Philadelphia Mayor: If You Try to Talk About Race Relations, We’ll Shut You Up!

March 22, 2013
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Philadelphia Mayor: If You Try to Talk About Race Relations, We’ll Shut You Up!

I wrote this week about an article in Philadelphia Magazine by a Robert Huber, who shared with the audience his white perspective on race relations in Philadelphia. As I pointed out, I don’t think Philly is unique, because left-liberal attitudes and policies have poisoned attitudes toward race in America for decades.  But it looks like you better not utter such politically incorrect thoughts in Philadelphia out loud, lest the mayor sic the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission on you. It looks like Mark Steyn’s experience in Canada crossing the…

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Shocking Michelle Shocked?

March 21, 2013
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Shocking Michelle Shocked?

On March 17th, singer-songwriter Michelle Shocked took the stage in San Francisco for a counter-cultural performance designed to challenge her audience’s assumptions.  San Francisco crowds love that sort of thing, but last Sunday they got more than they bargained for.  It turns out that while Ms. Shocked is still reliably left-wing on economics (her 2012 tour was titled ‘Roccupy!’, in sympathy with the fizzling ‘occupy’ movement), she has also become a born-again, fundamentalist Christian.   She now strongly supports Proposition 8 in California, which maintains…

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Bobbie Smith, RIP

March 20, 2013
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Bobbie Smith, RIP

Bobbie Smith, who had one of the smoothest voices in pop music, died last weekend at age 76.  He was lead singer for The Spinners, a Detroit-based group that was signed to Motown Records in the 1960s.  After failing to achieve success during the label’s heyday, they began to record with Philadelphia-based producer Thom Bell and had a series of hits between 1972 and 1976.  Even though they were from Detroit and never part of the Gamble and Huff stable of acts, The Spinners  nevertheless…

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“The Black Box” Has Good Reading Inside.

March 19, 2013
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“The Black Box” Has Good Reading Inside.

I wonder if the recent popularity surge of Scandinavian detective novels influenced Michael Connelly to add a Scandinavian element to his latest Harry Bosch novel, The Black Box. It doesn’t really matter. The Bosch series continues very strong, and I think even Scandinavians will like it for its own sake. When Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch, Connelly’s most famous detective, first appeared in a novel, he was dealing with the chaos of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. This story takes us back to that surreal…

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Apocalypse Imminent: Bill Maher says, “I just want to say liberals — you could actually lose me.”

March 19, 2013
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Apocalypse Imminent: Bill Maher says, “I just want to say liberals — you could actually lose me.”

No, this is not from The Onion. It seems that even the most radically leftist liberals, like Mr. Maher, have a threshold when the government takes just too damn much of their money!

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Motown in the Morgue

March 19, 2013
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Motown in the Morgue

My first job after graduating from college was in Detroit. Prior to graduation, my high-school and college classmates and I would discuss our respective future plans — to a person we all declared we’d never take a job in Detroit. Once the mortar boards and graduation gowns were packed away, however, and wedding bells and wet nappies weighed-in on economic reality,At first, I lived in Dearborn, but eventually find an affordable house to rent in the Warrandale section on Detroit’s west side. In 1985, I…

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Will We Ever Be Able to Overcome Race?

March 18, 2013
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Will We Ever Be Able to Overcome Race?

It’s not every day that you see an honest piece in the media about race in America. This one is fascinating, because I think it describes well the feelings many white Americans experience in their interaction with their fellow black citizens. It can be flat out uncomfortable. You will probably find yourself relating to a number of examples he uses, which I’m sure are not confined to Philadelphia.

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The Tyranny of Contemporary Cliches

March 13, 2013
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The Tyranny of Contemporary Cliches

There’s a certain type of mystery plot out there that is really starting to get on my nerves. The plot isn’t confined to a single sub-genre. The book can be set in a charming English village where an elderly lady plays the role of amateur sleuth. It can just as easily be a tough-as-nails hardboiled story about a tough wise-cracking PI. But for some reason, many authors think it’s a clever idea to use the following twist ending: the killer is gay. What does the…

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The Truth about the So Called “Robber Barons”

March 13, 2013
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The Truth about the So Called “Robber Barons”

As we all know and have been indoctrinated from kindergarten on, and see in popular culture and mainstream media, capitalism is fundamentally unfair, and if it wasn’t for the benevolent hand of government protecting us, we’d all be screwed. One of the myths perpetuated by our cultural elite is that the American robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th Century showed us how much we needed the protective oversight of government to keep us safe from the red in tooth and claw of…

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Collins’s Latest Mystery Depicts Cultural Controversy, Is a First-Rate Read

March 11, 2013
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Collins’s Latest Mystery Depicts Cultural Controversy, Is a First-Rate Read

The comic book industry is in a tough place. Congress is getting set to examine the problem of comic books and how they defile the moral fabric of America’s youth. Angry parenting groups are burning comic books, and the industry is losing money. Enter Jack Starr, the Starr syndicate’s troubleshooter. Whenever trouble rears its ugly head, Jack has to go and take care of it, and Dr. Frederick’s passionate anti-comic-books crusade certainly qualifies. This forms the plot of Max Allan Collins’ excellent new mystery, 'Seduction…

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Netflix Spending Generously on New TV Series; Amazon and Xbox to Follow

March 11, 2013
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Netflix Spending Generously on New TV Series; Amazon and Xbox to Follow

As reported here a few weeks ago, Netflix is making a strong commitment to original programming, as an online challenge to cable giants such as HBO and Showtime. The money Netflix is spending is even more than many analysts expected, according to Variety: CAA TV literary agent Peter Micelli was forthcoming about how Netflix — and other digital media upstarts — do business with Hollywood during a panel discussion Friday at the UCLA Entertainment Symposium. He went so far as to specify how much was spent…

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CW’s ‘Cult’ Presents Interesting Idea, but Does It Work?

March 8, 2013
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CW’s ‘Cult’ Presents Interesting Idea, but Does It Work?

The story line of the new CW show 'Cult' is reasonably complex. The protagonist, a newspaper reporter named Jeff Sefton, is searching for his troubled brother, Nate, who disappears in the first episode, leaving behind a blood-soaked chair in his apartment. The sister of the main character on the show-within-the-show (SWAS), named Meadow, is also missing, in the narrative of the SWAS—and this is where things really get weird and possibly headache-inducing for the unwary: numerous phone calls and texts from the ostensibly fictional Meadow…

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Culture, Technology and the Unconstrained Vision: Part 4

March 7, 2013
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Culture, Technology and the Unconstrained Vision: Part 4

Technology and the Conflict of Visions Consider the populations of America’s two high-tech meccas:  Silicon Valley/San Francisco, and Seattle.  Both are filled with ambitious, hard-working and entrepreneurial people.  Normally you might expect folks like this to skew to the right politically, but of course that is not true in either city.  San Francisco and Seattle are two of America’s most progressive metropolitan areas, and this is not only because of their citizens’ libertarian-leaning positions on social issues.  Both places are also intensely and flamboyantly “green,”…

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History Channel’s ‘The Bible: Beginnings’ a Dramatic Presentation of Bible Stories

March 6, 2013
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History Channel’s ‘The Bible: Beginnings’ a Dramatic Presentation of Bible Stories

The new five-part miniseries 'The Bible,' the first episode of which premiered on The History Channel Sunday night and will repeat tonight at 9:00 EST, is clearly a budget-conscious production but well worth watching. . . .

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Culture, Technology, and the Unconstrained Vision: Part 3

March 6, 2013
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Culture, Technology, and the Unconstrained Vision: Part 3

Technological and Cultural Change This leads me to another point, made in another newsletter from a National Review writer.  In his February 27th “Goldberg File,” Jonah Goldberg referenced an exchange of letters between Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley, and highlighted the following statements from Chambers:  …history tells me that the rock-core of the Conservative Position, or any fragment of it, can be held realistically only if conservatism will accommodate itself to the needs and hopes of the masses — needs and hopes, which, like…

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