On WorldNetDaily, pastor Dave Welch puts our secular holiday in a spiritual context. Also related is this American Culture article from last year. And drive carefully so you don’t have to be memorialized before your time. —Mike Gray
Monthly Archives: May 2010
Dennis Hopper, RIP: Update
America lost one of Hollywood’s few proud conservatives today. Dennis Hopper died of complications from prostate cancer this morning at his home in Venice, California. Hopper, 74, made his mark on the American cinema by directing and acting in the 1969 film Easy Rider, a classic, and his acting career spanned well over fifty years. Although he had his personal challenges in life, ones he admitted were of his own making, what stood out to me was a 60 Minutes interview he did a few years ago, at the height of the Iraq war. Even though President Bush was becoming increasingly unpopular, Hopper defended him, said he admired him, and clearly didn’t care what anybody else thought. This kind of character in Hollywood will be missed. Update: On 30 September 1970, Dennis Hopper appeared on the Johnny Cash Show and recited Rudyard Kipling’s great poem “If.” HT: John J. Miller
TCM Thrillers (May 31 – June 6)
This week: * Monday—Spend the day with Clint Eastwood. * Tuesday—Harry gets dirty and cleans up … crime, that is. * Wednesday—Go figure: Bogie travels across the Pacific without ever getting there. * Thursday—Beautiful people get involved in the Cuban revolution. * Friday—Kirk Douglas gets his first kiss—from a sealion. * Saturday—A robot battles a mummy … happens every day. * Sunday—You’ll never look at a carousel the same way again. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Monday—May 31st 5:00 PM—Where Eagles Dare (1969) An Allied team sets out to free an American officer held by the Nazis, but there’s a traitor in their midst. 8:00 PM—Kelly’s Heroes (1970) “Well, what do you think, Oddball?” “It’s a wasted trip, baby. Nobody said nothing about locking horns with no Tigers.” “Hey look, you just keep them Tigers busy and we’ll take care of the rest.” “The only way I got to keep them Tigers busy is to let them shoot HOLES in me!” ———- Tuesday—June 1st 12:15 AM—Dirty Harry (1971) “I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I’ve kinda lost track myself. But, being as this is a .44 Magnum,
Inconvenient Facts About Global Warming
As promised yesterday, here is my report from the fourth International Conference on Climate Change, reprinted with permission from Pajamas Media, where an earlier version of it appeared. This version includes exclusive new material not available previously. In the wake of the Climategate scandal, panelists and audience members at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC4) indicated growing confidence that the tide is turning in favor of those who believe that manmade global warming is not a crisis. More than 700 people — including a good many scientists, along with economists, policy analysts, and legislators — gathered together for three days in a Chicago hotel to discuss the once-settled but increasingly controversial proposition of an anthroprogenic global warming (AGW) crisis. Any triumphalism was averted by a general agreement to explore real-world facts and test the assertions of alarmists. The presenters and audience members continually asked whether the data says what the modelers say it does. The conference opened with a Sunday evening dinner at which Canadian statistical analyst Stephen McIntyre presented a meticulous history of the hugely influential “hockey stick” graph — which found an alarming rise of global temperatures since 1979 and led to the conclusion by the UN’s
Gary Coleman, 1968 – 2010 R.I.P
Actor Gary Coleman has died at age 42.
Climate Realism: Not to Be Denied Any Longer
Last week’s meeting of 700+ scientists, policymakers, and concerned citizens in Chicago to discuss the science and economics of global warming at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change was a huge success as measured by the intent of its sponsors: to establish once and for all that the climate realist position is increasingly the accepted conclusion among thinking people in the three categories noted above. That position is this: manmade global warming is not a crisis. Yes, all parties at the conference pretty much agreed that there was a good deal of warming in the 1980s and 1990s, and that the trend stopped and reversed in the current decade. Global temperatures have been falling in recent years, even though the weather stations and other data chosen to represent the official temperature records are in fact skewed to show higher and more-rising temperatures than are actually occurring. The predictions of a steady, horrifying increase in temperatures have proven false, which should have been a great embarrassment to the climate alarmists who made the claims and set them as the basis for their extravagant power grabs such as emissions limits and cap and trade. Yet the embarrassment has not been forthcoming
‘Airbender’, ‘Persia’ Casting Attacked
Ethnic activists are protesting The Last Airbender and Prince of Persia. Amusingly predictable story here.
“Lost”… and Found
It began with an eye opening. It ended with an eye closing. In “The End,” love conquered all. It’s a cliche, of course, but a time-honored one and it worked to brilliant effect in the series finale of “Lost,” which aired Sunday night on ABC. (This isn’t a recap, but spoilers will follow…) Millions of us followed these characters, led by Jack Shepherd (Matthew Fox), for six seasons as they struggled first to leave, and then to return, to the mysterious island where Oceanic 815 crashed in 2004. “Lost” didn’t always make sense. You had to be patient. You had to put up with a lot of nonsense. At times you wondered, with good reason, whether the writers were just making it up as they went along. But despite its flaws, “Lost” will undoubtedly go down as one of the finest, most beguiling science fiction programs in TV history. Was every questioned answered? Are you kidding? The Dharma Initiative was at bottom nothing more than a device to keep a couple of lead characters separated by space and time while bringing another pair together. The island at the center of the show was itself one big MacGuffin. Indeed, in the
Steve Kilbey’s Intimate Musical Diary
Let me tell you a little bit about Steve Kilbey… A long, long time ago–in the late 1980s, to be exact–an Australian rock band called The Church were on their way to significant mainstream success, or so it seemed. They had made impressive inroads into the Billboard Hot 100 chart with a darn-near perfect psychedelic pop ditty called “Under the Milky Way.” Its equally strong parent album Starfish went gold–no mean feat in that era of Poison and Def Leppard. Just imagine it: there our antipodean heroes were, trudging out of the musical underworld like Orpheus, singing those beautiful songs, playing those beautiful Rickenbacker guitars, closing in on the taillights of the Cure, damnit. But something happened. Perhaps they turned to look back at Eurydice too soon, taking their eyes off the righteous path just long enough for grunge rock to sail on by and steal all the glory. In the Church’s defense, no one could have predicted the impending Death of All Melody that would overtake the world for the better part of a decade. In 1988, they were an up-and-coming band with nothing but bright possibilities stretching before them. And during that summer, my friend Joe Carpenter and I became thoroughly besotted with the quartet, though
Roger Scruton Chronicles Modern Art’s War on Beauty
Inform a museum’s curator that she should request a refund from her plumber who foolishly set a urinal among the works of Rembrandt, Degas, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins, and Madam Curator will likely label you a judgmental, knuckle-dragging, Rush Limbaugh-listening, right-wing Neanderthal. “That’s not a urinal,” Madam Curator retorts. “That’s art! How dare you bitterly cling to an outdated objective standard of beauty! Clearly you know nothing about art’s relationship with the modern world.” “But it’s a toilet!” You argue, “Nothing but an ugly bit of porcelain designed to capture my pee.” “Ugliness and beauty,” Madam Curator haughtily notes, “are merely in the beholder’s eye. They are entirely subjective.” Roger Scruton flushes that postmodern nonsense in Why Beauty Matters, which aired on 28 Nov 2009 on BBC2. Scruton’s goal is to persuade us: that beauty matters. That it is not just a subjective thing, but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert. wants to show a path out of that desert. It is a path that leads to home. When Scruton’s documentary aired it received the typical reaction from critics. In an article, published in The
British Filmmakers Mock Islamic Radicals
There are some brave souls in the film industry. They just aren’t getting huge budgets and lucrative distribution deals from Hollywood’s current crop of dhimmi-embracing power brokers. In fact, they aren’t in Hollywood at all. They’re in Britain. Some British filmmakers have decided that satire and laughter are a good way to go after the Islamic supremacists in their midst. The reborn Libertas (LFM) web journal describes two such projects, Four Lions and The Infidel. In addition to being good medicine, laughter can be a form of resistance. Ben Lewis made this point in his 2006 documentary Hammer and Tickle. Even if folks tell jokes just to let off steam, in a Communist country that had very serious consequences. Lewis notes, in this 2006 Prospect article, Perhaps the most emblematic story of the joke-as-resistance is a report of the prosecution of a joke-teller in Czechoslovakia in 1967, which I found in the archives of Radio Free Europe, the anti-communist cold war broadcaster. An arriving refugee brought the news that a worker in a liquor factory had been arrested for telling the following joke: Why is the price of lard not going up in Hungary? So that the workers can have
The Inconsequentiality of Contemporary Atheism
Yes, I know that sounds kind of counterintuitive, given the bestseller lists the “New Atheist” books get on and the inordinate amount of publicity they engender, but the issue isn’t PR. No, it’s the quality of their thoughts and arguments. I can’t bring myself to read the rantings of atheist absolutists, but others much more versed in the nuance of philosophical discourse have done so and found these atheists wanting. One of these, David Hart, wrote a book called “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies.” I have not read the book, but I did read a piece he wrote at First Things that starts out thus: I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now
Recent Comments