Perhaps they believe they are still in college screaming for free speech. Or maybe they are just stupid. But the recent rash of anti-war movies have done worse than Al Queda in Iraq:
The Kingdom, the movie that reviewer Scott Holleran says “suggests that Islamic terrorists are right: America caused and deserves mass murder” has tanked. After 9 weeks in release, the dull thud of this turd on the cineplex floor is heard loud and clear: with a budget of $70 million, the domestic take is only $47 million. Last weekend, the traditional “Let’s go see a movie for Thanksgiving!” weekend, saw it draw only $34 thousand. Viewers who did see it give it a “B-”, so its not that it lacks professionalism.
Read more…
Culture, Politics
The fourth IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report is out, and people are starting to address it. But its still too early for anyone to have really studied it, as the differing opinions seem to show. Lenarte Artesanato quotes the Washington Post’s reporting that climate change is “irreversible”, while Science Daily moderates the “irreversible” aspects of the report with quotes from the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and others:
The report states that “neither adaptation nor mitigation alone can avoid all climate change impacts. However, they can complement each other and together can significantly reduce the risks of climate change.”
The Secretary-General, who is in Valencia at the end of an international trip that has taken him to both Antarctica and the Amazon rainforest, said he had witnessed first-hand the perils posed by climate change.
“I can tell you with assurance that global, sweeping, concerted action is needed now. There is no time to waste.”
UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Director Achim Steiner agreed, saying “we now have the compelling blueprint for action and in many ways the price tag for failure – from increasing acidification of the oceans to the likely extinctions of economically important biodiversity.”
Michel Jarraud, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), called for more detailed and continuing observation of the impact of climate change to help individuals, businesses and civil society make informed decisions about how best to adapt to meet their own circumstances.
Battle lines will be drawn along the same lines as before, with some urging immediate and drastic steps, others dismissing the science as faulty and politicized, and most of us here in the middle wondering what we should really do.
Climate, Politics
Vince Flynn has written yet another fast-paced, terror thriller Protect and Defend. Like all such books, you suspend belief a bit to get from here to there, but after 9/11, its not so hard to imagine the unimaginable. I enjoyed the book.
Read more…
Politics
As evidence mounts that the Surge is accomplishing at least some of its goals, many have noted how the Democrats don’t seem to want to recognize any progress. I noted what I like to call “spontaneous events” … those not planned by American forces … that show progress like the re-opening of a Christian church in Baghdad. But in the past few days, there have been other articles with both direct and non-direct evidences. These eat at the heart of the Democrat’s “Defense Attorney” style objections to “Bush’s War”: “there is no progress, and if there is progress, it isn’t because of us.”
Read more…
Politics
I’m continually amazed at what passes for political dialog “out there,” and have promised myself to not return to a particular forum after the last dust up. But I fear it is exactly what people want. I created PoliteTalk to try and attract people who want to debate issues without insulting each other. But alas, it has not caught on. People enjoy insulting each other too much, it seems.
My latest experience is all too typical. In a thread about waterboarding and torture, an Australian informed me that David Hicks, an Australian terrorist captured on the battleground in Afghanistan and held at Guantanamo, indicated he was repeatedly sodomized. Hicks has been in solitary confinement, so his comment is pretty clear: American soldiers are sodomizing their prisoners. On the eve of Veteran’s Day, I was upset by this, and indicated that the only “atrocity” committed at Guantanamo was throwing the Koran in the toilet where, I angrily added, “it belongs.”
Admittedly, my statement was insensitive to Muslims, but it is how I feel when faced with the lies that the terrorists employ so quickly. While I’m torn about the issue of water boarding, and don’t like the idea of torture under any but the most extreme circumstances, throwing a terrorist’s Koran into the toilet to try and provoke him to anger and make progress in interrogation hardly seems like torture to me. In a society that permits artistic and political expression such as the famous “Piss Christ” or flag burning, I fail to see what the big deal is about expressing disdain for a “holy book” that is the source of so much hatred, misogyny and fear among its adherents … and the rest of the world.
Read more…
Politics