According to a report by Harvard's Kennedy School's Belfer Center, North Korea has biological weapons, stuff like anthrax and and smallpox.
And the US is preparing to put nuclear bombers back on 24-hour alert for the first time since 1991.
Rev. Robert Jeffress is one of those religious leaders who badly compromised his status as a champion of integrity by getting on the Trump train. Erick Erickson at The Resurgent reports on the latest development in that sad situation. Jeffress got into a Twitter snit with Senator Ben Sasse (who ranks high on LITD's list of contemporary good guys) and accused him of doing nothing to advance the 20-week abortion ban bill. Sasse is a cosponsor of it.
I quit availing myself of most contemporary "entertainment" years ago. I rarely listen to music in any genre that was made after about 1980. I have darkened the door of a movie theater maybe once a year for the last couple of decades. I'm not the most intuitive person in the world, but I just sensed an odor wafting off Hollywood that indicated a rot that went beyond the ideology one hears prattled about at awards shows. Now that the cat is out of the bag about what a putrid industry movie-making is, it appears many post-Amercans are drawing a similar conclusion. Or maybe it's just a matter of growing weary of special-effects dazzle-dazzle, milking of franchises, sequels and remakes way beyond their shelf life, and the hard, mean feel of most Tinseltown fare. In any event, it's experiencing a box-office nightmare.
Speaking of the public eschewing morally rotten forms of entertainment, NFL stadiums had seats going begging this past weekend.
Turkey's Erdogan is using Diyanet, a government agency set up by Ataturk in the early days of modern Turkey to see to religious affairs, to turn his country into an Islamist police state.
University of Oregon president Michael Schill, who got his first taste of campus jackbootery after mere weeks in office back in 2015, when he couldn't finish his state-of-the-school address because hard-left thugs shouted him down, has proven himself to be a pathetic wimp.
Daren Jonescu offers a fresh way of arguing a point that we stress here at LITD repeatedly. He puts it thusly: "free men without virtue will also be the undoing of freedom."
I've never known you over almost 40 years to be a cineaste, and now you tell us it's on principle. How about foreign flicks? Or the grand compendium of films made throughout film history? You don't like going to the movies. Was there a time that you did? And no music made after 1980? None? I think you are more obsessive compulsive than principled. OCD of the principles.
ReplyDeleteOh, I love Turner Classic Movies! It's on right now at our house.
ReplyDeleteYep, no music after 1980. I tried, on the recommendation of friends, to get into Wilco and the Avett Brothers and Kurt Rosenwinkel and Terence Blanchard and some other stuff. Just didn't yank my chain. One thing I nearly always run into when I teach jazz history or rock history is that some student will want to turn me onto his favorite act, and he's just so sure they're the heaviest thing that ever came down the pike, and I'm like, sheesh, now I'm obligated to spend 5 minutes of my time on this planet listening to this stuff.
ReplyDelete45 minutes of my time.
ReplyDeleteWhen was the casting couch invented?
ReplyDeleteWonder how long most people can listen to your blues?
ReplyDeleteWithout drinking.
ReplyDeleteSo Jonescu throws this out: Would Henry Ford have tried to get away with cheap, quasi-fraudulent nonsense equivalent to filling a potato chip bag with air to create the illusion that there are a lot of chips inside?
ReplyDeleteCars that give you 300,000 miles and more of value don't sound like potato chips to me. Back when America was great and moral we considered them ready for the scrap yard around 100,00 miles. Cars are transportation. What's been added are 25 page loan contracts and a shitload of advertising designed to hypnotize you into signing on the bottom line and becoming a pawn in the hands of shady loan sharks and lying mechanics. But a cool car for a dude, a little social lubricant and, voilla, you might get laid.
There's no doubt that, among consumer products, few get the added layers of image-hustling that the automobile does.
ReplyDeleteLust and greed both grow out of need or the perception thereof.
ReplyDelete