Posts Tagged → European
We actually saw a movie
The other night, the Princess of Patience and I actually went to see a movie. Like the kind of movie that used to entertain, inform, and inspire Americans, instead of the dreck Hollywood has been excreting, lo, these past thirty years or more.
We saw “Oppenheimer,” a Hollywood movie that is based on fact, based on historic events, based on real people who did and said real things. It is not based on the vomitous Woke PC corrosive nonsense that Hollywood has specialized in for decades. We were entertained and informed by this movie, and inspired about the greatness of America. What a treat! This makes four movies we have seen in the past…five years? Or longer?
Oppenheimer is about a man named Robert Oppenheimer, a genius and socially inept physicist who is considered “the father of the atomic bomb.” Aside from all the sciency stuff about the why and how of developing the bomb, the movie also delves deeply into World War II, the ensuing Cold War with communist Russia, and the very real threat that communists living in America posed to a free America itself.
There is no spoiler alert here, because we all know that the atomic race against the Nazi Germans and the communist Russians resulted in The Bomb being dropped on a fascist Japan, thereby signaling America’s ability and willingness to use the Mother Of All Weapons. Genocidal Japan’s well-earned come-uppance in Nagasaki and Hiroshima also demonstrated how easily the entire blue planet we live on could be destroyed in a tit-for-tat use of atomic weapons, thereby ushering in the “Mutually Assured Destruction” doctrine of mutual atomic deterrence that shaped American, European, and Russian foreign policy for fifty years.
This strange conundrum of “I won’t blow up Planet Earth if you don’t blow up Planet Earth” became a strategic stalemate between superpowers, thereby forcing them to fight their battles in low-intensity conflicts around the globe.
I digress. But such is the force and pragmatic usefulness of such a movie as Oppenheimer that it naturally results in discussing all that came before, during, and after the film’s historic time.
The other important thing that this movie focuses on, but does not follow up on, is the communist takeover of the American universities. That really did happen, despite the Hollywood oh-so-sad depictions of meanie anti-communists trying to stop real communists from infiltrating American institutions. Today, sending your dear child to college is not likely to get them a real education, but rather an expensive indoctrination in (failed) cultural and economic Marxism at the hands of the successors to Oppenheimer’s fellow leftists.
Professor Oppenheimer was like not only a lot of his fellow Marxist academic intellectuals at the time, that is, exceedingly generous with other people’s money in order to vaguely “be nice to everyone,” but he was also like the many non-religious European Jews who had landed in America, abandoned their faith, and then embraced various degrees of Marxism in its stead. Some had already made this transition in Europe. This is a whole other subject, but it is very much threaded throughout Oppenheimer because a) so many of his fellow genius physicists and scientists on the Manhattan Project were former European Jews and b) so many of them were various shades of pink to bright red Marxist, and thus intrinsic threats to a free and democratic America.
While these brilliant minds were needed to make The Atomic Bomb from 1942-1945, they subsequently were very real security threats because of their….divided loyalties…or, said another way, their commitment to genocidal international communism rather than to the well being of their wonderful host country, our beautiful America. And Professor Oppenheimer captured this split or dual personality disorder very well. And so the Father of The Atomic Bomb ended up losing his security clearance in a ridiculous, procedurally deficient, dog-and-pony shadow kangaroo court proceeding that nonetheless had at its core the very real need to protect America from its own openness.
I could say more about this particular subject, but I am saving it up for an essay I have been writing for three years. Maybe longer. It is forthcoming here, because when I read yesterday about the ADL’s fascist Jonathan Greenblatt excoriating his political enemies for calling out American leftist fascism for what it is, I know I have to say whatever I can say to stem the tide of genocidal leftism that began in America in the 1920s, gathered steam among Professor Oppenheimer’s fellow academics in the 1940s, and is today utterly destroying America as a free and democratic country.
So…Oppenheimer. If you have not seen it, it is worth the nearly three hour watch and the ten bucks. I give it two thumbs up.
We saw Oppenheimer in a quaint old-time theater in rural America. Note the diametrically opposed movies: Puke -woke ninja turtles and Barbie vs. very real and important Sound of Freedom and Oppenheimer. Pretty good summation of where Americans are at right now.
Racist, violent, weird New York Times has to go away
When I was a kid, and we are talking over half a century ago, the New York Times newspaper was a daily thing, a weekend-long hit, a week of solid reading starting on Sunday morning, and a year-long fixed institution of America’s cultural and political landscape.
The NYT Sunday Edition was about six to seven inches thick starting around ten in the morning, and included incredible analyses of real estate markets, emerging technology, strange and interesting people and places in America and around the world. The Sunday Times Magazine had a fashion section that even a young boy could relate to, not because I liked fashion per se, but because the female models were beautiful to look at. And occasionally only semi invisible behind their colorful shmatas. Its real estate section was so good that even as a kid I enjoyed reading about stairs, table tops, and bars inside Long Island homes.
The NYT Sunday Edition had enough information for an entire week of fascinating reading on every subject known to modern civilization – science, technology, medicine, history, politics of course. Especially the obituaries and the wedding announcements, all of whom involved who’s-who people who we may not have even realized were major players in whatever given field they were in. Brilliant nuclear engineers who lived quiet lives in New Jersey, but who had invented something awesome that ended up powering all of suburban America suddenly had their great last reveal in the Sunday Edition obituary section. Who knew? He (and she) was a who’s-who!, we exclaimed to each other across the room. So much fascinating and rare information was contained in that one section among a dozen such amazing sections.
In our family, people grabbed their favorite section of the hot-off-the-press NYT Sunday Edition around 10:00AM and, with a plate full of lox and bagels, knish, and maybe some creamed herring with crackers, then grabbed a corner of a couch or a chair at the dining room table and sat and read deeply. Occasionally to exclaim something fascinating to the room full of other lox-and-bagel eaters equally entranced by their own compelling subject, pages turning with a rustle almost like a Fall wind rustling dry sycamore leaves in Central Park. And this weekly ritual involved kids and adults alike. Which I still think is a pretty fascinating statement about the complexity and value the NYT brought to the American table at one time. It was a real repository of valuable information, even if its fashion models occasionally had a nip-slip that intrigued a couple hundred twelve-year-old boys across America once a week.
To say that fifty years ago, and heck even thirty-some years ago when I was in grad school, that the NYT was the acknowledged and designated curator of American culture, literature, movies, arts, food, politics, etc. was no big thing. Conservative icons like William F. Buckley had no problem admitting the NYT’s supremacy, and he also admitted he was merely nipping at the NYT’s heels with his own National Review magazine.
While just a newspaper, the NYT was a massive institution with hundreds of intellectually curious people working in its busy beehive on just about every subject known to modern humans. While the NYT always had some sort of liberal-left tilt, it was mostly nuanced; that was rarely put on public display. Because to do so would be to reveal a deep bias at the great institution that would undercut the paper’s acknowledged claim to being the curatorial keeper of the American flame.
For the NYT to do a Big Political Reveal would be to alienate a large part of its audience, if not all of it. Because while traditionalist Americans did in fact revulse at the NYT’s hideous partisan caricature that greeted them especially in Sunday opinion essays in the 1990s, they still could find bits and pieces of meaning and value here and there in the capacious rubbish heap. Not so in the 2000s, when liberals-with-a-brain-and-a-conscience also began to recoil at the NYT’s ever more brazen partisanship, as seen daily in its “news reporting” that read like an English version of the Soviet Union’s daily Pravda: One political party was always bad, the other was always good. Republicans were always mean and stupid, Democrat politicians were always witty, smart, enjoyed the NYT cross word puzzles, and well intentioned if occasionally murderously drunk or rape-inclined.
You did not have to be a conservative to see the very low value in an outlet that makes no effort to tell the other side of the story. Every intellectual wants to know the full story, and while the NYT catered to people who saw themselves as intellectuals, they no longer (if ever) behaved or thought like intellectuals (curious people open to new information).
Well, well, well, how have times changed. No pun intended, the NYT has indeed really fallen badly since its heyday of the 1940s-1980s. Today, the NYT is a shell of its former self. In every way, including the slim to non-existent and almost meaningless Sunday Edition. Its owners and publishers have so garishly embraced a single corner in the boxing ring that they are in essence burning the wood from the NYT’s walls to keep their lights on and heat going, acting as their own termites gutting their own home to stay alive while simultaneously causing the home to collapse. They make no apologies for telling blatant lies and abusing their remaining readership.
Having avoided almost all things New York Times now for several decades, I still receive the paper’s emails. But what have we here in these digital missives, but cheap traders hawking an embarrassing array of cheap and weird goods: Sleep aids, insect repellant, protein bars, the Mediterranean diet available at a click here or there, and of course, everything imaginable that could be construed or cobbled together to be negative about President Trump.
However, if the once mighty NYT now stoops to deal in tawdry middle class diet aid clickbait and 100% fake news political red meat for its dwindling, clueless, bubble-and-silo’d ultra partisan readership, it has finally gone one too far: Yes, the New York Times supports calls for racial genocide against white/ European farmers (and everyone else who has white skin) in South Africa.
South Africa may have been a fundamentally unfair place for black Africans to live for a few hundred years, but at least it was highly functional and its quality of life for most people was a hell of lot better than the nomadic hunter-gatherer cannibals the Boers encountered in the 1600s. South Africa is now a dysfunctional, dystopian, genocidal racialist state that purposefully discriminates against the European people who grow the country’s food and who cater to the valuable safari tourist trade. South Africa is following in the steps of former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, its neighbor, where racist and genocidal Africans tortured, murdered, and drove out the European people who grew all of the food and did all of the engineering stuff for the entire nation. Zimbabwe sucks. Its public water supplies have dangerous parasites. Its corruption and lawlessness are legendary. So this is where South Africa is headed? And the NYT is cheering it on?
I look at the NYT now with more than fifty years of readership under my belt. Where I used to count the Sunday Hirschfeld comic Nina names hidden among the artist’s slashing style (my own middle child is named Nina in large part because of my childhood-into-adulthood fondness for the Hirschfeld comic search each Sunday) as a kid, I now see not-so-hidden Nazi swastikas and revolutionary torches and pitchforks. How far this institution has fallen. It is a crumbled ruin, a shadow of its former self. It isn’t even a Pravda, whose grinning grotesques at least openly acknowledged the 100% lying propaganda fake news. No, this is a ramshackle, collapsing shell housing a few dozen racist maniacs pounding feverishly away at their typewriter keys, raw and hell bent on a violent and bloody racist revolution across the planet. The once curious and magical place is really gone.
The New York Times deserves to be canceled. Don’t drink water out of the toilet and don’t read the New York Times. Anyone subscribing to this garbage is a shameful person. An outed dingbat, a dumbkopf, a kook, a Nazi or at least a Nazi collaborator.
For shame.
An aggregate of Al Hirschfeld cartoons where his daughter’s name Nina was often hidden, the number told in the artist’s signature. This was the height of the NYT’s more innocent times
America’s Frontier Identity Cuts Both Ways
America is a frontier nation.
It was carved out of the North American continent, geographically speaking, and conquered and purchased from its first inhabitants, the American Indians, sociologically speaking.
This was a frontier within a frontier within a frontier. Walls upon walls of high mountain ranges, surrounded by a vast ocean. As the Europeans steadily pushed inland, they found one Garden of Eden after another after another. This experience forged an identity not seen since the Hebrews left Egypt and trekked through the desert to the Promised Land.
One of America’s great beauties is its identity, the frontier identity, resulting from and coming out of our founding times. This is an idea in most people’s heads that the nation is huge, nearly limitless, nearly boundless. This is an inspiring conception, and it has been bolstered by 250 years of unfettered individual success.
Over the years industrialists, and to an increasing extent Republicans, were accused of having a false sense of natural resource limits. The natural resource exploitation of the 1800s and 1900s gave birth to unimagined material wealth, and also incredible land, water, and soil pollution. Some observers have more or less said this inexact misuse of valuable resources was due to the frontier mentality our early industrialists inherited.
Today, it can easily and more exactingly be said that the Left is living in a fantasy haze of unsustainable frontier mentality. The bizarre notion that tens of millions of illegal border crossers can simply enter any nation, here we are talking about America, and impose enormous costs on the inhabitants without fueling an explosive conflict is one of the standbys for liberals and Democrats today.
That Los Angeles and every other Western city is out of land, air and water (their huge impacts on schools, roads, hospitals, police and sewage infrastructure are barely guessed at) and yet must steadily absorb an increasing number of illegal economic migrants is a testament to the failed frontier mentality of the white liberals promoting this assault on their fellow American citizens. Some say liberals will burn down their house to keep control of it, and I might agree with that, if I thought it were going to be burned down. Instead, I am more likely to believe that we are headed toward some sort of genocide where my house will remain intact, but I and my family will be officially evaporated. To make room for someone “more deserving.”
Only in huge nations like America, and Russia, and China can these fantasies play out. The mental frontier is so vast, so unattainable, that pretty much anything can go, and everything will be alright. Stalin and Mao toyed with it, and used it. Today the American Democrats are following in that path, albeit slower, right now.
I myself am drawn to the frontier mentality that values wilderness, clean streams, large unbroken blocks of forest, farmland, and wildlife habitat. To me, that is the best expression of America’s frontier legacy, and boy do I like to roam in the big woods. A lot of the animals there seem more interesting than a lot of people I encounter.
Tomorrow we all vote, a referendum on this frontier mentality. My own conception has never been very popular with either of the political parties. Instead, we will see one side vying for the ability of a person to make his or her own way on merit alone, and the other side trying to flood the streets with new voters who can artificially breathe life into an unsustainable frontier mentality and create an America sure to fall apart.
And thus, the frontier mentality cuts both ways, for good and for bad, for health and for ruin, for fairness and injustice. Will our old frontier mentality ride in to save the day?
Middle East genocide has many advocates
Genocide in the Middle East is pretty much an ongoing thing, for hundreds of years, if not the past thousand years.
Recently there were a lot of loud marches in America and Europe, most of which involved violence and destruction. The protestors were against the right of self defense of one of the the Middle East’s oldest and smallest minorities, the Jews.
Where these protestors are today as Christians and Yazidis are ethnically cleansed by the hundreds of thousands in northern Iraq, by Muslim attackers, is a big question that must be answered truthfully by people of conscience.
Little kids, children of a few years of age clutching their one little baby doll, are being decapitated by Muslim men in the name of religion. Their fathers were lined up and executed over the past three days, their mothers raped and then executed in mass firing squad action. This is happening right now in northern Iraq, and there has been zero international outrage or action about it.
God knows, the Quakers and their paramilitary wing, the American Friends Service Committee, are such pure seekers of truth and peace, you would expect them to fly over there right now and throw their bodies in front of the Muslim bullets to save the Christians and Yazidis. Or at least to save their children. Or at least stage a protest in downtown Manhattan, or hold some peace vigil on a street corner in some town somewhere. But you would be wrong if you expected these people to actually do something beyond blasting America and Israel for imaginary crimes.
You see, genocide supposedly can only be committed by Christians and Jews, at least according to the UN and its leftist backers. Actual, real, measurable, documentable, visual, filmed, photographed, visceral genocide and ethnic cleansing committed by Muslims against Christians, Yazidis, Kurds, Jews, Zoroastrians, and anyone else in the path of the “religion of peace,” well…..that’s…just…silence…….. There is no justice or even speaking up by the fake, self-anointed proponents of justice and peace.
Here is a question that a lot of people would like to see answered: When will there be a Muslim peace movement? You know, an actual group of Muslims who stand up and say “Not in our name!”
Don’t hold your breath waiting. The American and European Leftists are busy teaching Muslims how to focus their hate onto legitimate targets, as defined by the Left. It only involves a small amount of genocide, and the victims really, really deserve it.
It is all very Stalinesque, as we might expect.
Was today’s MLK event in DC a sham and partisan pep rally?
How odd that none of the following black leaders were invited or present to speak at today’s MLK event on the DC Mall: Clarence Thomas (US Supreme Court), Condoleeza Rice (US NSA), Dr. Ben Carson, Professor Thomas Sowell, Congressman Allen West, Alan Keyes, or sitting US Senator Tim Scott, the only black US Senator…among many other candidates who might have had something to say about MLK and civil rights.
Partisan activist Donna Brazile coordinated the event, but exclaimed surprise that no Republicans spoke much less attended.
Wonder if today’s event was really just a partisan pep rally?
On the other hand, THIS was a genuine human rights rally: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEqnnklfYs
50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr march
On the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s nation-changing march, let us look closely into what has been achieved since that time, and what has failed.
On the list of achievements we have the definite growth in black voting and a far-reaching acceptance, even embrace of dark skin color among European-Americans. The Negro saga in America is both a painful story, and also a story of redemption, as blacks have found their way into any and all professions they desire, including baseball, football, tennis, track and field, medicine, technology, theology, law, academia, entertainment, and government.
That said, there is a key failure that King would have never imagined, and that is the self-segregation of much of the black community, and the seeming desire for perpetual victim status contrary to the facts and opportunities presented. Today, despite enormous advances on every front, black unemployment is three times higher than whites.
I say this in the wake of months of debate about Martin and Zimmerman, and newly surfaced and long-suppressed news items about black-on-black violence and nakedly racist black-on-white violence.
The failure of much of the black community is no secret, and people like me are not going to stand by idly and watch it happen, and we will not fear being called “racist” for identifying the problem and proposing solutions. Nor will I become a racist in reaction to someone else’s racism.
Racists believe in racial determinism. Racists believe that skin color is an indication of both physical and mental ability. Like the vast vast vast majority of European-Americans, I reject those goofball notions. I do embrace a color-blind America that rewards citizens for the quantity and quality of their work, and for the content of their character.
My commitment to the success of the black community is to say that good, well-meaning people like me are here to help, to lend a hand, to support you and your local institutions. I will say that the anti-white racism in the black community is both sad, and alarming. But I will not say that America is a racist nation. Racism is a corrosive, destructive, evil thing, and it eats the people who live it.
When I watch MLK’s speeches, I am overcome with feelings of inspiration and love. MLK saw an America that had potential, whose equal opportunity was the signature of a free society that the American dream promised. Call me naive, but I am sticking to my silly ideas of equality and brotherhood. MLK wanted it that way.