Friday, February 3, A.D. 2012

Nate the Neocon

A few weeks ago, Auster shared the following comic strip in his commentary on the neoconservative silence regarding the unfolding disaster in democratic Egypt: “Egypt and the cartoonishly disastrous neocons” The comic is from Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling (Ken Fisher):

Very good and sadly accurate.

Posted by Joseph on Friday, February 3, A.D. 2012
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Wednesday, January 18, A.D. 2012

Russian Ark

Christ is born!

Merry Christmas on this twelfth and final day of the Nativity.

Last week, one of Auster’s readers suggested the film, Russian Ark (originally Русский ковчег). It is somewhat of a historical fantasy wherein two men travel through time at the Russian Court. The movie lasts one and a half hours and was filmed in a single take. I believe that it breaks a record for that feat. The filming was done at the Hermitage Museum—the Tsar’s Winter Palace—in Saint Petersburg, and the result is quite impressive. Google has a video of it, though such eye candy deserves a viewing with better picture quality. Until you get the DVD with subtitles, here it is:

The last day of the Christmas season is also the eve of Theophany. I hope that you had a lovely Yuletide, and I wish you a blessed Theophany.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, January 18, A.D. 2012
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Wednesday, December 28, A.D. 2011

Damaged Women’s Coalition

You black hearted readers might enoy the following dark pearl from the Onion News Network: “Damaged Women’s Coalition Releases Statement.”

The “released statement” is in response to this earlier incident.

The Onion folks consistently deliver.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, December 28, A.D. 2011
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Wednesday, December 21, A.D. 2011

How Jewish is Hollywood?

I recently found a three year old article in the Los Angeles Times by Joel Stein that I found interesting and humorous: “How Jewish is Hollywood?” Stein quickly dispenses with concerns about “hate facts” and then has fun with the truth:

The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.

As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you’d be flipping between “The 700 Club” and “Davey and Goliath” on TV all day.

So I’ve taken it upon myself to re-convince America that Jews run Hollywood by launching a public relations campaign, because that’s what we do best. I’m weighing several slogans, including: “Hollywood: More Jewish than ever!”; “Hollywood: From the people who brought you the Bible”; and “Hollywood: If you enjoy TV and movies, then you probably like Jews after all.”

Stein even has a delightful time gently mocking the appalling Abe Foxman, who deserved much more robust derision:

I called ADL Chairman Abe Foxman, who was in Santiago, Chile, where, he told me to my dismay, he was not hunting Nazis. He dismissed my whole proposition, saying that the number of people who think Jews run Hollywood is still too high. The ADL poll, he pointed out, showed that 59% of Americans think Hollywood execs “do not share the religious and moral values of most Americans,” and 43% think the entertainment industry is waging an organized campaign to “weaken the influence of religious values in this country.”

That’s a sinister canard, Foxman said. “It means they think Jews meet at Canter’s Deli on Friday mornings to decide what’s best for the Jews.” Foxman’s argument made me rethink: I have to eat at Canter’s more often.

“That’s a very dangerous phrase, ‘Jews control Hollywood.’ What is true is that there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood,” he said. Instead of “control,” Foxman would prefer people say that many executives in the industry “happen to be Jewish,” as in “all eight major film studios are run by men who happen to be Jewish.”

Stein gets in trouble from time to time for writing as if Americans still valued witty but sincere, reasonable commentary about issues that the estrogenized masses find “sensitive.” His “Warriors and Wusses” in the Los Angeles Times criticizes pacifists who claim to support the troops, and “My Own Private India” in Time expresses dismay that his New Jersey hometown has been invaded and transformed beyond recognition by foreigners. Sadly, Stein bows before the mighty gods of leftist dogma. He is surely a fellow believer in the reigning Zeitgeist, but his lack of ardent faith, accompanied by moments of humorous dissent, cannot be tolerated. So, he recants. He is not a “Great Writer” but rather a talented fellow with an interest in popular culture who has made a corner for himself in the media—a sort of leftwing Mark Steyn who has settled to write for America’s worst opinion magazine. Yet, he has a family and needs to make a buck. The Jews may control Hollywood, but leftist idealogues run most everything else in America. Even a Jewish Democrat must fear their ire.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, December 21, A.D. 2011
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Wednesday, December 14, A.D. 2011

Vendée

I recently learnt that Navis Pictures is making a film about the counter-revolutionary revolt in the Vendée, The War of the Vendee. Navis Pictures is a new, low budget production company that uses young actors to make films of interest to Roman Catholics. The other movie that they have made so far is Saint Bernadette of Lourdes.

I wish them well, though I harbor worries about “Christian ghetto cinema.” I have watched enough terrible footage of evangelical Protestant movies to know how quality may be sacrificed when one preaches to a choir undiscriminating in quality. Angry feminists [sic] have Lifetime, the melanically endowed have BET, and evangelical Protestants have TBN. Each of those stations features a sorry showcase of trite tripe because they aim no higher than the soulless satisfaction of pressing ideological buttons or feeding demographically relevant appetites. May the Latins not indulge in the same aesthetic pathea!

Navis Pictures has posted a preview for the Vendée film. For an amateurish production, it looks pretty good. However, when I watched the trailer, I kept thinking that this is the sort of film that would have been made had T.F.P. produced The Goonies:

Any work that shows the wicked sans-culottes as the scum that they really were is worthwhile to me. The film is due to be released in January in the year of our Lord 2012.

Moreover, you may wish to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s words delivered at the dedication of the memorial to the Vendée:

Mr. President of the General Council of the Vendée, Respected Vendéans:

Two thirds of a century ago, while still a boy, I read with admiration about the courageous and desperate uprising of the Vendée. But never could I have dreamed that in my later years I would have the honor of dedicating a memorial to the heroes and victims of that uprising.

Twenty decades have now passed, and throughout that period the Vendée uprising and its bloody suppression have been viewed in ever new ways, in France and elsewhere. Indeed, historical events are never fully understood in the heat of their own time, but only at a great distance, after a cooling of passions. For all too long, we did not want to hear or admit what cried out with the voices of those who perished, or were burned alive: that the peasants of a hard-working region, driven to the extremes of oppression and humiliation by a revolution supposedly carried out for their sake—that these peasants had risen up against the revolution!

That revolution brings out instincts of primordial barbarism, the sinister forces of envy, greed and hatred—this even its contemporaries could see all too well. They paid a terrible enough price for the mass psychosis of the day, when merely moderate behavior, or even the perception of such, already appeared to be a crime. But the twentieth century has done especially much to tarnish the romantic luster of revolution which still prevailed in the eighteenth century. As half-centuries and centuries have passed, people have learned from their own misfortunes that revolutions demolish the organic structures of society, disrupt the natural flow of life, destroy the best elements of the population and give free rein to the worst; that a revolution never brings prosperity to a nation, but benefits only a few shameless opportunists, while to the country as a whole it heralds countless deaths, widespread impoverishment, and, in the gravest cases, a long-lasting degeneration of the people.

The very word “revolution” (from the Latin revolvo) means “to roll back”, “to go back”, “to experience anew”, “to re-ignite”, or at best “to turn over”—hardly a promising list. Today, if the attribute “great” is ever attached to a revolution, this is done very cautiously, and not infrequently with much bitterness.

It is now better and better understood that the social improvements which we all so passionately desire can be achieved through normal evolutionary development—with immeasurably fewer losses and without all-encompassing decay. We must be able to improve, patiently, that which we have in any given “today.”

It would be vain to hope that revolution can improve human nature, yet your revolution, and especially our Russian Revolution, hoped for this very effect. The French Revolution unfolded under the banner of a self-contradictory and unrealizable slogan, “liberty, equality, fraternity.” But in the life of society, liberty, and equality are mutually exclusive, even hostile concepts. Liberty, by its very nature, undermines social equality, and equality suppresses liberty—for how else could it be attained? Fraternity, meanwhile, is of entirely different stock; in this instance it is merely a catchy addition to the slogan. True fraternity is achieved by means not social but spiritual. Furthermore, the ominous words “or death!” were added to the threefold slogan, effectively destroying its meaning.

I would not wish a “great revolution” upon any nation. Only the arrival of Thermidor prevented the eighteenth-century revolution from destroying France. But the revolution in Russia was not restrained by any Thermidor as it drove our people on the straight path to a bitter end, to an abyss, to the depths of ruin.

It is a pity that there is no one here today who could speak of the sufferings endured in the depths of China, Cambodia, or Vietnam, and could describe the price they had to pay for revolution.

One might have thought that the experience of the French revolution would have provided enough of a lesson for the rationalist builders of “the people’s happiness” in Russia. But no, the events in Russia were grimmer yet, and incomparably more enormous in scale. Lenin’s Communism and International Socialists studiously reenacted on the body of Russia many of the French revolution’s cruelest methods—only they possessed a much greater a more systematic level of organizational control than the Jacobins.

We had no Thermidor, but to our spiritual credit we did have our Vendée, in fact more than one. These were the large peasant uprisings: Tambov (1920-21), western Siberia (1921). We know of the following episode: Crowds of peasants in handmade shoes, armed with clubs and pitchforks, converged on Tambov, summoned by church bells in the surrounding villages—and were cut down by machine-gun fire. For eleven months the Tambov uprising held out, despite the Communists’ effort to crush it with armored trucks, armored trains, and airplanes, as well as by taking families of the rebels hostage. They were even preparing to use poison gas. The Cossacks, too—from the Ural, the Don, the Kuban, the Terek—met Bolshevism with intransigent resistance that finally drowned in the blood of genocide.

And so, in dedicating this memorial to your heroic Vendée, I see double in my mind’s eye—for I can also visualize the memorials which will one day rise in Russia, monuments to our Russian resistance against the onslaught of Communism and its atrocities.

We have all lived through the twentieth century, a century of terror, the chilling culmination of that Progress about which so many dreamed in the eighteenth century. And now, I think, more and more citizens of France, with increasing understanding and pride, will remember and value the resistance and the sacrifice of the Vendee.

Memory eternal, Alexander Isaevich! Memory eternal, Vendéen martyrs!

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, December 14, A.D. 2011
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Monday, December 5, A.D. 2011

Siri

College Humor’s video spoof on the iPhone’s Siri is wickedly funny. I find the contrast of Siri’s sweet A.I. with the dreadful couple particularly delightful (rated very, very, very R):

Depictions of broken, perverted people should not be humorous; my soul must be irremediably damaged.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, December 5, A.D. 2011
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Wednesday, November 23, A.D. 2011

Europe from Athens

I am going to pick on the Hellenes two Wednesdays in a row. Several weeks ago, George Michalopulos shared the delightful picture below, “Europe according to the Greeks,” by Yanko Tsvetkov:

It is the best of Tsvetkov’s maps in my opinion. For a larger map that is easier to read, follow this link.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, November 23, A.D. 2011
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Wednesday, November 2, A.D. 2011

Женщина

I found the following on 150 Knots last week:

It is funny, but it also testifies to a truth. As I commented in “Russian Jumper,” had not the winter stopped the French and German invading armies, the women would have done so. Russia demonstrates well how women keep an institution (or a society) going after the men have gone A.W.O.L. Women cannot steer the ship, but they will keep it from going under for a long time. And those Russian broads are tough!

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, November 2, A.D. 2011
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Wednesday, October 26, A.D. 2011

Occupy Wall Street

Charles Cooke of the National Review interviewed a real daisy at the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park (rated PG-13):

While I was first watching the video, it occurred to me that the woman is an unhinged, leftwing version of my mother.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, October 26, A.D. 2011
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Friday, October 21, A.D. 2011

More Leftist Child Abuse

The Telegraph published a story last month about the latest trend to prevent “racism” in children: “Dress witches in pink and avoid white paper to prevent racism in nuseries, expert says.” I could not justify putting the story in the “politics” and “anthropology” categories. It simply does not rise above the level of absurd humor. Among the guidelines from “equality experts” (the Orwellian titles of British bureaucrats are quite loathesome):

From the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz to Meg, the good witch from the Meg and Mog children’s books, witches have always dressed in black.

But their traditional attire has now come in for criticism from equality experts who claim it could send a negative message to toddlers in nursery and lead to racism.

Instead, teachers should censor the toy box and replace the pointy black hat with a pink one, while dressing fairies, generally resplendent in pale pastels, in darker shades.

Another staple of the classroom - white paper - has also been questioned by Anne O’Connor, an early years consultant who advises local authorities on equality and diversity. . . .

Finally, staff should be prepared to be economical with the truth when asked by pupils what their favourite colour is and, in the interests of good race relations, answer “black” or “brown”.

The measures, outlined in a series of guides in Nursery World magazine, are aimed at avoiding racial bias in toddlers as young as two.

According to the guides, very young children may begin to express negative and discriminatory views about skin colour and appearance that nursery staff must help them “unlearn”. . . .

“The advice is based on an “anti-bias” approach to education which developed in the United States as part of multiculturalism.” America, the exporter of pop culture filth and academic diarrhea! At least, a significant minority of Americans despises the idiocy. Where is the fight in the Motherland? Have they all rolled over for these crazy bastards?

I would like to dismiss the “equality experts” without comment, as they deserve nothing but contempt, but suffice it to say that “darker” colors have a negative association primarily because of night. Witches, monsters, and bad guys tend to be portrayed as dark because the night is when “bad things happen.” A lone, dark road, a grisly alley at twilight, and the shadowy world under a little boy’s bed are dangerous places. Where there is no light, there is the unknown, and frightening and dangerous elements thrive in such dimensions. Let the insane meddlers attempt to blot out the sun to equalize all times of day lest “darkness” continue to have especially negative associations!

This is not a great insight. This is common sense. One has to be perverted with much nonsense, passing as “education,” for such obviousness to become elusive.

Moreover, when will negroidally focused “minds” realize that race has little to do with “color.” Colors are useful, conventional tags for sets, from sports teams to packaged food varieties to human groups. Yet, the color named is not what designates the group; color signifies but does not decide group boundaries. Nonetheless, the not so brilliant folks that populate “African Diaspora” departments are so obsessed with “color” that they ignore the reality by being so fixated on the sign.

Posted by Joseph on Friday, October 21, A.D. 2011
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