor, the production is reminiscent of the beloved SCTV comedy series of the late 1970s and early '80s, although not nearly as funny nor insightfully satirical as that much-missed gem of recent American culture. In fact, it's not even in the same league as that program in terms of writing and performing quality.

Most notably, A Colbert Christmas pales in comparison with SCTV's absolutely brilliant Christmas specials, and I would strongly recommend purchasing the latter and simply catching this one on Comedy Central if you're so inclined.

A Colbert Christmas consists mostly of parodies of Christmas songs, with Colbert's travails while trapped in the cabin providing a loose linking narrative. Some of the songs are mildly amusing—Toby Keith singing about the joys of firearms ownership, and Colbert's fellow Comedy Central talk show host Jon Stewart trying to convince him to give Judaism a try.

Others, however, are absolutely awful, particularly Willie Nelson's musical depiction of a magus bringing a gift of marijuana to the infant Jesus. Haha:

Also quite weak are the contributions of Feist, as an angel keeping people's prayers on hold while awaiting action, and John Legend singing a dreadfully extended double entendre about nutmeg. Ugh.

The show picks up nicely at the end, however, as Colbert and Elvis Costello sing a duet about what Christmas means to them:

Colbert shows concern for unbelievers while calling them to account for their beliefs, singing,

I pity them their lack of Christmas spirit,

For in a world like ours, take it from Stephen,

There are much worse things to believe in.

While mentioning "an obese man giving toys for good behavior," Costello sings of the season as also, and clearly more importantly, being about "a Redeemer and a Savior." This passage is representative of a strong theme in the song: the contrast between legalistic human codes for earthly salvation, and the grace given by God that gives hope and ultimately overcomes all things.

Particularly incisive is a passage illustrating the hopelessness at the heart of atheism and the contrastingly powerful optimism and foundation for joy in theism:

Some folks believe in nothing,

But if you believe in nothing,

Then what's to keep the nothing from coming for you?

The song concludes with another strong expression of this contrast between faithful hope and the essential sadness of unbelief:

You doubt, but you're sad,

I don't, but I'm glad,

I guess we're even,

At least that's what I believe in.

And there are much worse things.

It's the one truly engaging moment in the show, and it is well worth waiting for.

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Perhaps even more impressive was that the film took in over $20,000 per theater, an unusually high number for a wide-release movie.

In the wake of the film's first-weekend success, the Summit Entertainment studio announced over the weekend that it will produce New Moon, based on the second book in the internationally best-selling series of novels by Stephenie Meyer about the teen vampire Edward Cullen and high school girl Bella Swan. Lead actors Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart from Twilight will return to the same roles in New Moon, according to the announcement.

Also strong last weekend were Quantum of Solace (no. 2), Bolt (3), Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (4), and Role Models (5). All are genre films clearly put together with entertainment in mind.

Industry analysts say the stunning box office performance of Twilight, which was even significantly better than the $50 million analysts had expected it to bring in during its first weekend, along with the earlier success of Hannah Montana: The Movie, confirms teenage females as an important box office force.

It also confirms that people want movies that entertain as well as enlighten, and that political points and calls for radical social change do neither.

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Mike Gray points out that the current problems in the U.S. financial sector, while disturbing, are nothing new. In fact, they're a manifestation of a long-term cultural problem: the failure to recognize who truly should have authority over the nation's money.

 The unconstitutional rule of elite "experts" over the nation's money supply is a powerful example of the Progressive belief that a free people cannot govern themselves and thus must have their money and personal investments managed and manipulated by their "betters."

We've already been here:

The Government is in the banking business as never before. Against its will it has been made the backer of horsethieves and card sharps, bootleggers, smugglers, speculators, and swindlers in all parts of the world. Through the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve banks the riffraff of every country is operating on the public credit of this United States Government.

A recent article informs us that the crisis on Wall Street—and its cause—is nothing new.

To read the comments of Rep. Louis McFadden (Chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee for over ten years and an implacable foe of the Federal Reserve System) to the House of Representatives in the early years of the Great Depression, you'd think he was speaking about events in 2008 instead of 1932:

Mr. Chairman, we have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks, hereinafter called the Fed. The Fed has cheated the government of these United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the nation's debt. The depredations and iniquities of the Fed have cost enough money to pay the national debt several times over . . .

This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of these United States, has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our government. It has done this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladministration of that law by the Fed and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it . . .

Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders. In that dark crew of financial pirates there are those who would cut a man's throat to get a dollar out of his pocket; there are those who send money into states to buy votes to control our legislatures; there are those who maintain international propaganda for the purpose of deceiving us into granting of new concessions which will permit them to cover up their past misdeeds and set again in motion their gigantic train of crime.

Much of this sounds all too familiar:

The United States has been ransacked and pillaged. Our structures have been gutted and only the walls are left standing. While being perpetrated, everything the world would rake up to sell us was brought in here at our expense by the Fed until our markets were swamped with unneeded and unwanted imported goods priced far above their value and made to equal the dollar volume of our honest exports, and to kill or reduce our favored balance of trade. As agents of the foreign central banks the Fed try by every means in their power to reduce our favorable balance of trade. They act for their foreign principal and they accept fees from foreigners for acting against the best interests of these United States. Naturally there has been great competition among foreigners for the favors of the Fed. . . .

What we need to do is to send the reserves of our National Banks home to the people who earned and produced them and who still own them and to the banks which were compelled to surrender them to predatory interests. . . .

Mr. Chairman, there is nothing like the Fed pool of confiscated bank deposits in the world. It is a public trough of American wealth in which the foreigners claim rights equal to or greater than Americans. The Fed are the agents of the foreign central banks. They use our bank depositors' money for the benefit of their foreign principals. They barter the public credit of the United States government and hire it out to foreigners at a profit to themselves. . . .

All this is done at the expense of the United States government, and at a sickening loss to the American people. Only our great wealth enabled us to stand the drain of it as long as we did. . . .

We need to destroy the Fed wherein our national reserves are impounded for the benefit of the foreigners. We need to save America for Americans.

McFadden ended his speech by invoking Scriptural imagery:

What is needed here is a return to the Constitution of the United States. We need to have a complete divorce of Bank and State. The old struggle that was fought out here in Jackson's day must be fought over again. The independent United States Treasury should be re-established and the Government should keep its own money under lock and key in the building the people provided for that purpose. Asset currency, the device of the swindler, should be done away with. The Government should buy gold and issue United States currency on it. The business of the independent bankers should be restored to them. The State banking systems should be freed from coercion. The Federal Reserve districts should be abolished and the State boundaries should be respected. Bank reserves should be kept within the borders of the States whose people own them, and this reserve money of the people should be protected so that the international bankers and acceptance bankers and discount dealers cannot draw it away from them. The exchanges should be closed while we are putting our financial affairs in order. The Federal Reserve act should be repealed and the Federal Reserve banks, having violated their charters, should be liquidated immediately. Faithless Government officers who have violated their oaths of office should be impeached and brought to trial. . . .

Unless this is done by us, I predict that the American people, outraged, robbed, pillaged, insulted, and betrayed as they are in their own land, will rise in their wrath and send a President here who will sweep the money changers out of the temple.

McFadden's 1932 prediction never came to pass.

[Editor's note: Added to his other prescriptions, McFadden's calls for a gold standard would indeed have pulled the United States out of the bad recession it was suffering in 1932 and prevented it from falling into the Great Depression. However, although a stable and flexible money supply is essential to a well-functioning economy, posession and trading of physical gold is not essential to the maintenance of it. What is certainly essential is that the people, through the Congress, have authority over the creation of money.]

Fast forward to today: Did either of the two leading candidates for president seem willing to "sweep" the "moneyed vultures" out of the temple? Of course not. There could be no greater indication that neither party really stands for the people.

—Mike Gray

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Michael Novak’s latest book, No One Sees God, is a welcome addition to the ongoing conversation (or is it more of a shouting match?) with the most prominent of the New Atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens). I’ll confess that Novak, a brilliant writer, scholar, religious thinker, and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is much kinder than I would have been to the new bile-spewing atheists.

In fact, a quite unique aspect of the book is its measured tone and approach. It would take someone of the stature and demeanor of a Michael Novak to break through the shouting with something so different and so effective.

The book’s thesis is one I don’t believe I’ve seen put forth quite this way anywhere else: "that atheists and believers in God can and should open civil, reasoned conversations about questions important to each. Who really are we? What may we hope? How ought we to live?"

That is the biggest problem preventing such civil dialogue: absolute certainty on both sides of the divide. This is an assertion that I am sure both sides will have difficulty swallowing, but Novak points out that many or even most of each camp at times doubt the certainty of their convictions. Thus the title, No One Sees God. He points to the experience of many religious believers in encountering “the dark night of the soul.”

I am sure many religious believers will balk at such a contention, but Novak persuasively makes the case that God is on such a completely different plane than we mere humans, that accepting the inconceivably non-human nature of God means we have moved to a more mature, less childlike understanding of our place in the world.

Theologically this is called the incomprehensibility of God. Novak calls it a “dark knowledge.” I know that feeling, and I’m sure that many other honest religious believers would be unafraid to admit as much.

This honesty about the nature of our faith gives us a bridge to understand those who think of God as a Santa Claus for the benighted. Most of them, if honest, would also admit to doubting the certitude of their convictions of a universe devoid of deity.

After all is said and done, then, there is not really so much separating those of either faith, one believing in a personal God, the other believing matter is all there is. As Novak puts it,

The experience of nothingness is . . . practically universal. Yet some in the two groups . . . seem blessedly to have been spared it. Trying to understand it, however, I prefer to speak of this experience without the –ism, prior to any ideology about is, as “the experience of nothingness.

“The line of belief and unbelief,” he notices, “is not drawn between one person and another, normally, but rather down the inner souls of all of us.”

So why the vitriol and lack of humility of so many atheists, and the lack of humility of so many religious believers? Although he doesn’t put it this way, it seems to me that Novak is saying that this is simply human nature. Belief and certainty just come easier to some, and it is those to whom it comes most easily who find it impossible to credit the other side with anything positive or constructive.

The so-called “New Atheists” are a particularly egregious example of just how blind absolutely certain people can be. Religion is the bane of all human existence, they assert over and over again, and must be scrubbed from the earth.

Novak begins the dismantling of said atheists in a curious way: “In fact, there is much in atheism to praise.” I don’t disagree with him after reading his arguments, but that phrase would never occur to most religiously inclined people. Novak uses as his example an atheist of a completely different kind than those of today's vitriolic sort, Jurgen Habermas, who “writes of believers with respect and as equal partners in an important dialogue.” Dialogue is the last thing the new atheists are looking for.

Novak includes an important insight that has always seemed rather obvious to me but has not previously received much if any attention in the debate:

Their [the new atheists'] natural habit of mind is anthropomorphic. They tend to think of God as if He were a human being, bound to human limitations.

Thus when this anthropomorphisized God doesn’t measure up to their limited human expectations, they not only reject him, they ridicule anyone who dares to believe in such a pathetic excuse for a deity—which is in fact a fiction they themselves have created out of their own imagination.

In praising certain aspects of atheism, Novak lays the foundation for the religious and atheists to have a spirited yet respectful dialogue. And from a Jewish and Christian perspective, he also helps the believer understand why such a dialogue is possible.

Novak in fact gives us an example of such dialogue in a debate with an atheist friend, Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute. He makes several powerful arguments. One is in reply to the common atheist refrain, and an understandable one, that bad stuff happens, and therefore God must either not exist or not be fully good. Making use of the term Providence, Novak points out that the Jewish and Christian faith doesn’t paper over the horrors of life. God is present in them all, he observes.

Interestingly, Novak implies that this great difference may all come down to “blick.” This concept, which became part of a debate between a famous atheist (Anthony Flew, who has since become a theist) and theists, seems basically to mean something like a basic paradigm. It is the way one interprets the facts of existence. Many people cannot help but interpret things a certain way, because of their blick (originally spelled “blik”).

One reviewer of the book used this as evidence that the convinced atheist could never be convinced by argument to embrace religious belief. Yet that ignores an important aspect of the argument: Novak uses Anthony Flew, a powerful longtime advocate of atheism, to make his point.

My one minor quibble with the book is that in discussing the world we currently inhabit, with all its sin and misery, Novak doesn’t make much reference to the Fall. At one point he states that God “made the earth to be a place of trial.” He discusses the goodness of creation, but it is vitally important to remember that God did not create a fallen world. He created a perfect world that was marred by the freedom he gave his creatures.

It is that fallen world that is the place of trial, and it is in this world that Michael Novak does such a tremendous job of helping religious believers and atheists see that they might, if they wish, get along a little better and search for the truth together.

—Mike D'Virgilio

No One Sees God, by Michael Novak: Recommended

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Fourteen years in the making—or more likely, fourteen years in the avoiding—Guns 'n' Roses' new album, Chinese Democracy, will hit the stores this Sunday.

S. T. Karnick critiques the album, track by track, as it has been made available for preview at the band's MySpace page.

Overall, it's a good and enjoyable album, but fans who are expecting a classic that justifies a fourteen-year gap since the band's last studio-produced album will probably be disappointed. Such an expectation, however, is of course rather fatuous, and judging the album on its own merits, it's a very decent effort.

The opening song, "Chinese Democracy," announces a somewhat newer style for the band, with choppy, industrial-style guitar chording and compressed-sounding vocals from lead singer Axl Rose. It's an interesting and enjoyable show-opener.

"Shackler's Revenge" is similar style to "Chinese Democracy" but includes Rose's usual higher-pitched vocals in addition to lower-register growls. The bridge includes some fancy guitar shredding, but nothing we haven't heard a good deal of in the past 14 years.

"Better" sounds more like old-fashioned GnR, with Rose's vocals at the fore, although there is some anachronistic grunge in the arrangement. The guitar solos are enjoyable but very much in the currently conventional metal mode, less blues-oriented than in the group's early years.

"Street of Dreams" is a ballad featuring piano chords, power chord guitars, orchestral backing, and one of Rose's exceedingly dramatic, over-the-top vocal performances (think Steve Tyler in even tighter trousers), which may appeal to the fans of the band's early albums—or may not.

Flamenco guitars and Chapman-stick-like bass guitar open "If the World" with a shuffle beat, and Rose's expressive, high-pitched vocals preside over an arrangement that soon accumulates power chords in an interestingly odd, uncluttered metal shuffle arrangement with a more blues-oriented guitar solo and then a flamenco-oriented acoustic guitar solo. Thanks to all the eccentricities, the song manages to work very well and is a highlight of the album.

"There Was a Time" also has a shuffle beat and employs mellotron orchestra, but overall it sounds more like conventional GnR than "If the World." The arrangement highlights Rose's vocals, which are very good on this track, as the other instruments tend to fill in the gaps between vocal lines and stanzas instead of intruding over the singing. Shortly after the halfway point, multitracked vocals increase this emphasis. The guitar solo includes some good use of wahwah pedal and other distorting effects, thus imitating the vocals in another way. The song doesn't scream of originality, but it is rather affecting.

"Catcher in the Rye" largely recreates the band's classic sound, with a straightforward rock rhythm, just-right vocals from Rose, some very good piano in the background of the mix, and even some synthesizer passages.

"Scraped" opens with a passage of intertwining a capella vocals reminiscent of Extreme, and the rest of the song sounds a good deal like that very talented band, although of course Rose makes Extreme's fine vocalist, Gary Cherone, sound quite conservative by comparison. I'm not sure that that's a good thing, but the song has its charms.

Given the title, "Sorry" naturally returns us to ballad territory, and this one has some unusual touches: more acoustic guitar fills, initial verse vocals influenced by late-1990s hiphop locutions, another very blues-oriented guitar solo (rather good while not being groundbreaking), post-bridge verse vocals sung in an appealingly natural timbre, and rather Metallica-sounding vocal choruses, which is certainly not new to the world but brings a nice bit of additional variety to this particular album.

"Riad and the Bedouins" returns to the sound of the band's early years, with a noisy, raucous arrangement in the style of "Welcome to the Jungle"—but not, alas, the drama or melodicism of that classic song.

"I.R.S." has a slow shuffle beat and effective vocals by Rose. Power chords drive the chorus and bridge, as the band once again bows to metal conventions but makes them their own. Particularly effective are a couple more-sparsely arranged passages after the 2:00 mark.

"Madagascar" is driven by Rose's vocals, which I find to be overly dramatic here. The rhythm and synthesizer punctuation in the main verses are reminiscent of "Gangsta's Paradise," while the choruses are driven by descending melody lines in Rose's vocals and the bass guitar. A long bridge section includes orchestral backing and excerpts from speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. The whole thing ends up sounding more than a little pretentious, but the musical talent employed compensates fairly adequately.

"This Is Love" is the metal equivalent of Julio Iglesias or Celine Dion, and if that sounds like something you'd like, you'll probably like it.

"Prostitute" initially sounds a good deal like a David Bowie song, including Rose's vocals, although of course he sings it in a rather higher timbre than Bowie's. The use of piano and synthesizers is also notable. Overall, the song is basic metal end-of-album drama, with orchestral accompaniment, another interesting shuffle beat, and some progressive metal rhythms in two bridge sections. Such touches make it more interesting than it would otherwise be, given that the vocal melodies are basically undistinguished.

That seems largely true of the whole album: the interesting touches and arrangements make it more enjoyable than the sometimes uninspired melodies would suggest. Overall, it's well worth purchasing, if you like this sort of thing.

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Given the importance of the issue of personal responsibility in current cultural and social issues, I'm reproducing here, in edited form, my analysis of the conclusion of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, from our discussion in the Comments section of my recent article on the book.

As I note in this analysis, the last chapter of the book is crucial in refuting ultilitarian arguments for statism and its destuctive effect on individual freedom.

Thus the raw power of the state is shown for what it is, merely the actions of the powerful to increase their power. It is revealing to consider what is reported (in the immediately previous chapter) as having happened to the writer whose wife Alex and his gang raped and killed earlier in the story. He has been apprehended as a revolutionary and terrorist. Thus the victim is the criminal, and the criminal is a hero.

That latter phrase will sound familiar, of course. In A Clockwork Orange we have the same totalitarian processes as in 1984, combined with all the social manipulation employed in Brave New World. To all of this awfulness, Burgess adds a government-allowed rule of terror by criminals and thereby creates a chillingly accurate horror story about the modern megastate, which uses multiple means to manipulate, terrorize, and if necessary, brutalize the population into submission.

The last chapter confirms this by utterly destroying any utilitarian arguments for such activities.

A Clockwork Orange, novel by Anthony Burgess: Most Highly Recommended.

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Former Beatle Paul McCartney has announced that he wants to release a 14-minute "experimental" song recorded in 1967, called "Carnival of Light."

McCartney said the composition (if it may be called that) reflects his (unhealthy) interest in musique concrete,and that he told the band members, "just wander round all of the stuff and bang it, shout, play it. It doesn't need to make any sense," according to a BBC Radio interview to be broadcast tomorrow.

One suspects that it is entirely successful at that last goal. AP reports.

Fantasy novel and graphic novel master Neal Gaiman (Sandman) has been engaged by DC Comics to write a two-part installment of the Batman comic book series in which Bruce Wayne (Batman's real identity) will die or at least give up the cape to another.

Tentatively titled "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader," the book is scheduled for release next February. "Working with artist Andy Kubert, Gaiman will try to reconcile the various versions of Batman, some wisecracking, others brooding, over the Dark Knight's 69-year history," USA Today reports.

Continuing the creative destruction of the print media business, advertising revenues among U.S. monthly magazines crashed in the past year, with the worst drop other than after the 9/11 attacks. Magazines are laying off staff at alarming rates. Media Bistro reports.

CBS-TV's interview with President-elect Barack Obama on the network's 60 Minutes newsmagazine achieved the program's highest rating in nine years, with 24.9 million people having seen at least some part of the show. The show's rating was actually slightly lower than NBC's Sunday Night Football game, however. The Hollywood Reporter reports.

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Quantum of Solace, the first James Bond movie to serve as a direct sequel to its predecessor (Casino Royale), brought in nearly $30 million more in its first weekend in general release than the immediately previous installment in the series and $23 million more than the previous Bond film record-holder, Die Another Day.

Even accounting for ticket-price inflation, Quantum of Solace was a big success, selling an estimated 9.8 million tickets, much more than the 8.1 million estimated as having been sold for the first weekend of Die Another Day.

Clearly the audiences liked the move toward American action-film conventions in Casino Royale and were looking for more of the same. The film delivers on that promise, as noted in this publication last weekend.

Still going strong was the cheery animated comedy Madagascar: Escape to Africa, bringing in another $36.1 million, raising its ten-day total to $118 million.

Next week brings three highly anticipated films—Twilight, based on the popular vampire novel series by Stepanie Meyers; the animated comedy Bolt, and the Reese Witherspoon-Vince Vaughn holiday comedy Four Christmases—likely to push box office receipts up even further and pose strong challenges to Quantum of Solace.

However, good audience reaction to the latter should keep the crowds lining up despite the competition. Quantum of Solace is still going strong in the UK, retaining its number 1 spot at the British box office in its third weekend.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The latest iteration of the long-running James Bond film series finds the films moving toward general contemporary U.S. action film conventions. Daniel Craig's characterization of Bond has him as less pretty than previous ones, more muscular, less witty and socially adept, and less willing to cooperate with authorities.

This last item is in some ways the most important change, moving Bond from his original role as the government employee as gentleman-adventurer (a highly conservative type of romanticism) to more of a rebel within the belly of the beast.

Bond has always had an independent streak, to be sure, but in the past his differences with his superiors tended to be clearly based on his superior knowledge of the situation, due, of course, to his being directly in the center of the action in the field. In the current installment, Quantum of Solace, however, Bond's personal motives—in particular, revenge for the killing of Vespa in the previous installment—place him in continual conflict with his superiors.

This, too, has happened on occasion in past Bond films, but the distrust of government and authorities in general is greatly amped up in Quantum of Solace. This certainly seems to accord with current social attitudes in the United States, and not as strongly with the situation in the UK. Given the record-setting popularity of the film in Britain in its first three weeks of release, perhaps the government there has something important to think about.

Rather amusingly, in QoS a building designed to be environmentally low-impact turns out to be a deathtrap for the people there when the action reaches its climax. It's a very clever use of the series' apparently mandatory inclusion of a villains' compound in the middle of nowhere.

An unfortunate weakness of the film, in my view at least, is the action sequences. These are chopped up into brief shots with the camera trained closely in on the action. The effect is to intensify the emotional impact of the scenes while making it difficult to understand exactly what is happening.

This overbalancing of reason in favor of emotion goes very much against my own preferences in action sequences, as I prefer to be given the information myself about the events and deduce how the characters feel about them. Usually, after all, this is a simple matter of thinking, "Oh, that must have hurt." Hence the choppy, incoherent framing and editing is both unnecessary and confusing.

The way to shoot action sequences, then, is to use fairly open, informative camera shots of sufficient length to show the audience what is happening. Three films that do this in an exemplary manner are The Birth of a Nation (the first true feature-length fiction film ever made), The Adventures of Robin Hood, and Rio Bravo (see also here), and I invite the reader to give them another look after seeing QoS.

Even films that do use a variety of quick camera cuts in the action sequences can be quite clear about what is happening, as witness nearly any Jackie Chan film; I suggest a look at Drunken Master.

On the plus side, the film has a very strong story on both the overall level (the espionage-international affairs angle) and the personal one (in Bond's current and past relationships with several women, including M, the latter played well once again by Judi Dench).

Thus despite the unfortuitous choices in staging the action sequences, and also despite sporting the worst Bond theme song and credit sequence ever, by a good measure, Quantum of Solace is well worth seeing. It's a James Bond film that may well inspire a little thought among its audience. In that regard, too, it is a very American action film, contrary to most critics' dismissive attitude toward the form.

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The New York Times thinks it's cute that a couple of obscure filmmakers have repeatedly duped several big media outlets into printing outlandishly false stories.

What's more, the Times story agrees with the hoaxter in placing the blame on the blogosphere instead of on the mainstream media.

The very opposite is true.

Here's what happened, as the Times story accurately recounts it:

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

Eisenstadt has been doing this for several months, the story notes, and other publications taken in by his hoaxes include The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times. The story does not acknowledge that the New York Times itself recounted the absurdly false claim about Palin.

Most importantly, as noted earlier, the story sides with the hoaxters in laying most of the blame on bloggers:

But most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers, a reflection of the sloppy speed at which any tidbit, no matter how specious, can bounce around the Internet. And they fell for the fake material despite ample warnings online about Eisenstadt, including the work of one blogger who spent months chasing the illusion around cyberspace, trying to debunk it.

Note the deceptive wording: "most of Eisenstadt's victims have been bloggers." Of course most of his victims would be bloggers—there are thousands of them and only a few mainstream media outlets. Very, very few of these blogs have even a small fraction of the reach of the mainstream outlets, however, and that makes their mistakes much less egregious and important than those by the major media.

Moreover, a great many bloggers opposed the Republican ticket and would have been delighted to recount such an embarrassing story. The readers of all blogs, however, would not assume that the reporters had dug up this nugget themselves but were in fact simply commenting on a fact derived elsewhere. As with talk radio and newspaper opeds, people expect bloggers to be giving opinion and analysis, not original reporting, unless the blogger says otherwise.

In fact, the great majority of those bloggers who reported the story surely got their information from the mainstream sources taken in by the hoax and recounted it in good faith, assuming—incorrectly, it turns out—that the big-media outlets had done the requisite fact-checking before moving forward with the story.

Once the story hit the first few media outlets, even places such as Fox News, thought to be more sympathetic to McCain-Palin than most, recounted it in good faith. No one saw fit to check something that had been reported by such "credible" sources as MSNBC. It is those who raced to report it initially and have big audiences who are fully responsible for the dissemination of this blatant calumny.

So the real story here is the one the New York Times failed to report: that the hoax incident shows the appallingly low standards among the mainstream media, not the blogosphere.

And why were the standards ignored in this case? The answer could not be more obvious: because from the mainstream press's perspective as rabid haters of Republicans and the American right, the juicy tidbit about Palin was too good to pass up and too important to waste time checking for accuracy.

That's the real scandal here.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The New York Times has published a fascinating story on a new theory about the origins of mental disorders, one that sees it as the result of different genes in the same person struggling for dominance during the brain's development.

The theory is definitely early in the testing stages and quite hypothetical at this point, but it does appear to have a good deal of explanatory power, the story notes.

An interesting angle is the theory's agreement with recent thinking about how a variety of factors, including environmental ones, appear to affect the body's expression and implementation of its genetic code.

This movement is an outgrowth of the sociobiology insight that species' behavior patterns are affected by natural selection and thus reflect the evolutionary advantages of the behaviors in question. Recent innovations in genetic theory build on that observation by suggesting that environmental factors can also affect the expression of an individual creature's genetic code. The new theory on the causes of mental disorders follows that skein of reasoning further.

This line of thinking has very interesting and important philosophical and cultural implications, and it is thus a scientific movement that bears watching.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

TAC correspondent Mike Gray says Peter Brimelow is right about immigration.

Let me begin by saying that I'm not a libertarian. In my view, libertarians are largely cultural and political theoreticians who continually entertain the charming notion that society ought to be organized along their particular lines of thought, that they have the Revealed Truth in their pockets (usually dog-eared copies of Atlas Shrugged), and that utilitarian methods will be triumphant and we needn't repair to outmoded and irrelevant moral absolutes since there are no absolutes.

Libertarians evince a chronic disdain for Biblical morality; they may pay lip service to it, but they rightly regard it as an impediment to their carefully laid plans. Except for Marxism/socialism, I can't think of any other coherent political philosophy more antithetical to the Biblical view of mankind than libertarianism.

Having said that, I must admit my admiration for a few libertarian thinkers, one of whom is Peter Brimelow. Thirteen years ago he published a book whose prescience is almost breathtaking: Alien Nation, the subject of which (erroneous misrepresentations notwithstanding) is the consequences of American government policy with respect to legal (not illegal) immigration, specifically the disastrous results of the 1965 Great Society legislation. Conservatives and liberals—and even other libertarians—have condemned Alien Nation since its first publication.

Brimelow recently gave a speech titled "Immigration is the Viagra of the State." A few of his statements regarding the implications of current U. S. policy and how they impact America's cultural stability are extremely quotable:

Yet in the U.S. it's very probable that the party of free markets—perhaps I should say the alleged party of free markets—is going to be annihilated in this year's election and that the party of statism may be in power for a generation. . . .

So I'm not saying that immigration is absolutely a bad thing. But I am saying that it can be a bad thing, and that in the U.S. today—and also Europe—it is a bad thing. . . .

Americans are taught to believe that they are "a nation of immigrants." Of course, all nations are nations of immigrants. There is no known case where people grew out of the ground. What's different about America is the speed with which it was put together. Unfortunately, it can be unput together just as quickly. And that, in essence, is what's happening. . . .

This is a transformation without precedent in the history of the world.  To adapt Brecht, the government is dissolving the people and electing a new one. . . .

And that's the bottom line to this review of the U.S. situation, which I really want to stress. The point is that the status quo is statist. . . .

The Americans have had mass immigration before—notably the so-called Great Wave of  immigration from about 1880 through the 1920s, when it was cut off by legislation. And they've had a welfare state before, roughly since the New Deal in the 1930s. But they've never had both together. And they just don't work. . . .

Further practical problems with immigration arise in the area of freedom of speech. For example, in Britain there is a Race Relations Act, and under it, people have been jailed for saying things, like blacks are disproportionately involved in crime, which are actually true. But truth is not a defense. . . .

[T]he major Mexican organization in the U.S. has unblushingly begun a campaign to lobby the major American media to prevent them quoting or featuring immigration critics on the grounds that criticism of immigration is "hate." . . .

But what I would suggest here is that the immigration influx of the late twentieth century into the U.S. and the West in general has been the Viagra of the state.. It has reinvigorated the state, when it was otherwise losing its powers because of the collapse of socialism and the triumph of classical liberalism. . . .

Americans are taught that "Diversity is our strength." But diversity is not strength. It is weakness, for a wide range of reasons.

Although I don't often say this about libertarians, Peter Brimelow is well worth listening to, and Alien Nation is a must-read.

—Mike Gray

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As predicted, California activists are not satisfied that the people have spoken regarding same-sex marriage in last week’s successful referendum vote to define marriage as being between one man and one woman (or vice versa, for feminists), and they have taken to the streets in protest.

Also as predicted, numerous minor celebrities have joined the protestors, and some of slightly greater renown spoke in support of them while entering an awards ceremony at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel last Thursday. Sean Penn, for example, was reported as saying the following:

"I think it might be an idea to go out and join them shortly," Penn said. "It was a shameful decision that was made."

We’ll await word from the IRS regarding whether those who didn’t vote for Obama for President will be afforded the same option.

Forty-three Democratic legislators, including leaders of the California Senate and Assembly, filed a brief Monday urging the California Supreme Court to void Proposition 8.

The citizens of California rely on the Legislature and the courts to safeguard against unlawful discrimination by temporary, and often short-lived, majorities," the legislators said in the document, written by attorneys at the firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

"It's unfortunate, obviously, but it's not the end," Schwarzenegger told CNN. "I think that we will again maybe undo that, if the court is willing to do that, and then move forward from there and again lead in that area."

They should never give up. They should be on it and on it until they get it done.

Nicole Kidman and Charlize Theron are getting in bed together.

Kidman will play real-life artist Einar Wegener, the world's first postop male transsexual. Theron will take on the role of Wegener's artist wife, Gerda.

Einar underwent a series of sexual reassignment surgeries beginning in 1930 after he began modeling as a female for his wife. The cross-dressing portraits became an instant hit.

Einar, who changed his name to Lili Elbe, died in 1931 of complications from the fifth surgery.

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Pundits are paid to “interpret” the results of elections. I am not a pundit, but I have watched politicians debate and shape public policies for a quarter century, and I think I can discern some meaning from last week’s elections.

There is no shortage of claims that the Obama win and advances by Democrats in federal and state elections nationwide reveal a shift in public opinion towards the left. Some commentators—such as Henry Manne, dean emeritus of the George Mason University School of Law and by all accounts a brilliant man and solid libertarian thinker—believe “the political direction of the country is now determined for a long time to come, and it is inevitably leftward.” (Forbes.com, October 14th; note that he wrote this before Obama won the election.)

It’s always a big mistake to assume that yesterday’s public policy battles are still today’s, or to overlook evidence of changing public opinions. Think tank leaders are especially prone to these mistakes. But it’s also a mistake to put very much faith in the meaning of close elections, or to believe the spin coming from left-leaning mainstream media about election results. And this year’s election was close, decided almost entirely by increases in the turn-out of black and Hispanic voters who probably did not view their votes as endorsing a liberal versus a conservative agenda.

Since Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, ran to the right of his Republican opponent, if his election has ideological significance (which is probably does not), then it proves just the opposite of what Obama’s liberal supporters claim it does. The election may prove that the only way to win a Presidential election today in America is to call for lower taxes and less government, at least loudly and often if not sincerely.

Obama did so, whereas McCain was a reluctant spokesperson, at best, for conservative and libertarian ideas.

“A Rasmussen poll of October 30 reported that 31 percent of likely voters believed that ‘taxes will go down’ under an Obama administration versus just 11 percent under a McCain administration,” according to Dick Armey in a November 7 Wall Street Journal op-ed. The Republicans’ message that Obama was “too liberal for America,” never expressed very loudly, didn’t stick, partly because the mainstream media refused to echo it, and partly because the public blamed Republicans for out-of-control spending, the recession, and the massive financial bailout.

According to Pat Toomey, president of the Club for Growth (Wall Street Journal, November 6), a poll of voters in 12 “swing” congressional districts, commissioned by the Club for Growth, showed voters oppose higher taxes, support tax cuts, believe Washington is wasteful, oppose the bailout (and blame Republicans for it), support more domestic oil production, and oppose “card check” (allowing pro-union coercion in union organization votes) by wide margins.

Obama won these districts despite being on the “wrong” side of these public policy debates. That’s evidence that this election was about charisma and a few key issues—the financial crisis and the war—and not about ideology. Exit polls also showed America remains a “center-right” country, with polls showing 44 percent self-identify as moderate, 34 percent as conservatives, and only 22 percent as liberals.

In short, the right's ideas did remarkably well, to the degree they were subject to a referendum at all, garnering 46 percent of the popular vote despite a weak Republican candidate, a charismatic Democratic candidate, a financial crisis, an unpopular war, and 99 percent of the media “in the tank" for Obama.

There are big fights ahead on health care, energy policy, taxes, trade, and labor policy. But conservatives and libertarians enter every one of these arenas with leads in opinion polls on the key issues at stake.

And importantly, we have a big lead in intellectual credibility on these issues. We’ve been consistent, and consistently right, in opposing nationalized health care, global warming alarmism, high taxes, protectionism, and pro-union rules for decades now. The election didn’t bring any new evidence or ideas to bear on these issues.

The left embraces its positions on these issues in order to build coalitions to win political power, not because research or a principled political philosophy say they are the right views to embrace. This is a crippling deficiency of the left, and  a major long-term strategic advantage of free-market proponents.

Looking ahead, I see Obama and his Democratic allies burning through political capital faster than GM and Ford are burning through their cash reserves as they seek to make quick progress on their top agenda items—and even faster if they digress into social issues such as abortion, “don’t ask, don’t tell,” reparations, and same-sex marriage.

The right needs to make elected officials aware that this is the case, so that a false sense of a public mandate for bigger, rather than smaller, government doesn’t lead to the passage of bad legislation that may prove difficult to repeal once the public’s true views become apparent.

Republican leader Mitch McConnell has said Republicans will work with Obama to “implement his campaign promises of cutting taxes, increasing energy security, reducing spending and easing the burden of an immense and growing national debt.” Columnist Kimberly Strassel (in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, November 7) thinks this means Republicans are correctly “not standing ready to negotiate [meaning, capitulate] on eliminating union secret ballots, nationalizing health care, enacting a climate program, or over-regulating the financial industry.”

This approach would be very good. Right out of the box, Republicans seem to be identifying the right issues to hold Obama accountable on, and which ones they should vigorously oppose.

Political progress, as Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner likes to say, doesn’t progress in a straight line. It zigs and zags, with setbacks and detours along the way. Obama’s election was not a major setback for conservatives or for libertarians. In fact, the next four years may bring some long-overdue clarity to the political debate, with the right's ideas and messages stronger and more widely embraced thanks to the battle.

—Joseph Bast

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Taking up a theme about which I've been writing for several months (and indeed for more than two decades), AP wonders, "Will economy make crowds shun gloomy flicks?" Well, yes and no, as I've noted earlier in my weekly updates on the U.S. movie box office. They will shun gloomy flicks, but not largely because of the economy.

The reality is that people always tend to shun gloomy movies regardless of economic conditions.

Certainly it's true that some downbeat films can be very popular, as was spectacularly true of Titanic and The Dark Knight, but such successes are greatly the exception. Plus, downbeat films that achieve real popular success almost always have some big compensations that satisfy audiences despite the unhappy endings, as in the spectacular action and romance of The Dark Knight, 300, and Titanic demonstrate.

Absent that, however, gloomy movies don't do very well, and even with them it's a tough road. So, no, the economy isn't driving people away from depressing Oscar-bait films; the movies themselves are accomplishing that quite effectively.

That's the real reason the animated comedy film Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa led the U.S. movie box office last weekend with a spectacular $63.1 million in its first weekend of release. Let's see, funny talking animals or another fictional expose of U.S. perfidy in the Iraq War . . . what do you think, honey?

Thus also the strong showings for the silly comedy Role Models, which finished second at $19.2 million, High School Musical: Senior Year (third at $9.2 million), and Zack and Miri Make a Porno (fifth at $5.4 million). Also in the top ten were two horror films, Saw V and The Haunting of Molly Hartley.

The one serious film in the top ten was Clint Eastwood's The Changeling, finishing fourth with $7.2 million and benefiting from a strong performance by Angelina Jolie and an appealing, positive element in the central characters' personal strength and courage—a couple of those big compensations mentioned above.

This preference for movies that actually entertain is not something unique to wicked Americans, either; it appears to be all but universal. India, after all, is known for its aggressively entertaining Bollywood films, and most countries in the world enjoy Hollywood's escapist fare and don't have much use for our antiwar dramas and pro-homosexual cinema.

And this past weekend the latest James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, was tops at the UK box office again, selling another $14.3 million worth of tickets. Also strong in Blighty were High School Musical 3: Senior Year, Ghost Town, and Saw V. Sound familiar? Only slots five, six, and ten had particularly serious films among the entire UK top ten for the weekend.

All of this is good news, actually, as it confirms once again that although most critics are incredibly stupid, audiences tend to be very smart. That keeps the U.S. film industry from entirely destroying itself by devoting its efforts exclusively to the kind of frightful, idiotic, politically driven nonsense the filmmakers would really like to make. God bless the free market!

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

French film director Olivier Assayas has cast the lead actor for his film biography of the terrorist known as Carlos, Ilich: Story of Carlos.

Playing the role of the Venezuala-born leftist terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as Carlos and as the Jackal, will be Edgar Ramirez, who played a soldier backing Fidel Castro in Che, Steve Soderbergh's biography of the Cuban communist revolutionary.

Sanchez/Carlos is now in jail in France after leading a global terrorist organization that served the Soviet Union's ends as he worked for Palestinians, Syria, Libya, Iraq, and the Romanian communist government, among others.

Director Assayas referred to Carlos as "the most complex and controversial character to emerge from the revolutionary struggles of our time," according to Reuters. What controversy there could possibly be over the man's actions is puzzling, given that he was simply a murderous thug who served as many of the world's wickedest regimes as possible.

After a film made by a prominent Hollywood director lauding Che Guevara, of course, it was only inevitable that someone would take up the cause of an even more blatant terrorist.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Now it's obvious that technology does not stand still.  If Star Trek is any guide, one day we'll all be talking to our computers—conversationally, I mean, not with unilateral threats of destruction as is now common. In fact, talking to computers is happening more often even today; voice recognition capabilities are being used in several areas of the military, such as fighter aircraft.  But there are still some bugs that need to be worked out, as the Wikipedia article on voice recognition technologies attests:

Working with Swedish pilots flying in the JAS-39 Gripen cockpit, Englund (2004) found [voice] recognition [on the part of the computer] deteriorated with increasing G-loads. It was also concluded that adaptation greatly improved the results in all cases and introducing models for breathing was shown to improve recognition scores significantly. Contrary to what might be expected, no effects of the broken English of the speakers were found. It was evident that spontaneous speech caused problems for the recognizer, as could be expected. A restricted vocabulary, and above all, a proper syntax, could thus be expected to improve recognition accuracy substantially.

In other words, jet fighter computers may have to stay after school for remedial instruction; but only if the pilots have learned how to breathe right:

The Eurofighter Typhoon currently in service with the UK RAF employs a speaker-dependent system, i.e., it requires each pilot to create a template. The system is not used for any safety critical or weapon critical tasks, such as weapon release or lowering of the undercarriage, but is used for a wide range of other cockpit functions. Voice commands are confirmed by visual and/or aural feedback. The system is seen as a major design feature in the reduction of pilot workload, and even allows the pilot to assign targets to himself with two simple voice commands or to any of his wingmen with only five commands.

This shows a burst of common sense from our British cousins; the pilot can't accidentally tell the wheels to go up or down or fire a missile just in case he loses his temper and says something he shouldn't.

So what has all this to do with Henry Fonda?  Well, consider our current President: Everybody knows that one of the requirements for a position in his administration is the necessity of pronouncing "nuclear" "nookyulur."  It's the sine qua non of employment in the White House, the shibboleth that gets you through the front door; saying "nookyulur" signifies you're an insider.

Well, as I noted earlier, technology doesn't stagnate. The codes in that small case strapped to the military aide's arm are likely transmitted by the President electromechanically, meaning the prez pushes buttons or throws switches and the information gets passed along. 

But one day we'll be living in a Star Trek world, conversing amiably with toasters, talking to our lawnmowers, and so forth.  The President will be able to obliterate Patagonia with just a few well-chosen words. By then, voice recognition software will have to have developed to the point that, regardless of whether the President says "nuclear" or "nookyulur," the bombs will still get delivered and everybody will breathe a sigh of relief—except the Patagonians, of course.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In a report confirming what common sense had long told us, a new study published in the scientific journal Pediatrics found that watching TV programs containing sexual content makes teenagers more likely to get pregnant or get someone pregnant.

The study used a methodology that actually traced the real connection between viewing habits and teen pregnancy, as the Chicago Sun-Times reports:

The research was based on a 2001 survey of 2,000 12- to 17-year-olds who were asked how often they watched any of 23 popular TV shows, ranging from cartoons and comedies to adult-themed shows such as "Sex and the City."

Follow-up interviews were done years later to see how many of them got pregnant in their teen years or were responsible for a pregnancy.

The result was statistically conclusive and quite powerful:

Teens who watched shows where sex was regularly shown or discussed had two to three times the risk of pregnancy than young people exposed to lower levels of sexual content, the study said.

Interestingly and importantly, the young people's actions were affected by the ideas presented, not only by actual depictions of activities—the very mention of sexual topics had an effect, the Sun-Times story noted:

"Even shows that had a little bit of sexual talk"—but didn't show sex acts—". . . were still powerful in terms of the relationship to teen pregnancy," said Anita Chandra, a behavioral scientist for the Rand Corp. who was the study's lead author.

Chandra added an important observation in the story:

One possible reason, according to Chandra: TV shows tend to focus on the positive aspects of sex, not possible consequences.

"That may make teens more likely to initiate sex earlier, before they're really ready to make responsible choices and find ways to protect themselves," she said

That is a crucial distinction that must be taken into account when discussing violence and sexual content in the media and their effect on children. Often in these discussions the point will be made that some people who want to limit children's exposure to sexual content in media products don't seem to object as strongly to depictions of violence. Thus such people are being hypocritical, they say.

As this study shows, however, there is a crucial and essential difference between depictions (or even discussions) of sex and of violence in the arts: the bad consequences of violence are readily apparent, whereas the bad consequences of sexual license are often far removed in time and space from the actual events. Thus whereas depictions of violence have built-in moral messages, discussions and depictions of sexual behavior do not.

As a result of her study, Chandra says children's exposure to sexual content in the media should be limited, and failing that, at least parents should watch the shows with their children and discuss the issues as they arise.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

First, let us talk of principles. There seems to be a severe dividing line between conservatives.

One set, which appears to be the majority, could be classified as Classical Liberals, meaning they take their political and social philosophy from the Founding Fathers.

The other group has accepted the statist assumptions of the modern liberal welfare state and believes it is unrealistic to think Americans will even again not be dependent on government for many of their social and economic needs. Thus, the latter say, we must embrace these assumptions and run these programs in a more conservative way.

Down that road lies ruin for the conservative movement, because that is not conservatism at all.

The American people in this election did not move left. As the Wall Street Journal noted,

Assorted pundits of the left and right keep telling us that the tax issue has lost its political power. They must not have been paying attention to the Presidential campaign, and especially not to Barack Obama. One of the Democrat's main political feats this year has been to portray himself as a more formidable tax cutter than John McCain.

Interestingly, a recent poll showed that more people identify themselves today as conservative than did eight years ago. Eight years ago, conservatives made a pact with the devil by hitching their wagons to the “compassionate” conservative, George W. Bush. Thanks to that compassion and the big spending it brought on, Democrats, who for much or modern history had been tagged as profligate “big spending liberals” were now able to run as fiscally prudent taxpayer watchdogs.

The vote in California shows the real power of conservative values. As a result of a state referendum, the tyranny of a handful of judges was not successful in imposing same-sex marriage on the people of that state—Prop 8 won by a vote of 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent among the same people who voted 61 percent to 37 percent for Barack Obama for President.

Similar propositions passed by even larger majorities in Arizona and Florida. In all, voters in thirty-one states have rejected same-sex marriage and not one state has affirmed it. As these votes show, conservative values are ingrained in the majority of the American people in spite of their immersion in a culture hostile to such values.

Most Americans are thus quite open to the message of the nation’s classical liberal foundational values, and if these principles are articulated correctly, people can be persuaded that ordering our society around them is far better than a continued adherence to the statist nostrums promoted by the left.

Selling these values to a people daily indoctrinated by a culture profoundly controlled by the left is extremely difficult. Yet in all the discussions about the way forward to reclaiming conservatism that I have read or heard, I have come across only one brief comment acknowledging the primacy of culture in shaping the thoughts of the American people.

Talk radio, the blogosphere, think tanks, and conservative publications are shouting into the void if they think they can persuade Americans to embrace foundational values without also imparting them aggressively through the culture. In strategizing a way forward, then, we must think about how we can engage and penetrate the cultural influence professions (arts, entertainment, education, including legal education, and journalism and media) with a legion of right-thinking individuals who understand and embrace the classical liberal values of our country’s founding.

Given that only a small percentage of Americans truly embrace leftist notions about government and society, a more neutral, liberty-oriented culture would have a huge impact on how average, largely apolitical Americans decide they want to be governed. Thus it is a shame and dereliction of responsibility that the conservative movement has ignored culture for so long.

The conservative movement has to move beyond its decades-long antagonistic and hypercritical approach to culture, and instead begin to work hard to make a positive impact from within those cultural influence professions.

The timing couldn’t be better, or more critical, to make this a top-shelf priority in the years ahead.

Mike D'Virgilio is Executive Director of The Culture Project.

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Bestselling author and TV producer Michael Crichton has died of cancer at the age of 66. Known for his hugely popular thriller novels dealing with scientific subjects and for his TV series ER, he infused his works with a great sense of scientific investigation as an adventure and the world as a place of real wonders.

In Crichton's world, knowledge is always a good thing, but what people do with it is often foolish and enormously destructive. That accords with reality, of course. That insight sometimes made Crichton's narratives seem to suggest that the public should put strong strictures on science and technology. As science writer Ronald Bailey noted in a review of Next, this implication could be interpreted as a Luddite vision assuming that "humanity rushes headlong into misusing powerful new technologies."

That, however, was not the real thrust of Crichton's works. Love for knowledge—philosophy in its basic sense—was clearly what drove him and is most evident in his writings. There was never anything cynical about his works. Crichton's observance of the ills people can bring through science need not suggest that science is intrinsically bad. In fact, his attitude looks rather like a scientist's puzzled acknowledgment of original sin.

To some extent Crichton's writings reflected an attitude of scientism in its totalizing sense, the fallacious assumption that nothing not readily explainable by science is true. In a book such as Congo, for example, there is a strong implication that human beings are not unique in this creation and thus intrinsically of greater importance than other creatures. That line of thinking actually contradicts the warm feelings toward humanity that are necessary to justify his and the reader's concern for the characters.

Fortunately, that sort of scientism is usually not too annoyingly evident in his works. Very much on the positive side, in addition, was his crusade in recent years to tell the truth about global warming: there is no manmade global warming crisis. None. In speeches, articles, and his excellent potboiler novel State of Fear, he not only refuted the scientific and economic assertions of global-warming alarmists but also, and perhaps more importantly in cultural terms, pointed out their real motivation for pursuing their agenda: money.

As Crichton made clear in his typically melodramatic and entertaining fashion in that book, there has been a huge amount of money to be made by scaring people about global warming, and the activists who have flocked to that cause have made vast sums of it by exploiting the public's natural and laudable concern for taking good care of the environment. State of Fear was thus an important cultural event in addition to being a highly entertaining read.

In all, Crichton's works reflect an unfailingly benevolent but reasonably skeptical atitude toward humanity, and an appropriately ambivalent attitude toward science—an awareness that knowledge is always good, but human beings are not.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

After a hard-fought referendum campaign, voters in the state of California have approved by a 52-48 margin a constitutional amendment reversing a state Supreme Court decision to force the public endorsement of same-sex marriages.

The results are being widely reported as conclusive, with nearly all precincts having reported.

The entire proposition read as follows: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

Exit polls indicated that black voters were especially concerned about the issue, favoring the measure by a two to one margin.

Activists have promised to bring the matter right back to the courts to try to thwart the people's expressed decision on the issue and force them to endorse same-sex marriages against their will.

Many analysts are hailing the vote as a strong success for individual freedom of conscience in the state.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 06:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After a year off because of the writers' strike and a need for the series' producers to recharge their batteries, the Fox espionage-adventure-political-thriller series 24 will return with a four-hour, two-night premiere block on Sunday, January 11, and Monday, January 12.

The four-hour opening block has become a hallmark of 24 in recent years, and the show will run on consecutive Mondays thereafter until concluding in May, as has also been the case in recent years.

The location of the series' central story line and Bauer's activities will be moved away from its usual Los Angeles sites to South Africa. In another welcome change, Jack Bauer's former colleague and enabler at the CTU unit, Tony Almeida, returns, after having been presumed dead for a couple of years.

In addition, theatrical film star Jon Voight will reportedly appear on the program as a villain.

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High School Musical 3: Senior Year continued its strong performance in its second weekend of release, garnering another $15 million to push its ten-day total to a very healthy $61.8 million.

Escapism has driven box office numbers higher in the past couple of weeks, although the past weekend was hurt by low numbers on Friday, as Halloween reduced moviegoing, and represented a 38 percent dropoff from the same weekend of the previous year, which featured two big film openings (American Gangster and Bee Movie). This time around, the comedy Zack and Miri Make a Porno finished second with a take of $10.7 million in its initial weekend. The moral-dilemma horror film Saw 5 continued its strong performance while falling to third, with a solid $10.1 million.

A more serious and indeed somber film, Clint Eastwood's Changeling, finished fourth, and a newly released small-budget horror film with religious implications, The Haunting of Molly Hartley, came in a decent fifth.

Guy Ritchie's energetic crime film Rock 'n' Rolla fared very poorly, bringing in just $1.8 million in its first weekend of wide release, finishing well out of the top 10.

Overseas, the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, took in an impressive $38.6 million in its first weekend in Britain, France, and Sweden. Its opening day total of $8 million in the UK set a new record by $1.5 million over previous champion Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Interestingly, the new Bond film features an eco-terrorist as its main villain. More on that when we review the film here on TAC.

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Sen. John McCain took his political campaign to the airwaves in a comic way Saturday night, spoofing his significant lack of money when compared with his opponent, Sen. Barack Obama. Making fun of Obama's paid program that appeared (at big expense) simultaneously on several TV networks last week, McCain, accompanied by Tina Fay impersonating Gov. Sarah Palin, depicted himself as having been unable to afford the big networks and having to settle for a program on the QVC shopping channel:

Later in the show, he appeared on the "Weekend Update" fake-news segment and showed himself a good sport in making fun of his "maverick" image:

In addition, the show also included a sketch mocking the odious Keith Olberman of MSNBC, with guest host Ben Affleck correctly depicting the talker host as an annoyingly mad crank.

All in all, McCain came off as personable and quite likeable. Whether it will have any effect on voters is surely debatable, but it seems likely his appearance raised some people's comfort level regarding him and his campaign.

The episode did quite well in the ratings, with a 9.0 in the Nielsen gauge, about 12 million viewers—15 percent less than Gov. Sarah Palin's extremely highly rated appearance on SNL last month.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The hit series 24, which did not run on TV last season because of the writers' strike, looks poised to make a strong run this year with a new jolt of energy.

The Fox Network will begin running new episodes of season 7 this coming January, and in the meantime it will set things going with a TV movie, 24: Redemption, on Nov. 23 at 8 p.m. EST.

According to published reports including a story on E! Online, 24: Redemption will set up the story lines for the season's episodes. The trailer, embedded below, reveals that the new season deals with international problems originating in Africa and includes the same kinds of powerful moral dilemmas that have characterized the series over the years.

In addition, the E! Online story reveals, protagonist Jack Bauer's (Kiefer Sutherland) daughter, Kim (Elisha Cuthbert), will return to the series during the season, though not in 24: Redemption, and two new twentysomething characters will be introduced. One of them is the son of the president of the United States, and he becomes increasingly enmeshed in an international conspiracy at the center of the story.

Here's the trailer:

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The show's final block of episodes will probably run in the 2009-10 season, according to reports.

Produced by Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butthead, the Fox series always took a sympathetic but satirical look at American life and had sound values at its core. Its picture of blue-collar life in the United States was done with sometimes achingly comic realism and without either rancor or rose-colored glasses. We'll miss it.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)