The top story right now at TMZ is about Michael Jackson’s daughter:
Note the particular ad that TMZ decided to follow it, minus the cropped photo of female breasts used to grab attention to the left of the text:
Any relationship between the two? Isn’t that kind of strange — the insistence on sex and death at the same time?
How can I get organized to read and understand all these books? Here are 6 new rules added to the revised first four in version 1.23 of the Radical Reading Regimen.
On April 10 I published the next step in my developing self-improvement program, an application of Charlie Martin’s 13 Weeks method to my problem of better organizing my research. I looked forward to diving back into a deep reading routine filled with novels and culture while blogging my results here at PJ Lifestyle so all the wiser, more enlightened souls who make it their business to fill the comments section with their manifestos could tell me what an idiot I was for not seeing the world exactly the way they did.
But then on April 15 — Patriot’s Day — bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, resulting in 3 deaths and 264 injuries. The real world had intruded on the Wonderland of Books I’d constructed for myself. As Charlie has pointed out from time to time in his 13 Weeks series, life has a way of throwing off our plans.
For days the country sat in nervous panic as police searched for the killers. Partisans of every persuasion speculated about the motives of the evil monsters who would load pressure cooker bombs with shrapnel to mutilate the bodies of innocent human beings they had never met. David Sirota of Salon longed for the murderous act to serve as fodder for his goal of demonizing his political opponents. I liked the way PJ columnist Roger Kimball put it on on the morning of April 18:
One of the curious, but also most predictable, responses to the Boston Marathon bombings from the Left has been the fervent expression — amounting nearly to a prayer — that the perpetrator or perpetrators of this act of mass murder be “homegrown,” preferably white, male, Christian, and conservative.
Why? Why does the Left prefer to have its terrorism served up by Timothy McVeigh rather than Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad? It’s an interesting question. That the Left exhibits this prejudice is, like Falstaff’s dishonesty, “gross as a mountain, open, palpable.”
David Sirota, writing at Salon, gives almost comic expression to the genre in an essay with the really special title “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” Why does Mr. Sirota wish that the Boston murderer of 8-year-old boys be a white American? Because a spectral quality called “white male privilege” operates insidiously behind the scenes. If Timmy McVeigh blows up a government building, says Mr. Sirota, only he is blamed. If Mohammed does it, Muslims are likely to be “collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse).”
What do you think of that argument? I think it’s hooey.
But how can intellectual and cultural warriors do battle with hooey level arguments? PJ Media Legal Editor J. Christian Adams offered advice to the Benghazi whistleblowers that is just as applicable to every American striving to fight for these issues in their own way:
I know a thing or two about being a whistleblower. I appeared on the Huckabee show this weekend (see video below) and explained how simply telling the truth is the way to shield yourself from the sinister deceptions from places like the Huffington Post and the George Soros-funded Media Matters. They can try to smear you, but the truth of your testimony will rise above their smears.
All we can do is present the truth about the nature of the enemy. If that doesn’t work, then what else is left?
There’s nothing that makes Hollywood more nervous than portraying Islamist terror. As far back as 1994, James Cameron’s True Lies was denounced as racially insensitive for imagining a chillingly plausible Islamist terror threat involving nuclear weapons. Cameron, anticipating accusations of unfairly linking terrorism with Islam and Arabs, took care to try for “balance” by placing an Arab-American character on the good guys’ side (the actor who played him, Grant Heslov, this year won an Oscar as one of the producers of Argo). Yet the advocacy group the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) slammed the film anyway. The hysterical 1998 movie The Siege imagined that, in an overreaction to a terrorist attack, Brooklyn would be placed under martial law and all young Muslim men would be interned in Yankee Stadium. Ridiculous.
Since 2001, of course, Hollywood has almost completely avoided showing any Muslim involved in terror, changing the bad guys in 2002’s The Sum of All Fears from Palestinians to neo-Nazis. The 2005 Jodie Foster movie Flightplan, about an abduction on an airplane, used a hint that Arabs might be responsible as a red herring. The actual villain: an all-American air marshal played by Peter Sarsgaard. Several Middle East themed movies like Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies essentially saw a moral equivalence between the U.S. and the Islamists, saying both sides were up to comparably nasty stuff in the War on Terror.
By Theodore Shoebat and Walid Shoebat
**** WARNING: GRAPHIC VIDEOS INCLUDED IN THIS ARTICLE ****
The Boston Marathon bombing by the Tsarnaevs is not the first notable attack upon Americans by Eastern European Muslims. In 2007, a young Bosnian Muslim named Sulejman Talovic opened fire in the Trolley Square mall in Salt Lake City, killing five people and seriously injuring another four before being taken out by officers.
There will be more to come, as long as we keep observing the modern world’s sick obsession with multiculturalism.
As he was killing his victims, Talovic repeatedly proclaimed that Allah was great, and the night before the massacre he told his girlfriend that “something is going to happen tomorrow that you’ll never be able to forgive me about.” He also said that the day will be “the happiest day of his life and that it could only happen once in a lifetime.”
Prior to settling in America, Talovic had a hallucination in Bosnia of a white horse with “two beautiful eyes,” imagery which is emphatically Islamic.
Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev may be out of the way, but this should not make us believe that the Islamic threat is gone, or that the world is now safer.
Now is not a time to celebrate, but to study our enemy assiduously. The Tsarnaevs are from Chechnya, a nation of the Caucasus region. Now that the brothers are becoming household names, Americans should inquire into two of the most focal points of Islamic jihad: the Caucasus and the Balkans. Though much of the region remains Christian today, a sizable portion is Muslim, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Dagestan, and, of course, Chechnya.
The Balkans and the Caucasus harbor by far the most fanatic of all Islamic fundamentalists. When they were under the Ottoman sultans, they proved to be the most loyal and fervent fighters for the cause of the caliphate’s universal expansion.
They are not entirely of the same nature as the terrorists Americans are used to — like those of Iraq or even Afghanistan. They are larger in stature, fiercer, and have a higher propensity for sadism and murder than their Islamic brethren in the Middle East.
They are now a part of the backbone of the Syrian revolution, assisting their fellow jihadists with their tenacity and ferociousness. One journalist describes the Chechens as such:
The Chechens were older, taller, stronger and wore hiking boots and combat trousers. They carried their weapons with confidence and distanced themselves from the rest, moving around in a tight-knit unit-within-a-unit. (1)
To help Americans recover from this cultural illness, here is a video showing just how sadistic, heartless, and sanguinary some Eastern European Muslims can be, and the type of mindset of the Tsarnaevs:
But why such cruel violence? This question takes us deeper into our inquiry into the jihadist mindset. For decades Americans have been used to the standard procedure of Islamic terrorism. It began with just planting bombs; then came suicide attacks and decapitations. All of these phases are not part of a cultural evolution, but a gradual revival back to original Islam. Now we are entering a newer phase in this awakening: human sacrifice and cannibalism.
The original state of Islam is not entirely what the West has witnessed these last few decades; it is actually more like what one sees in ancient Mexico or pre-Israelite Canaan. We are seeing this pagan savagery arise gradually, but soon it will be universally known.
Another example of the kind of violent fantasies that one can expect to start seeing bubbling up as the war against America intensifies:
Here’s why Rosenberg hates “neocons” so much. He fully embraces the progressive dogma that every single death in Iraq is a murder and that “neocons” are responsible for it. In Rosenberg’s eyes, anyone who so much as wrote in favor of the Iraq War is morally equal to any terrorist who may only be responsible for a handful of murders:
Something vile and horrific happened in a courtroom in Ohio last week, and as I’ve reflected upon the event, I’ve been disturbed by the thought that we have become a nation of compliant sheep that no longer produces citizens capable of standing up to injustice.
At a sentencing hearing for school shooter T.J. Lane, who gunned down six high school students, killing three and paralyzing one from the chest down, Judge David Fuhry gave Lane three life sentences in prison, to be served consecutively.
In what should have been a day of closure and justice for the families of the victims and the community of Chardon that suffered so much in the wake of the school shooting last year, a courtroom full of people stood by and allowed T.J. Lane to victimize the families in a base, contemptible way that likely added exponentially to the heavy burden the families already bear.
The courtroom for Lane’s sentencing hearing on Tuesday was packed with families of the victims, students, teachers, and members of the media. As the hearing began, Lane slipped off the button-down shirt he was wearing, revealing a t-shirt onto which he had written “KILLER” with a marker. A collective gasp filled the courtroom. As the families of the victims gave their statements, Lane smiled and leered at the families, almost seeming to enjoy the moment.
After the sentence was read, Lane had the opportunity to make a statement. At that point, he said something so horrific that I’m not even going to write it here, simply to spare you if you haven’t already heard it. (You can read it and watch the video here.) Trust me, you will have to bleach your soul once you hear it. It should be added to The Book of Things That Shall Never Be Repeated. Then Lane flipped the families the middle finger as a parting shot and said, “F*** all of you!” As a mother, I had a visceral — almost physical — reaction. I almost vomited, thinking about the pain his contemptible words caused the families and how they’ll never be able to scrub them from their minds.
People called talk-radio programs that day to vent their anger. Along with vicious prison-retribution wishes, caller after caller said they would have been arrested had they been in the courtroom. They wouldn’t have stood by while Lane visually and verbally tortured the parents.
WTAM host Bob Frantz said: “I would have been shot dead today. I would have leapt tables to get to that kid.”
And yet.
Everyone stood by and let it happen.
Freelance writing is a financially precarious career – you’ve always got to be on the lookout for new opportunities, or you’re screwed. So when I found out recently about a relatively new online magazine called Inspire, my first thought was: hmm, what can I come up with that they might want to use?
Now – and hey, here’s a tip for you kids looking to move into the fast lane of the media game – the first thing you do in situations like this is to study the publication in question and try to determine its worldview, its style, its tone, its intended audience, and so on. Inspire, as it happens, is published by an organization called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Not al-Qaeda itself, mind you, but a branch of al-Qaeda with a similar but longer and more geographically specific name. It’s published in English and is apparently aimed at jihadist fanatics and aspiring jihadist fanatics.
A Fox News writer helpfully noted in 2010 that the magazine is “designed to encourage would-be terrorists into acts of violence,” and quoted Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution as saying that it’s “clearly intended for the aspiring jihadist in the U.S. or U.K. who may be the next Fort Hood murderer or Times Square bomber.” Useful info for an aspiring contributor! A while back Inspire ran an article titled “I Am Proud to be a Traitor to America” by an author who, not long afterward, was taken out by a U.S. drone in Yemen. For a freelancer, this sort of thing is great news: when a publication’s regular contributors are being systematically decimated in anti-terrorist strikes, it’s more likely that there’s always going to be room for fresh blood.
A nurse who transferred a prank phone call from two Australian radio presenters about the Duchess of Cambridge has died in a suspected suicide – two days after being duped.
The body of Jacintha Saldanha, who was working on the switchboard, was found at an address yards away from King Edward VII Hospital, where she worked, just before 9.30am today.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge issued a statement saying they are ‘deeply saddened’ by the tragedy and said they had not made a complaint, adding: ‘Their thoughts and prayers are with Jacintha Saldanha’s family, friends and colleagues at this very sad time.’
‘On the contrary we offered our full and heartfelt support to the nurses involved and hospital staff at all times.’
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image courtesy shutterstock / Steve Ikeguchi
Related at PJ Lifestyle:
The 79 million boomers alive today make up over a quarter of the entire American population. Last year, the oldest members of the generation turned 65. For the next 18 years, 10,000 boomers will turn 65 each day, according to the Pew Research Center. Today, the average life expectancy for women in America is 81 years old. For men, it is 76 years old. According to Gallup, the expected retirement age in the United States is 67. So, as Boomers enter into the retirement that precedes the end of their lives, will they find meaning and satisfaction as they age? Will they thrive, flourish, take a slow ride off into the sunset?
This is an enormously important question not just because of the implications it has on the happiness of real people, but also for the consequences it will have on society, social services, and our culture as a whole. As Pew points out, “By force of numbers alone, they almost certainly will redefine old age in America, just as they’ve made their mark on teen culture, young adult life and middle age.”
The baby boomers are becoming characterized by startlingly high rates of depression and pessimism. Boomers are more depressed and less satisfied with their lives than both those who are older and younger than them, according to a study published in the American Sociological Review in 2008.
Women, in particular, are suffering. In the American population generally, women tend to be more depressive than men, and this is true of the boomers as well. In 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that between 1999 and 2004, rates of suicide increased by 20 percent for 45-to-54-year-olds, a far greater increase than that experienced in nearly every other age group. Among women who were 45-to-54-year-olds, the increase was a staggering 31 percent. Suicide aside, boomers have found another way to cope with their doldrums: according to the National Institute of Health, between 2002 and 2011, the number of illicit drugs users aged 50 to 59 tripled.
What is going on? This is a generation that is better educated, more successful, and has better access to health care than the generations that directly preceded it. This is the generation whose women benefitted from the gains of second wave feminism.
Experts on aging, depression, and happiness are at a loss for what is causing the boomers’ funk. One explanation is stress. “Much of the research is pointing to daily stress as a precipitator of their depression,” according to Donald A. Malone, Jr., the director of the Mood and Anxiety Clinic in the department of psychiatry and psychology at the Cleveland Clinic.
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Related at PJ Lifestyle:
You don’t just wake up miserable one day and stay that way. To the contrary, producing a nice, consistent level of misery takes a lot of work. Do you ever hear anyone say, “Wow, that guy does whatever it takes to be miserable!” Of course not. Everyone is too busy patting the happy people on the back. “Wow, I wish I could be as happy as she is!” “They’re just such a happy couple!” “Wow, what a happy child!” How about a little appreciation for all the work people put into being utterly miserable? After all, as you’re about to see, depression takes effort!
Abraham Maslow once said, “If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.” So, take his advice to heart. Make comfort your highest priority. Surf the web as much as possible at work and do the same things, day after day, year after year without making any effort to improve. Veg out in front of the TV every night and channel surf. Don’t read, don’t take classes, do the same old, same old. Get yourself into a nice deep rut and then, as an extra added bonus, blame your spouse or kids for “holding you back” and keeping you from achieving the dreams you haven’t made any effort to pursue for years. That’s just the sort of stagnant life that will help keep you down in the dumps.
via James Holmes — Aurora Massacre Shooter Tries To Commit Suicide in Jail | TMZ.com.
James Holmes — the shooter in the Aurora movie theater massacre — was hospitalized after several “half-hearted” suicide attempts … this according to law enforcement.
According to cops, Holmes ran headfirst into a jail cell wall on Tuesday … and while he sustained injuries … they were not life-threatening.
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Related at PJ Lifestyle:
Political theology, as defined by Wikipedia:
Political theology or public theology is a branch of both political philosophy and practical theology that investigates the ways in which theological concepts or ways of thinking underlie political, social, economic and cultural discourses.
…
Writing amidst the turbulence of the German Weimar Republic, Carl Schmitt argued in Political Theology that the central concepts of modern politics were secularized versions of older theological concepts.
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Center-Left polemicist John Avlon at The Daily Beast claims that “Over the past four years, no less than 89 obsessively anti-Obama books have been published.” This isn’t true — and Avlon knows it — as a casual stroll through “Interactive Hate: The Great Obama-Loathing Canon” reveals. Many of the titles he calls “books,” those who made them understood as short pamphlets. I recognize several that I helped edit and produce for a conservative 501(c)3. Others come from obscure, self-published authors with no influence.
Avlon’s big number of anti-Obama “books” hides the reality: plenty of titles with scary Obama pictures on the cover filled the market since 2008 but few offered little more than a polished collection of what you could find for free doing anti-Obama google searches. To understand the president one must look beyond the new release shelf.
Here are the 15 books I’ve found most useful in grasping the intentionally confusing worldview of our commander-in-chief: 4 recent books focused on Obama by conservative critics, 6 historical books on movements and ideologies, and 5 titles by the president, his supporters, mentors, and influences.
To grasp Barack Obama we need to understand the books he read when he first began his community organizing journey three decades ago. We have to put ourselves in the head of the young, college-age Barry to understand how ideological seeds grew into the disastrous public policy of his administration. To know where to begin we start with the two books by Barack Obama’s best, most underrated analyst, Stanley Kurtz.
Since its publication in October of 2010, Radical-in-Chief has served as my primary map for navigating the stormy media waters of the Obama presidency. I reviewed it here for the publication I edited at the time, instructed all my writers to read it, and applied a blunt headline to summarize its importance: “Case Closed: Barack Obama is a Socialist Working to Destroy America.”
My progressive friends laugh their heads off when I argue this with a straight face. They see Obama as a corporate sell-out still carrying on most of Bush’s war policy. Obama’s just a wimpy, moderate liberal and party hack beholden to Wall Street. To which I respond,
That’s what Obama wants you to think. In his memoir he admits attending Socialist Scholars conferences in New York City in the early 1980s. Stanley Kurtz has verified which ones he attended, who spoke there, and what ideas were argued. It’s there that Obama learned about what community organizing really is all about. And when you read these people’s books — like Saul Alinsky — they admit it quite openly that they are just pretending to be centrist pragmatists in order to dupe do-gooder liberals like I was and you still are so they can gradually implement a European social welfare state. There’s a reason why over 90% of Europeans would vote Obama. He’s one of them.
That’s when my friends usually change the subject.
How do we know for certain that Obama’s ideology is still the same as in the early 1980s when he began his career as a stealth socialist community organizer? It’s not just because his administration draws from the ranks of community organizers and employs the movement’s tactics on the national level. It’s because Obama still works with the same people who are still pursuing the same goals. All that’s changed is now Obama’s the “good cop,” a friendly politician, instead of the hardball activist “bad cop.”
In Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, Kurtz shows Obama’s second term plans. He reveals that the exact same community organizing mentors who trained Obama now work for him. Their goal? To quietly, as no one pays attention at the national level, use regulatory boards to implement “Regionalism.” The objective: create regions based around metropolitan areas that can swallow up and redistribute tax money from the richer suburbs to the poor inner cities. They would also seize control of schools, lower educational standards, and implement regulations to stop the growth of suburbia. Kurtz describes it as replicating the collapsing system of the European Union here in the United States. This is the “fundamental transformation.” And Kurtz unearthed documents within the archives of these stealth socialist community organizing groups irrefutably identifying Obama as a partner in the effort.
Barack Obama may have begun as a minor figure within the world of community organizing but by the mid ’90s he was a major player, responsible for directing millions through his position on the boards of numerous charitable foundations. The paper trail Kurtz assembles between his two books of Obama’s deep associations with this ideological movement to transform America lies too deep for any of the president’s defenders to explain. So they can only follow the president’s lead, a favored tactic of Alinsky, and obfuscate.
Just like the youtube deception with Benghazi, and just as we see in the next two books, focusing on the methods of ACORN and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice…
The unedifying saga of Amanda Todd is one with a single victim, no heroes, and too many auxiliary vampires and vultures.
Every update about the adorable looking 15-year-old girl who was apparently driven to suicide by online “jailbait” bullies simply increases the world’s toxicity.
Learning that vigilantes have (or haven’t) tracked down and publicly shamed her alleged tormenter (and other accused online lowlifes) somehow doesn’t reassure me.
So I hesitate to add to this mess, and am unsure whether I have anything original or useful to say.
Except one thing, the thing I haven’t seen mentioned much in all the bandwagon-jumping articles condemning “cyberbullying” and “rape culture,” and calling on Somebody (always Somebody Else) to Do Something.
Here it is.
Are you ready?
DEAR FEMALES:
DON’T POST NAKED PICTURES OF YOURSELF ON THE INTERNET.
via “Mark Rothko: The Tragedy and the Ecstasy” « Acculturated.
In a surprising intersection of pop culture and avant-garde art, a scene from AMC’s hit television series Mad Men centered on a painting by abstract expressionist Mark Rothko in a 2008 episode. In the scene, word gets around the Sterling Cooper advertising agency that eccentric co-founder Bert Cooper has bought an outrageously expensive painting for his office. A few employees decide to sneak a look.
A secretary calls the painting’s colored rectangles “interesting.” Accountant Harry Crane, panicked that this might be Cooper’s way of testing his employees’ aesthetic acumen, decides to search the office for “a brochure that explains it.” The agency’s art director, Sal Romano, immediately recognizes the artwork as a Rothko and admires it. But only account executive and part-time writer Ken Cosgrove seems to feel it.
KEN: I don’t think it’s supposed to be explained.
SAL: I’m an artist, okay? It must mean something.
Sal’s on the right track. Rothko himself said, “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.” But Ken instinctively grasps that the artist intended for viewers to feel an intimate connection to his often huge canvasses, to be “enveloped within” the work, in Rothko’s words.
KEN: Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you’re just supposed to experience it. Because when you look at it, you do feel something, right? It’s like looking into something very deep. You could fall in.
Mark Rothko, born 99 years ago today, September 25, persevered through various stages of artistic development to find a way to relieve modern man’s spiritual and creative emptiness.
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Some of you may remember that earlier this year, Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception. In fact, on that panel, they didn’t hear from a single woman, even though they were debating an issue that affects nearly every woman. Because it happened in Congress, people noticed. But it happens all the time. Many women are shut out and silenced. So while I’m honored to be standing at this podium, it easily could have been any one of you. I’m here because I spoke out, and this November, each of us must do the same.
During this campaign, we’ve heard about the two profoundly different futures that could await women—and how one of those futures looks like an offensive, obsolete relic of our past. Warnings of that future are not distractions. They’re not imagined. That future could be real.
A commenter pointed out this NYT‘s piece entitled “Men, Who Needs Them?” which, of course, is written by some Uncle Tim man by the name of Greg Hampikian:
With expanding reproductive choices, we can expect to see more women choose to reproduce without men entirely. Fortunately, the data for children raised by only females is encouraging. As the Princeton sociologist Sara S. McLanahan has shown, poverty is what hurts children, not the number or gender of parents.
That’s good, since women are both necessary and sufficient for reproduction, and men are neither. From the production of the first cell (egg) to the development of the fetus and the birth and breast-feeding of the child, fathers can be absent. They can be at work, at home, in prison or at war, living or dead. …
Meanwhile women live longer, are healthier and are far less likely to commit a violent offense. If men were cars, who would buy the model that doesn’t last as long, is given to lethal incidents and ends up impounded more often?
Is this a serious article? What kind of misandrist pens this type of sexism? Common to the NYTs, sure, but his dismissal of men and suck-up-ness (no, it’s not a word, I made it up) to women and his audience is pretty clear. What is his malignant purpose?
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Cross-posted at the Dr. Helen blog.
Image courtesy shutterstock / Dietmar Hoepfl
More on Men and Women at PJ Lifestyle:
Scott was the young brother of Ridley Scott; in addition to Top Gun, had directed Beverly Hills Cop II, Enemy of the State, and the remake of the Taking of Pelham 1,2,3, in addition to other projects in both film and TV. The Contra Costa Times has the early details of his apparent suicide:
British film director Tony Scott, known for such Hollywood blockbusters as “Top Gun,” “Days of Thunder,” “Beverly Hills Cop II” and “The Taking of Pelham 123,” jumped to his death Sunday from the Vincent Thomas Bridge spanning San Pedro and Terminal Island, according to Los Angeles County coroner’s officials.
Scott, 68, climbed a fence on the south side of the bridge’s apex and leapt off “without hesitation” around 12:30 p.m., according to the Coroner’s Department and port police.
A suicide note was found inside Scott’s black Toyota Prius, which was parked on one of the eastbound lanes of the bridge, said U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Jennifer Osburn.
More as it comes in.
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