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 truly fascinating measure of the hegemony and absurdity of political correctness is the liberal elites' furious reaction to ABC news personalities having asked the two ultraliberal remaining candidates for the Democrats' presidential nomination a few mildly challenging questions.
Continue reading "Charlton Heston's Greatness" »
Continue reading "What Kind of Culture Should We Want?" »
The winningest coach in college basketball history, Bobby Knight, retired unexpectedly yesterday with several games remaining in the season.
Knight, known both for his coaching brilliance and angry, public and private tirades, has long been a big target of criticism from sportswriters.
A large part of that criticism is well-earned, for Knight has always been thoroughly uncompromising in his insistence that his teams play the game the way it should be played and that others involved in the game reach similar standards, and he often manifested it in childish behavior, verbal aggression, and physical violence.
Continue reading "Bobby Knight Retires - Unlamented by Weenies" »
ESPN2 morning co-anchor Dana Jacobson is back at work after a week's suspension for her drunken, foul-mouthed tirade at a public dinner.
At the beginning of the Jan. 28 program, the first since her suspension, Jacobson offered a rather cryptic apology:
I want to once again say how truly sorry I am for my poor choices and bad judgment that night. I've taken responsibility for what I did say and do that night.
What's cryptic about it, of course, is the phrase "what I did say and do". Certainly no one should expect her to apologize for anything she did not do, so the use of the word 'did' is redundant and indeed confusing.
Evidently her intent was to imply that she did not say the most offensive thing attributed to her: "F— Jesus!"
Yet neither Jacobson nor her ESPN bosses has denied that she said it. Hence the use of the word 'did' is obviously intentional dissembling.
Continue reading "Jacobson's Back, Protesters Unsatisfied" »
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" »
Providing further proof that America's elites are delighted when people of low mental ability use Christians and Christianity as punching bags, ESPN has suspended sports-show anchor Dana Jacobson for one week after she indulged in a drunken, foul-mouthed public tirade that included an astonishingly vulgar curse directed at Jesus Christ.
The one-week suspension is very revealing of the mentality of the management team at the Disney-owned sports network, given that the same behavior would have gotten anyone not in the media fired, and it would have gotten a media person fired had it been delivered against an accredited victim group—cf. the termination of radio host Don Imus and basketball commentator Tim Hardaway last year.
Continue reading "Christ-Hater Skates,Thanks to Elite Prejudice Against Christians" »
Sports are important, as they provide physical exercise and personal camaraderie, but to make a fetish of anything in life is always disastrous.
So it is with sports, as we see all too often in these days when Americans have so much time, money, and freedom (all of which are good things, of course, and are great blessings when used properly).
The Associated Press reports just such an incident this week:
Upset that his 7-year-old son wouldn't wear a Green Bay Packers jersey during the team's playoff victory Saturday, a man restrained the boy for an hour with tape and taped the jersey onto him.
Continue reading "Football Jerseys, Domestic Disputes, and the Nanny State" »
TAC Mystery Fiction Correspondent Mary Reed reviews a classic novel by English suspense writer "Sapper," now available for free online through Project Gutenberg Australia.
H. C. McNeile, aka "Sapper," is one of the most popular and most reviled of mystery-suspense writers.
Writing largely between the two World Wars, the former British military man brought an American-style hardboiled approach to British fiction with his popular character Bulldog Drummond, a wealthy, intrepid, honorable former military officer. The Drummond tales combined suspense, espionage, and detection, rather after the fashion of Leslie Charteris's Saint stories. The character also appeared in the movies and on television and radio.
Sapper also wrote straight detective novels, one of which is Ronald Standish, the item currently under review.
Sapper's books sold very well indeed, and readers enjoyed them immensely, but literary critics of later decades, especially since the 1960s, have criticized his books as representing an obsolete, politically damaging, and personally vile point of view—for the narratives frankly demonstrate that different types of people behave differently. This is a reality that contemporary thought (if it can be honored with that designation) would like to deny and ignore, consigning it to the ash heap through force of career destruction of those who dare to speak it.
Hence, reading books such as those by Sapper is a dangerous act and should be undertaken only by the bold. I recommend that you do so immediately.—STK
Continue reading "A Dangerous Mystery Writer" »
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" »
A classic type of literary and folk-tale character is the trickster, an individual who routinely and comically transgresses the boundaries of acceptable social behavior. From Br'er Rabbit to P. G. Wodehouse's Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge and Uncle Fred to Bugs Bunny to The Joker of the "Batman" comics to Susan Vance in Bringing Up Baby to the con artists in Hustle, the trickster is a pre-moral or non-moral character whose schemes take ordinary people out of their comfortable existence and force them to react to unfamiliar, morally disorienting situations.
In so doing, this type of character both identifies the regnant social boundaries for us and causes us to think about whether the rules make sense.
This is an important process in a liberal society, as social boundaries should be based on common sense and the consequences that personal choices impose on society and individuals. As conditions change—due in great part to technological advances—we must alter our social mores and rules in order to reflect the different world in which we live.
Continue reading "The Value of the Trickster" »
I haven't got around to seeing Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project yet, but I certainly will. The documentary on the veteran stand-up comedian, who is now 81 years old, premiered last Sunday night on the HBO cable network and was shown at the New York Film Festival a couple of months ago.
According to reports, the movie was directed with evident affection by comedy filmmaker John Landis. (To see the Variety review click here.)
Rickles has that effect on people, and he has always been highly respected by other comedians.
Rickles is well-known for his tart-tongued improvisations in which he picks on members of the audience and celebrity guests and upbraids them for presumed character flaws and stereotyped ethnic characteristics.
Continue reading "The Splendid Mr. Rickles" »
Two very entertaining detective-film series are on display tomorrow on Turner Classic Movies. The day starts with the best Sherlock Holmes of the cinema (in my view), Basil Rathbone, starring in four Universal Sherlock Holmes films broadcast on TCM tomorrow morning from 6:00 EST until 11:00.
Co-starring Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, most of the Universal Sherlock Holmes films were set during then-contemporary times—during and just after World War II—and often included aspects of the war in their plots, as in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon,which TCM will show at 6 a.m. tomorrow. The films also had about the same amount of melodramatic action as the original Conan Doyle stories typically provided.
The puzzles aren't exactly scintillating and perfectly fair-play, but the movies go along at a nice, snappy pace, and the actors give the central characters and their adversaries strong and even charismatic performances.
Continue reading "Two Entertaining Detective Film Series" »
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" »
One of the most important presumably unintended consequences of the Sexual Revolution of the second half of the twentieth century has been the increasing dominance of male desires and a corresponding diminution of the value of women's ways of viewing sex. The opening of all doors ensures that men, who by nature tend to pursue a variety of sexual partners, will drive the agenda, and women, who are by nature better fitted for long-term partnerships, will simply have to accommodate them.
Perpetuation of the species ensures that men who spread their genetic characteristics widely will greatly affect the gene pool, and women who are able to take care of their children well—which at least in earlier times was much easier if a man was around to help—will be similarly successful. Hence there is an innate tension in relations between the sexes: there are centrifugal forces at work, but at its best human sexuality ties couples and families together.
The development of moral codes pertaining to such matters helped the species thrive. What both men and women give up in freedom they obtain in greater success in contributing children for the future.
Continue reading "The Oppressive Realities of the Sexual Revolution" »
It's rather startling how much of the culture is exploring moral issues in increasingly traditional terms. As is perhaps most evident in ABC's Dirty Sexy Money, an ever-more common approach among producers of TV fiction series is to take flamboyant story material and apply it to intensely moral ends. An important aspect of this trend, also highly evident in DSM, is the notion that the rich are a good deal more morally suspect than the middle classes.
Hence it should hardly surprise us that not one but two new shows on the CW this year are based on the premise that life among the wealthy in Manhattan is so bad that even self-imposed exile is better.
Interestingly, the point of both shows is that the moral weakness and decadence of the New York wealthy is what makes life there really rather miserable.
Continue reading "New TV Dramas Are Taking Moral Issues Seriously" »
ABC's new series Big Shots (Thursdays at 10 pm EDT), which premiered last night, is clearly intended to be a male version of Desperate Housewives. Think of it as Desperate CEOs.
The central characters of the program are the heads of four corporations, and the hook is that although their businesses are doing well, their personal lives are a mess.
One is enormously henpecked, another is divorced and being set up for a gross public humilation and has a young-adult daughter who openly hates him (or seems to), another is cheating on his wife, and the other's wife has been cheating on him with his boss.
Get the irony? At work they're Masters of the Universe, but at home they're ineffectual schlubs.
Yes, the show is that plausible and meaningful.
As noted earlier, Big Shots is part of the current TV season's trend toward the feminization of adult males. As one of the Big Shots says in the pilot episode, "Men—we're the new women."
Continue reading "ABC's "Big Shots" Misses Big" »
The current race controversy in Jena, Louisiana, is, as is the natural order of things, only being worsened by the invasion of evil nitwits from outside the town attempting to intensify the grievance culture that already oppresses American blacks today.
The facts of the story are fairly simple: the town of Jena has yet to find a way to create some sense of harmony among people of different skin tones in the local high school, and—after a series of unpleasant incidents including the hanging of nooses on a tree (evoking fears of lynchings), the burning down of the school, and a physical assault on a young black man trying to enter a mostly white party—six young men were charged with attempted murder for beating a classmate unconscious and then kicking him repeatedly as he lay helpless on the ground.
Continue reading "The Very Real Dangers of Race-Baiting" »
The tendency of the nation's schools to suppress boys' natural ways of seeing and doing things and force them to adopt feminine attitudes and behaviors, brilliantly documented by Christina Hoff-Sommers in her 2001 book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, is becoming increasingly evident in the culture.
Three recent articles document some of the consequences as young men mistreated by our educational system advance into society and try to become men when they simply don't know how and have been taught to disrespect masculinity and suppress it in themselves.
AP, for example, notes that network TV's new primetime schedule "puts the softer side of men on display":
In a number of broadcast ensembles premiering this fall, men are opening up about issues beyond sports, money, power and sexual conquests. They’re expressing their feelings—often to other men—on fatherhood, intimacy and love.
According to Reason magazine senior editor Radley Balko in testimony before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Crime on July 2 of this year,
800 times per week in this country, a SWAT team breaks open an American's door, and invades his home. Few turn up any weapons at all, much less high-power weapons. Less than half end with felony charges for the suspects. And only a small percentage end up doing significant time in prison.
Please bear that in mind as you read the following guest commentary by Steve Stanek, a research fellow of the Heartland Institute.
The points Steve has to make are of immense importance, and I endorse his view here.
Continue reading "Twilight of Liberty" »
The journalist and novelist Mark Goldblatt has frequently gone out on a limb to criticize insalubrious aspects of today's black American culture, an activity that tends to bring anger, fear, scorn, and general cultural exile. His posture is truly a courageous one, and it is highly salutary for black Americans, who, like all of us, cannot reach their great potential unless they are held to the same high expectations as other Americans.
Hence Goldblatt's excellent National Review Online article today on Michael Vick and on Whoopi Goldberg's absurd defense of him on the TV program The View is very important indeed. Goldblatt writes,
Continue reading "Defending the Indefensible, Based on Skin Color" »
It's a truism that the lyrics, manners, styles, and rhythms of rock musicians' offerings tend to express the joys of a rather devil-may-care, hedonistic lifestyle. Now a scientific study has confirmed what our mothers told us: you won't last long that way.
Reuters reports that rock stars do indeed die younger than the rest of us, on average:
A study of more than 1,000 mainly British and North American artists, spanning the era from Elvis Presley to rapper Eminem, found they were two to three times more likely to suffer a premature death than the general population.
Between 1956 and 2005 there were 100 deaths among the 1,064 musicians examined by researchers at the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University.
Continue reading "Rock Stars Get Their Wish to "Die Before I Get Old": Study" »
The central moral issue of the past century was whether a traditional (in fact, millennias old) assumption behind moral thinking should prevail, or should be replaced by a newer, seemingly more compassionate thought. It is a matter over which American society is still struggling.
The classical Western notion, of course, was that an individual is responsible for his or her own actions, even if outside circumstances contributed to the person's decision to break a rule. That meant, for example, that even poverty did not excuse theft.
Of course, even if personal responsibility was assumed, mercy and common sense were essential to the dispensing of true justice. Western morality and our sense of justice always recognized that sometimes, albeit rarely, an individual's circumstances can be so compelling as to excuse rule-breaking. And of course anything not done by choice, such as killing a person in self-defense, was automatically excused.
This mindset was challenged in the past century by the philosophy of determinism.
Continue reading "Free Will, Determinism, and Pop Culture" »
Today on National Review Online, American Enterprise Institute education policy studies director Frederick Hess astutely observes the significance of a recent incident at a Maryland university in which a checkout person refused to ring up a young woman's purchase because she was wearing a t-shirt declaring herself as pro-Israel.
Ironically, the incident resulted in a series of conciliatory gestures from the woman who was refused service, and the store made it a policy that employees could discreetly refuse to serve someone whom they found politically unacceptable, provided that they quietly found someone else to serve the person.
As Hess points out, this incident illustrates the contemptible contemporary process of turning tolerance on its head to ensure that certain favored groups get special treatment because they continuously complain about how downtrodden they are:
Continue reading "The Perversion of Tolerance" »
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) has declared that the U.S. television networks are not "gay" enough but that Disney-owned ABC is getting close.
The organization, which has been highly successful at bullying corporations into supporting a radical pro-homosexual agenda, issued its first report on the matter after analyzing "the number of 'impressions,' or occurrences, of gay characters, discussions or themes counted during 4,693 hours of programming examined from June 2006 through May 2007," according to Reuters:
Continue reading "ABC Is "Gayest" TV Network—Study" »
Two stories in the news vividly encapsulate the astonishing gulf between left and right today. First, actor Sean Penn in Venezuela, where he applauded Marxist, America-hating President Hugo Chavez. AP reports:
That's bravery, all right. Penn languishes in prison to this very day, beaten brutally hour after hour, for those statements, as he would in Cuba or Venezuela.Chavez met privately with the 46-year-old actor for two hours Thursday, praising him as being "brave" for urging Americans to impeach President Bush.
Continue reading "Penn and Willis, a Study in Contrasts" »
The Adam Sandler comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry was the top U.S. box office attraction this past weekend, as expected. The film brought in $34 million, edging out the previous week's top draw, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by $2 million.
It will be interesting to see whether Chuck and Larry can sustain its appeal. Adam Sandler has strong box office appeal when appearing in silly comedies, and this film had the additional draw of the curiosity factor, as its subject matter, homosexual marriage, is in the news and seems to promise rich ground for humor.
Continue reading "An Immorality Play" »
Summer has become the main season for cable TV networks to premiere new series and specials, as the broadcast networks give themselves over to reruns and game shows on the assumption that nobody wants to watch television on warm summer nights.
That's probably a good bet—and certainly a good thing if true—and it has a further benefit in that the cable networks tend to be a little more creative than the broadcast majors in the kinds of series they offer. Chasing a smaller audience allows them to be more adventurous in what they'll try—and sometimes they succeed. Two good examples are AMC-TV's Mad Men and TNT's Saving Grace, both of which premiered in the past few days.
Continue reading "TV Tackles the Sensate Culture" »
At least two companies have pulled their ads from the upcoming July 25 premiere of the Black Entertainment Television (BET) program Hot Ghetto Mess which is based on the popular website of the same name.
Expressing the same attitude as the website, the program will show viewer-submitted videos of stupid things people do, with an emphasis on the black community. It will also feature comedy, pictures, music, and man-on-the-street interviews to "shine a spotlight on prevalent images in pop culture and examine what role they play in American lifestyle," as the BET web page for the program puts it. It will feature, according to the BET site, "shaking booties, thug life, baby-mama drama and pimped-out high schoolers."
In short, in showing the stupidity and ignorance of many Americans, Hot Ghetto Mess will do precisely what a good many shows directed at a broad audience do, but will be directed toward black Americans.
Continue reading ""Hot Ghetto Mess" TV Program Under Fire" »
Fleeing headlong to the last refuge of a particular type of scoundrel, actor Isaiah Washington, fired from the high-rated ABC-TV program Gray's Anatomy for referring to a fellow actor as a "faggot," claims that he was dumped because he's black, not because he said something—twice—almost guaranteed to get him in trouble in today's extremely sensitive, pro-homosexuality Hollywood environment.
In an interview with Newsweek magazine, Washington said that his refusal to act submissively was what really got him fired:
Continue reading "Fired Actor Plays Race Card" »
Actor Isaiah Washington, fired from ABC TV program Gray's Anatomy, one of the top-rated shows on television, for calling a fellow actor a "faggot," may soon have a new job.
Washington is in reportedly "sorting through" numerous offers of television and movie projects, and is leaning toward an undisclosed opportunity at NBC.
Meanwhile, Washington has argued that the offended actor, T. R. Knight, used the incident to exploit a pro-homosexual spirit in Hollywood in order to bolster his own position on the show.
Continue reading "Actor Fired After Homosexual Furor Is Putting Career Back in Order" »
Nancy Drew, the new theatrical film based on the classic girls' book series (the first theatrical film adaptation since the 1930s), has opened to lukewarm reviews.
Of course it's just a silly child-oriented adventure-comedy on the surface, and glittering things are all that nearly all critics see today. But underlying the frivolity is some very sound thinking and solid values. It would be a pity for people young and old to miss them because of a snobbish preference for sophisticated surfaces empty of real goodness.
Continue reading "Maiden of Mysteries" »