The embarrassing Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair photo shows the value of public relations people—and why investing real money makes people more careful about what they do.
Continue reading "Miley Cyrus, Unprotected Celebrity" »
A new ad campaign for Absolut vodka shows open hatred for the United States.
Continue reading "Absolut Radicalism" »
Continue reading "Why Academe Leans Left—And What Can Be Done About It" »
Jason Mitchell's "Father Fearless" character on YouTube shows how Christians can engage the culture with love and without rancor and scoldings. It's a message that could make a huge difference in the American Culture. TAC correspondent Dean Abbott reports.
Continue reading "'Father Fearless' Points Way to Cultural Engagement" »
As you've seen if you clicked on the link in the story immediately below, the film Fitna was removed from the Livelink site because of threats of violence against the proprietors. We've embedded a new link that should work, as numerous sites are carrying the film, in the grand tradition of liberty that the Internet has already developed.
Those who dislike the film—whether they have seen it or otherwise—are trying to ensure that it gets lost on the internet, by posting other videos with "Fitna" as the title. Those who wish to make sure others can see the film should point them to this permalink: http://stkarnick.com/blog2/2008/03/post_120.html.
We will monitor the situation and continue updating the link as necessary. If it should prove necessary in future, we'll download the file and save it to our own site.
The Dutch politician Geert Wilders has released Fitna ("Fatwa"), his short film about Islam's plans for the west and for world domination (see earlier article here).
Continue reading "'Fitna' Outlines Muslim Plans for the West—and the World" »
TAC correspondent Michael D'Virgilio analyzes the cultural implications of the political journey of David Mamet, another modern liberal mugged by reality.Continue reading "David Mamet Swings to the Right" »
Dr. James Dobson, former head of Focus on the Family, says the Christian Right needs new leadership, as older leaders are retiring.
Dr.James Dobson is quite right to point out that there is a leadership void on the Christian Right today. The coming change will do much good if the new leaders have a better understanding of the culture. They must realize that culture is not their enemy but a realm in which Christians must compete as in any other area of life.
Doing so will win many more converts than most sermons could ever hope to do.
For a sampling of articles showing how Christianity can engage culture and how religious faith can manifest itself in unexpected ways in cultural offerings, see the following items from The American Culture's archives (and there are countless others available on this site): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
Evangelicals who think the contemporary American culture is fundamentally hostile to religious faith, and particularly Christianity, would do well to consider this avalanche of evidence to the contrary.
Continue reading "What Kind of Culture Should We Want?" »
Continue reading "Monk and God" »
Here's a preview of an article coming soon on another site. I've been working with the editor for a week to get this published, and an updated version will run eventually, but in the meantime here's a version that is timely because the season-ending of Prison Break will run on Fox tonight at 8 EST.Continue reading "A Defense of Pop Fiction" »
Sometimes meaningful cultural moments crop up in the most unexpected places.
One place you'll find them is on the Discovery Channel show Man vs. Wild (Friday nights at 9 EST). In each episode, Bear Grylls, a former British military commando and an expert on survival techniques, shows how to get through the worst wilderness conditions and find one's way back to civilization.
Continue reading "The Subtle Cross" »
As former Major League Baseball pitcher Roger Clemens testifies before a congressional committee investigating allegations of the use of performance enhancing drugs in the sport, the observations in my Tech Central Station article during the last big government investigation into the matter apply as strongly as ever:
Continue reading "Clemens and the Constitution" »
For those who have yet to understand that multiculturalism is nothing of the sort and is merely cover for the continual denigration of Western Christian civilization in the ongoing internal effort toward its eventual overthrow, the latest news from Europe ought to do a good deal of convincing.
Continue reading "Multiculturalism Gone Mad: "Christian Ramadan"" »
Pope Benedict has ordered the bishops of the Catholic Church to increase the number of trained exorcists in order to combat the rise of satanism and other occult activities.Continue reading "Pope Orders More Exorcists" »
In all the controversy over the Dana Jacobson issue, I suspect that it is all too easy to lose sight of what actually is important about it. What happens to Jacobson as a result of what she has done is important to the general public, but not because Jacobson is any serious danger to society. Of course not.
It is important because the response to her by her bosses and the elite in general represents what kind of society and culture we live in and whether we can cause positive changes in both.
It is not obvious that we can do so without much struggle.
Continue reading "The Cultural Hegemony of Identity Politics" »
Continue reading "EU Presses Computer Privacy, Thwarts Google" »
A year ago, upon the release of the Fox Faith theatrical film Facing the Giants, I reported on an analysis by Christian screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi criticizing the film. It took me a long 
time to get around to seeing Facing the Giants, in large part because of the many negative reviews, but I saw it a few weeks ago and corrected the record in an addendum to the original post on this site from November 1, 2006. I think it worth placing the full text here on the main page, to give readers my own comments on the film. The original piece and my update follow:
Screenwriter and script analyst Barbara Nicolosi is extremely disappointed by the Christian-produced film Facing the Giants. I have not yet gotten around to seeing the film, but I suspect that Ms. Nicolosi is quite right. She points out that Facing the Giants is the cinematic equivalent of Contemporary Christian Music, bland nonsense meant to make Christians feel good and thereby bring in a steady stream of money from a highly defined market segment, what is known in the entertainment business as a cash cow.
Continue reading "A Bad Sign for Christian Cinema—UPDATE" »
Lee Harris, a very intelligent man who writes thoughtful books and contributes insightful articles regularly to TCS Daily, recently wrote a very interesting and well-informed article about Christmas for that online publication. Harris is clearly sympathetic to the celebration of Christmas while being fully cognizant of the pagan foundations of both the date chosen and the various traditions associated with the day.
In contrast to many complainers on both sides of the arguments over whether public celebrations of this great holy day should be encouraged or even allowed, Harris points out that these varied foundations are not faults but strengths. He correctly characterizes Christmas as "a great multicultural festival" good not only for Christians but indeed for everyone.
His conclusion is particularly interesting and sensible: not only should Christians embrace the celebration of Christmas wholeheartedly, so should non-Christians as well.
Continue reading "Christmas Wisdom from Lee Harris" »
Somehow I missed this year's celebration of the Great American God-Out. A group of undoubtedly amiable fanatical nitwits decided to start an annual celebration of godlessness, the first of which occurred this past November 15 and raised absolutely no fanfare at all:
Continue reading ""The Great American God-Out"" »
National Review Online has just published an interesting article praising FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. The thrust of the piece is that Martin, a Republican, has been better than a Democrat would have been. That's true, just as President Bush's compassionate conservatism is better than the Democrats' coercive progressivism, but just as with the President's agenda, "better than the Democrats" definitely does not mean "good".
The article's authors, Cesar V. Conda and Lawrence J. Spivak, make a good case for the proposition that Martin does indeed favor markets in general, at least in the abstract, and they make the following argument:
Continue reading "The Idea Behind the FCC's Intrusive,Coercive Regulatory Agenda" »
As noted earlier on this site, former Queen guitarist Brian May's earning of a doctorate in atrophysics is an impressive achievement.
The latest news regarding May is not nearly so good, although May himself is not at fault for it. The story reflects an unseemly lack of standards and a vulgar and grasping attachment to our modern-day celebrity cult. The news is that Liverpool John Moores University has named May its next chancellor.
Continue reading "Brian May Named University Chancellor" »
Film directors Brian De Palma and Paul Haggis have attacked the media for not reporting enough on the negative aspects of the Iraq War, and said that they felt compelled to make up for that poor reporting by making their recent films Redacted (De Palma), which opens tomorrow, and In the Valley of Elah (Haggis), which opened a few weeks ago and crashed at the box office.
There has been no word yet on whether reporters will return the favor by making quality movies to compensate for the shoddy filmmaking behind the current crop of films opposing the Iraq War.
Novelist-journalist Norman Mailer has died at age 84, according to his literary executor. Malier, known for his interesting but often overly dense prose, puzzling choices of story material, combative journalism, "existential" philosophisizing, and aggressive self-assertiveness in his personal life, burst on the scene at the age of 25 in 1948 with a well-written, critically acclaimed, and popular debut novel, The Naked and the Dead.
Intelligent, wily, handsome, charismatic, and highly personable when he wanted to be, Mailer was the embodiment of the "hipster" culture that arose after World War II, in which authors such as he, Gore Vidal, Jack Kerouac, and Stanley Baldwin rebelled against the overly bureaucratized and stifling, government-dominated society that had arisen during the first half of the twentieth century and found its greatest expression during World War II, when nearly everything in American society was under control of the national government.
Continue reading "Norman Mailer and the Hipster Cataclysm" »
Everything's Gone Green, as the New Order song has it. As you may know, NBC TV has gone green this week, stacking its lineup with allegedly eco-friendly messages, plotlines, and other empty gestures.
This is just part of a general cultural trend toward accepting the premise of the global warming alarmists and their preferred policy of vastly increasing government control over our lives and forcibly returning wealthy modern societies to the supposedly ideal conditions of the 1830s—a society on which they poured undisguised contempt untiil the eco-bug hit.
Continue reading "NBC Goes Green" »
Following in the grand tradition of animal-rights activist Bob Barker, comedian and The Price Is Right game-show host Drew Carey has joined the public policy fray. Carey, however, has taken up the libertarian banner, producing and hosting a series of videos for the Reason Foundation.
Carey's first video for The Drew Carey Project—Gridlock, about traffic problems—didn't get much attention. But his second, Drew Carey Defends Medical Marijuana, is making up for it
Carey is quoted on the teaser page for the video as saying,
I think it’s clear by now that the federal government needs to reclassify marijuana. People who need it should be able to get it – safely and easily,” says The Price Is Right and Power of 10 host Drew Carey in a new Reason.tv video examining medical marijuana and the war on drugs.
Continue reading "Legalize Dope, "Price Is Right" Host Says" »
The one big advantage environmental activists have is the presumed purity of their motives. They claim they only want to protect the earth from a few particularly greedy people, and they say their efforts benefit everybody.
That’s their story, anyway, and they’re sticking to it. The reality is a far different matter, as the acclaimed documentary filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Patricia McElhinney make clear in their film Mine Your Own Business, now available on DVD.
The film is billed as presenting “The Dark Side of Environmentalism,” and it succeeds brilliantly. Seldom have Western environmental activists been shown in all their abundant arrogance, smugness, and paternalism.
Continue reading "New Film Exposes the "Dark Side of Environmentalism"" »
Are democracy and free markets inherently hostile to each other? That's the question Brian Anderson takes up in his new book, Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents, my review of which appears in the Nov. 6 issue of National Review, currently on sale at newsstands and online.
In my view, the problem is with democracy, not markets. Finding any faults with democracy is undoubtedly a bizarre thing in our time, but it is clear to me that the contradictions that seem to be inherent in democratic capitalism are in fact inherent in democracy itself, and that market capitalism is the victim of democracy, not an abuser. Hence my thought, taking after that of the American Founders, is that where democracy interferes with freedom, it is democracy that ought to give way.
I recognize that this proposition may sound rather radical, and I shall defend it further in future, but in the meantime, here's my review of Brian Anderson's book, which will give you a sense of the outlines of the argument:
Continue reading "The Problem of Democracy" »
A fascinating article in today's Christian Science Monitor shows that the media got everything wrong in the Jena 6 story, which was portrayed as an example of racism in the South and of injustice toward blacks. Craig Franklin, a local journalist from Jena, demolishes what he calls "Media Myths About the Jena 6" in the story.
It is a must read, and the facts it adduces constitute a powerful indictment of the mainstream media and the race baiters who continually try to take advantage of such situations.
Some excerpts:
Continue reading "The Truth About Jena" »
This past weekend's movie box office tallies provided more evidence that U.S. audiences are tired of gloom and doom from the popular culture. Producer-writer-director-actor Tyler Perry's comedy Why Did I Get Married? led with $21.5 million in sales, displacing another comedy, The Game Plan, which came in a distant second by bringing in $11.5 million.
The George Clooney left-wing legal drama Michael Clayton and the Mark Wahlberg-Joaquin Phoenix crime drama We Own the Night tied for third with $11 million apiece in the preliminary reports.
The Farelly brothers film The Heartbreak Kid, starring Ben Stiller in a comedy depending on personal discomfort for its effects, fell to fifth in its second week, taking in $7.3 million, a very poor number in light of Stiller's proven box-office appeal—his last movie, the charming and amusing Night at the Museum, brought in well over $100 million in its first ten days.
Continue reading "Perry Buries Competition at Weekend Movie Box Office" »
Amazon.com is holding a contest to find the best unpublished debut novel. The winner will be published by Penguin Books, and Publishers Weekly will assist in judging entries. As Publishers Weekly reports, it's a complicated and expensive-sounding process:
Continue reading "Amazon.com Holds Novel-Writing Contest" »
Can you believe that?
Today's Chicago Sun-Times breathlessly reports that "the director's claim to sole authorship of his movies comes in for heavy scrutiny" in the exhibit, which allegedly "reveals Hitchcock as a master collaborator who relied, often heavily, on crack creative teams to help bring his suspenseful visions to life."
This is one of the biggest duhs I've ever heard.
Continue reading "Appalling Scandal of Alfred Hitchcock's Collaboration" »