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Dune 2021 Movie Review

Setting aside Regal Theaters’ ear-splitting volume emitting from every theater room as well as the one we sat in, and setting aside our thoughts on the 25 minutes of shallow woke commercial bombardment before the 2021 movie Dune even started, we did enjoy the movie, if not the venue.

A cult classic movie, like the 1984 version of Dune, is usually a cult classic for good reasons: Excellent acting, good props and sets, good costumes, and fealty to author Frank Herbert’s vision all make the 1984 Dune movie a timeless classic with a cult following. You can watch it once a year and never grow tired of it.

Yes, to follow the 1984 version, a viewer must already be somewhat familiar with the book Dune and with its general story line to begin with. But it covers and tracks well with a lot of the 1,000-page book’s territory. For example, the 1984 Dune has a highly compelling and truly evil Baron Harkonnen, literally bathing in the blood of his slain enemies and reveling in the blood of a sexually molested slave boy whose heart plug he just pulled in front of his two nephews (one of whom, the actor Sting, evinces morbid fascination and horror turned to sadistic glee all too well).

Fast forward to Dune 2021, and now our evil Baron Harkonnen is merely deeply brooding and kind of distantly menacing. That he is surrounded by black-clad ministers of evil and a brutish thug nephew, and that he bathes in black used motor oil to “heal,” makes him icky and probably really bad. But we see no blood-baths, no sadistic glee as the vulnerable innocents twitch their last under his daintily painted finger nails. He doesn’t even look for Duke Leto’s ducal signet ring as the helpless prostrate mess breathes its last, a boring scene which contrasts poorly with the believable 1984 Baron, whose unfulfilled lust for the Atreides signet ring is foiled and gives way to howls of rage.

The same distance is observed between the Duke Leto Atreides character of 1984 and 2021. One radiates nobility and dead seriousness, while Oscar Isaac acts here exactly like he acts in every movie in which he appears. Which is to say weak. Oscar Isaac is literally the same character in Dune as he was in Star Wars. He emits no gripping leadership, exudes no magnetic charisma at the head of one of the universe’s greatest armies that we admire in the book and in the 1984 movie.

And again, the 2021 movie’s lack of the Sting character, Harkonnen Feyd Rautha, nephew of Baron Harkonnen, removes what was in the book the evil Harkonnen foil to young and good Paul Atreides. As House Atreides represents good, honor, justice, fairness and clean living, House Harkonnen is everything opposite- murder, coercion, violence, cruelty, sadism, greed etc. Throughout the book Dune, and in the 1984 movie, the two nephews (who turn out to actually be related by blood) ever more tightly circle each other, coming closer and closer to an in-person showdown knife fight to the death. All of this foil effect and symbolism is absent the 2021 movie

While the 2021 movie has fantastic special effects that are blended with just enough gritty sand to make them believable, today’s movie lacks the true grit, grime, and desperate feel of the 1984 version.  The 2021 space ships are superior to the almost pathetic hand-drawn ones of 1984. However, in 1984 the freaky-looking mutant spacing guild navigator folds time and space by shooting light beams out his mouth and ass, thereby connecting two distant parts of the universe and moving an entire army across the distance between the two points “without moving.”

We get no such mouth or ass action in 2021, and it is a true loss. Because no matter how good your special effects are, and no matter how much your movie watchers are supposed to innately know that eight thousand years from now weapons and space travel are really high tech, your viewers nonetheless want to see how that high tech moment is attained. That is the point of watching a movie. Having a bunch of spacing guild navigators show up in 1960s NASA astronaut space suits with their visors filled with a pink fume just does not cut it (when the Emperor’s representatives visit Caladan). That scene is oh-so Star Trek and Star Wars, and we who are in 2021 are  supposed to be oh-so-beyond those passe genres.

As much as I expected to be bothered by the woke racial aspect of the 2021 Dune movie, because Hollywood has done such a good job of butchering otherwise ok movies on the altar of PC, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked. In case you missed it, Hollywood now demands that non-white-skinned people appear in all kinds of movies in roles that were originally written by, of, and for white-skinned people. As a result, this ‘woke’ virtue signaling gone super foolish now has unfunny black women trying to play the humorous roles of truly funny Italian and Jewish guys in Ghost Busters IX or whatever. Go woke, go broke making stupid movies appealing to no one but Hollywood insiders.

But here, in this movie, the roles are believable. Even the role of Dr. Liet Kynes, who in the book is a tough guy, and who in the 1984 movie is played very well by a big tough guy, is now switched to a black lady. I think she carries the role off well and believably. And so do the varied multi-racial Fremen, whose skin tones run from crusty white to deeply black. The 1984 movie had some blacks and American Indians in military roles, which was avante gard for its time. Here, the pursuit of heterogeneity is not forced, and it flows. Thank Shai Hulud.

In sum, the 2021 Dune movie is pretty good. I say A for weapons and action acting, B for acting, A for special effects, C+ for script, A for props and sets. My son said they should have simply used the 1984 script verbatim or close to it, and he is right.

It is easy for me to say that it could have been better, and I am but one lone watcher in a sea of watchers. But then again, I am a customer and my opinion is supposed to count with the people selling this movie. After all, Dune is the first movie I have gone to see in a couple years, maybe even three years. That is because Hollywood has turned out endless nonstop trash and junk that is either not entertaining, or not meaningful, or shallowly PC woke preachy and annoying. At this point, I now simply refuse to transfer my hard-earned wealth into the pockets of Hollywood America haters. When a decent movie comes along that promotes family, loyalty, fearless stoicism and fearless warriors, vision for a better future, risk and sacrifice, why then Hollywood can expect a donation from me.

This Dune was part one, and that is one of its main superior aspects over the 1984 movie, which tried to do too much in too short a time. To serve up the book well and just, one must convey it in bites that can be consumed and digested. Such is part one here. I am looking forward to part two, and hopefully more intensity and inward awareness from the protagonist, Paul M’uad Dib Atreides aka Timothee Chalamet.

America’s Voice gone but not silenced

Sadly, America’s Anchorman Rush Limbaugh has died.

Anyone who regularly listens to his show is not surprised, as the stand-in radio show hosts have been daily for the past couple of weeks. Their daily presence was an indication that Rush was physically unavailable, due to his increasingly severe cancer. And it was only that kind of bar that would keep Rush from sitting at the EIB Golden Microphone himself. His love for what he did was clear.

Rush’s impact on American culture and world-wide politics was unprecedented. He represented the thinking of at least half of America’s citizens. He raised unique questions about the world’s best political system, America, and he posed piercing analysis of the players in it, including members of both major political parties.

Ironically, Rush was a product of a politically partisan mainstream corporate media that had fully merged with the Hollywood entertainment industry. Had the mainstream media actually produced real “news reporters” that simply reported the facts, instead of mounting nonstop daily attacks on Heartland America and the conservatives who represent it, Rush Limbaugh would not have had an audience. Because there would have been no demand for Rush’s service.

Rush’s greatest service to America has been to point out the obvious lies and partisan hypocrisy in the American media and establishment cultural centers, and to be a powerful force for limited government, individual freedom and liberty.

“Rush’s death is a huge loss. He was the best, period. He had a way of articulating the seriousness of politics in a way that didn’t depress the listener. He was a relief to listen to, and of course understood the real nature of politics and politicians better than anyone,” says Central Pennsylvania political activist Ron Boltz.

Right on, Ron. Perfectly said.

I myself was introduced to Rush Limbaugh in 1991 by my friend Kenny Gould in Potomac Maryland, when I was working at the US EPA. Listening to Rush changed my life for the better, and to be frank, I don’t think any radio hosts come close to his performance. Of all the radio hosts I have heard, I believe that Mark Steyn comes the closest to capturing Rush’s analytical way and also his positive, personal way interacting with radio listeners who called in to the show.

America is a poorer place with Rush Limbaugh removed from our national conversation. His quotes and voice will live on, as will the pro-freedom America-first movement he helped start. We will miss you, Rush. Godspeed to wherever you are headed now.

p.s. Rush’s “bumper music” in his radio show was usually the 1970s fun disco/funk stuff from a time when skin color boundaries were being broken by music and generally people felt good about being together. Here is one song that he especially liked: Every 1’s a winner by Hot Chocolate.

p.p.s. for those people who claim that Rush Limbaugh was “racist” etc, they obviously never listened to his radio show, and therefore had no justification for their ridiculous accusation. Rush was the canary in the coal mine for American conservatives, who are now being silenced for “wrongthink” by Big Tech, Big Media, and the Big Political Establishment Uniparty, all of whom try to badmouth and impugn anyone who disagrees with them.

 

Carpe diem

Carpe diem means “seize the day,” and while it may have been an especially well worn adage given from fathers to sons standing over large firewood piles that were not going to stack themselves, it became much more widely appreciated and used as a result of one of those now all too rare things – a meaningful Hollywood movie. Yeah, we have to go back to 1989.

In The Dead Poets Society, now deceased and yet still amazing actor Robin Williams plays the sort of inspirational high school teacher we all wish we had (and I did have several like Williams’ movie character, notably Master Spencer Gates, wrestling coach Master Tim Loose, wrestling coach Master Jay Farrow, and Teacher Agnes Hay). While reading and teaching both good and bad poetry with his adolescent students, with humor and also sincerity, Williams’ character leads them into deeper reflection about their growing self-awareness, hopes, dreams, etc. His teaching all culminates in one line, one forever-lesson that must never be let go of for fear of forgetting to stay focused on the best of life: Carpe diem.

In the movie, carpe diem becomes the watch word, the reminder, the quick phrase meant to sum up all the teaching and to remind young people not to live up to the old adage that ‘youth is wasted on the young’. To always do better, to strive for even better than that, and that by seizing the day and making the most of it, a person realizes her or his fullest potential in a life that is under the best of circumstances so very fleeting, and often is truly fleeting.

At his 102nd birthday, my grandfather Morris lamented “I don’t know where my life went!” Despite his long years, dying just two weeks shy of his 103rd birthday, his life had flown by on wings. And he was a guy who had truly lived every day to its fullest, by nearly every measure.

I mention Morris to give the reader some perspective on the true meaning of carpe diem…when you are blowing out the 102 cramped candles on your birthday cake, and you reflect on your long life, and you openly feel like it has flown by you, you had damned well better have made the most of it, in every way, or you have committed both a tragedy and a crime by wasting your God-given opportunities and potential.

This all came to me in recent weeks because of the “permanent retirement” of several people with whom I was close, one way or another. Their sudden and unexpected deaths stuck a sharp stick in my ribs, reminding me of carpe diem.

One of my friends is, or was, US Army Col. John “Jack” Francis Keith, who dropped dead in his foyer three weeks ago after walking the dog, at the tender age of 77. Jack was one of the most amazing and humble men I have known, not necessarily because of his fascinating career, but because of his “way.”

We met when Jack was hired to start up the brand new Pennsylvania Parks and Forests Foundation, and he then came to me for help finding an office in which to set up shop. Naturally, I found him office space one floor below me at 105 North Front Street in Harrisburg, one of Dick Etzweiler’s amazing historic buildings. We immediately bonded and worked together on a variety of projects, as well as hunting together, socializing together, him always gently mentoring me (the poor sonofabitch was a hell of a kindly optimist).

In 2001, Jack got me to acquire my first custom longbow at the Eastern Traditional Archery Rendezvous. It was crafted by bowmaking legend Mike Fedora, the “modern grandfather of traditional bowmaking,” if any of that makes sense, and as it remains an extension of my very soul, I still hunt with it. While he was mostly silent about his Vietnam combat tour, Jack once briefly told me how he had earned a Silver Star for combat valor, among other medals: Their forward position being overrun, like the movie “We Were Soldiers,” the U.S. Army soldiers had backed themselves into a defensive circle around and amongst a copse of trees. Jack distinctly remembers pulling the cord that detonated a dozen mortars or small cannons leveled waist-high around their hastily thrown up perimeter in the dark, and then in the morning finding Vietnamese soldiers both on the ground and literally nailed up to the trees by the long steel flechettes (long nails or spikes made into arrows) blasted shotgun-like from the mortars. He described the various rifles brought into action by the Viet Cong also being pinned across the soldiers’ chests by the same swarm of steel mini-arrows, the carrier and gun frozen in mid-stride.

Like I said, Jack was a hell of a guy. I could go on and on about what he did, the outdoor adventures we had, and how his friendship improved my life. I know that other people also feel the same way about their friendship with Jack.

And other beloved people have also died, one as recently as in the past 24 hours. Joanna was not just a loving mother, daughter, and sister, in terms of career she had “made it to the big time.” Serving as a general counsel attorney at the US EPA, where I started my career oh so long ago, Joanna started feeling not so good just weeks ago. Now she is gone, in her mid sixties, and the people who loved her and who drew strength and deep pleasure from her company, including her own aged parents, are bereft.

If I could ask Joanna one thing, one reflection on the high value of our lives before she floated away, it would be “Should I carpe diem?

I know what she and Jack would say in response: Do not take any day for granted, make the very most of every day and minute that you are given, gather ye rosebuds while ye may; you never know when it will end.

And so, as these positive, constructive, giving people leave us, as is the end for each and every one of us here, I keep thinking carpe diem. And you should too, I believe. Whatever your dream is, whatever your good and positive passion is or could be, perhaps subdued because of financial fears or some other challenge, carpe diem. Make it happen, make life happen to its fullest, before it is too late.

The kind of Vietnam-era US Army flechettes that shaped a young Jack Keith’s life as he moved forward

A full bag in 2004 (where oh where did that time go?). Me on the left, Jack Keith on the right, and Tim Schaeffer in the middle. If anyone could write a book on carpe diem, it is Tim, who got his PhD and JD simultaneously and now runs the PA Fish & Boat Commission

My wife says that Jack Keith was the most handsome man she ever met. Right on.

Jack in later years with wife Dottie

A remarkably young looking Robin Williams, back when he looked old and serious to my 20-something eyes. He is saying Carpe Diem like he means it.

Savage tribalism vs. the Red Pill

In recent discussions with people of varied perspectives about political choices in the upcoming election, what has struck me is the high volume of tribalism involved in selecting who to vote for. We can also call this political party partisanship, which it is, but at its core this simplistic solution to complex problems is really just tribalism.

Tribalism is Us versus Them, Black vs. White, Good vs. Evil, Democrat vs. Republican etc., and at its core, it represents human savagery. Savagery because tribalism requires little analysis or critical thinking, and because people act out their unconsidered partisan politics in brutal ways that would make them blush in any other venue.

Sure, people living in America have a wide variety of reasons for voting the way they do – Biblical values, atheistic values, pop culture values, no values, but if you watch the YouTube videos of intensely partisan people responding to questions about why they are supporting a given candidate, you will often see that they really don’t know the particulars. All they know is Orange Man Bad, Republicans bad, white people bad, capitalism bad, and so on. Don’t push them too hard, because they can get upset quickly when asked to think about their actions and decisions, or to explain them. Tribalism has pretty much shut off the I Can Think For Myself button in their head.

The over-arching question for the next three weeks is, Can enough people take the Red Pill to overcome their simplistic tribalism in this election?

Recall that in the scifi movie The Matrix, good guy Morpheus offers our clueless young man two choices. He can take the blue pill, and he will wake up in his bed with vague memories of some weird discussion, and a red pill. The red pill opens his eyes and he suddenly sees reality, not silly tribalism. People who have watched the movie know that Neo takes the red pill, which wakes him the hell up to an uncomfortable reality, which he eventually changes through his informed actions.

And so as the mainstream media-Democrat Party-Hollywood entertainment complex has created an evil dream-like “Matrix” environment, you, me, individual Americans are taking the red pill and waking the hell up is imperative.

Today, the red pill means getting voters to read www.breitbart.com and www.thegatewaypundit.com and www.zerohedge.com and #walkaway and the Black exit from the Democrat Party slave plantation among many others sources of information. Anything to get voters off of tribal MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR etc. Daring people to open their minds, to free their minds, is step one to ending tribalism. Getting voters to actually take the red pill, cut through the mainstream media fog, stop behaving like savages, and realize that there is no Orange Man Bad, just false choices that work against their own interests, is the hard part.

Take the damned red pill, Carla! Open your mind!

 

 

 

 

 

iHeart Radio’s Gillette Hari Kari Moment

Over the past couple of weeks, iHeart Radio has embarked on its own style of Gillette razors campaign, where a successful brand with a wide following abruptly changes everything it does and thereby deliberately antagonizes and alienates its own customer base.

Recall that last year Gillette had a campaign against straight white men, families, and religion that revealed how clueless liberals are, despite their claims of being “open minded.”

Gillette’s discriminatory ads revealed the stereotypes of regular Americans that liberals live under, and how warped the world of Hollywood, New York City, the entertainment industry, and modern cancel culture are. The ensuing hue and cry by smeared, racially profiled, gender shamed, antagonized, and alienated buyers of Gillette products resulted in Gillette losing gazillions of dollars of business, as former devotees purchased hair gels and razors made by Gillette’s competitors, instead. Whatever Gillette was after, they reaped the exact opposite result, to their own great loss.

Well, if you listen to AM radio talk radio, here in Harrisburg it is WHP580, then you are probably listening to an iHeart Radio station, and now they are following Gillette’s lead full steam ahead.

For decades, talk radio stations have followed a pretty standard and successful format, where the talk show host – Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Bob Durgin, Ken Matthews, Buck Sexton et al – speaks, shares his or her views on politics and culture, and then also has some product advertising. Sprinkle in some general news reporting by some media outlet, usually Fox News these days, and you have a 2-4-minute break, at the end of which the talk show host returns and picks up where they left off. This format has worked like a Swiss watch for about thirty years, and suddenly, iHeart Radio has thrown it overboard.

Well, let’s call this like it is: Man overboard!

It is a catastrophic man overboard moment, because iHeart Radio has not only abandoned the working format, they are introducing an enormous amount of content and political commentary totally contrary to the hosts in whose show this new content is appearing. For example, iHeart Radio now plays all kinds of oldies songs shorts from the 1970s-1990s and has bizarre commentary about them, has interviews with Hollywood actors who are well on record as hating the talk show host the audience is presently listening to, encourages listeners to enjoy the benefits of covid19’s impact on nature (fewer humans are alive to ruin the natural world), and a bunch of socialist entertainment industry pap and commentary. Topped off with NBC News literally reading verbatim China’s talking points against this administration and against America.

Literally all of this new content runs contrary to the interests and educated beliefs held by the listening audience. Not to mention it all takes up time that the audience wants to be listening to their talk show host. It literally stretches into five minutes of Hollywood news and entertainment crap. My favorite bizarre moment was this chipper baby-talking radio lady, who could have been a suburban soccer mom anywhere, announcing the tour of “the up and coming rapper named Pitbull!”

Her enthusiasm was so obviously artificial and fake, especially because American soccer moms don’t normally listen to up-and-coming violent rap thugs named Pitbull. All cheery like and all.

Now surely iHeart Radio is run by some pretty smart people. It has to be. It is, after all, a huge business with a lot to gain and a lot to lose. Smart people usually make business choices that reinforce brand loyalty and reward their customers with more of what their customers want. So one cannot help but come to the conclusion here that iHeart Radio is deliberately trying to alienate and push away the very audience that has made them successful, just like Gillette did.

But why would iHeart Radio staff try to alienate their own audience?

Because like the goofball liberals running Gillette’s self-detonating social commentary advertisements, the same mindset at iHeart Radio informs the same type of liberal-in-a-bubble that they can feed us America First idiots anything, even things toxic to us, and we will just eat it up. Because they see us as deplorable morons with no independent thoughts and no ability to think for ourselves. Which is of course not true, because talk radio audiences are the best informed of all media audiences in America. Just ask the New York Times! True fact.

And so we are watching iHeart Radio follow the same path as Gillette and other virtue signalling companies, whose leadership and staff mistakenly thought they could “educate” their customers by belittling them and driving them away. Incidentally, Fox News is also going in this direction. If you listen to Fox News radio briefs these days, you will hear “news” that is 100% overt policy assaults on the Trump administration, with no rebuttal or other viewpoint followup provided. With the two Murdoch boys running it, Fox News is now just part of the larger Democrat Party mainstream media.

If iHeart Radio is going to commit hari kari (Japanese ritual suicide), then maybe One America News should be exploring its options for providing radio listeners with just one small space to be free, to call our own. Free from the monotonous, poisonous uniculture of Hollywood’s vacuous, heavily leftist entertainment industry.

This little space on the radio dial is all we want. But is iHeart Radio listening?

Screenshot of iHeart Radio’s web page…no “Contact Us” or feedback page. No phone number. Just “hand made in New York City”…by liberals who just don’t care

iHeart Radio wants to answer our questions, so long as we are satisfied with inaccurate off-topic stock replies. Note that they only provide a “Yes” button, and no “No” button. Hello? Is anybody listening?

 

collusion with Russia meddling is real and happening

No doubt about it, Russia has been meddling in America’s elections for decades. It is one of the weaknesses that an open society like ours has, and which a closed, authoritarian society like Russia (and China) do not have. The nature of our democratic process leaves America vulnerable to tampering from without and to treason from within. And in our universities, our corporations, and our news outlets. And so it is not news anywhere that some Americans have been colluding with Russia in its meddling since forever, like since the 1920s.

Looking back on the 1930s responses to open treason and the 1950s “Red Scare” and the resulting Hollywood blacklisting of Americans openly colluding with Russia in the attempted murder of America, it seems the problem’s surface was only scratched then. Groups like the ACLU, founded by open communists (Roger Baldwin – “Communism is the goal”), are still active and incredibly destructive today.

And even more so, we have a a political party whose leaders now openly identify as “Democratic Socialists.” They are not even hiding their actual allegiances any longer.

Yes, we see the American young people flocking to this Democratic Socialism Free Stuff banner. It is surprising and painful, because it is so at odds with the self-reliance and independence that marked American culture from our very beginning.

It is a fact that my wife and I have been complicit with others in our generation and the generation before us in absolutely spoiling rotten our kids, and priming them for this Free Stuff movement. Giving them everything, demanding from them very little. And sonofabitch, wouldn’t ya know it, when the little bastards grew up to teens and twenties, they actually expected everything for FREE. We trained our own kids to be this way.

Even though I had done my best to require from my kids home chores before dinner, or before fun time, I think I was like a lot of other old fashioned dads who also collided with our beloved wives on this.

As dads, we were boys once. And as boys, we in our generation were expected and often aggressively forced by our dads to work our butts off all the time, to do chores, in order to earn TV time, to earn a bicycle, to earn telephone time after homework was done, and so on. God bless our good wives today, they love our children so very much, they can’t imagine hurting their feelings by always backing us up on enforced chores. Making the children do chores gets in the way of their homework, ya know…hey, are you doing your homework or scrolling through endless humorous memes over there?

God help the dad who demands chores from the kids! Even my own son, my pride and joy, a good kid, the ‘mini me’ who is supposed to grow up to be smarter, stronger, faster than me, when tasked with helping fill our wood sheds with enough split firewood for the winter said “Well, that doesn’t sound like very much fun.” And then pouted about not being able to spend that time with his buddy.

So now America has one, maybe two generations of young people who really expect everything to simply be handed to them. Without having to work for it at all. Free participation trophies for everyone. Contrast this to the old days, a mere thirty or forty years ago, where young people expected to eventually inherit from their parents, but only after working very hard to achieve much on their own.

And so here we are, Crazy Bernie Sandals and every single other Democrat candidate for president, is promising free everything for everyone, like free college tuition, free income, free housing, free health care, including for law-breaking illegal aliens who illegally invade America and who have neither put money into the collective taxpayer pot nor will they. America’s own material success and wealth are being used as a weapon against America.

Obviously this free stuff movement is financially and socially unsustainable, because resources have limits and it is innately unfair. But that is not the point for the Free Stuff movement. The point is to use that lure and false promise to buy enough votes from gullible kids and illegal aliens to attain communism in America through our democratic process. That is, to turn America into a communist country.

Crazy Bernie Sandals honeymooned in the old Soviet Union Russia, because he was and still is a proud authoritarian communist. But he is not alone in this view; every other Democrat candidate has said more or less the same things he has said, sometimes differing by a few shades of grey.

Leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917, which is when Russia became an authoritarian communist country exporting its cruelty abroad, there were two movements to achieve communism in Russia. One group was the Bolsheviks, whose belief in Bolshevism required a violent overthrow and replacement of the existing government. Their competitors were the Mensheviks. They believed in the eventual slow drip-drip-drip overthrow of the Russian government, one chip at a time, one government position at a time, one vote at a time, using the democratic process to slowly implement their goals until the government was dominated by communists. And only then they would use force to implement their authoritarianism.

Know what the Mensheviks were called?

The Russian Social Democratic Party.

Sound familiar to something happening today right here in America?

One call I won’t take

Phony, fraudulent telemarketer calls are super annoying, and like you, I am fed up with them.

Another phony call just arrived, called “Call of the Wild,” a new movie loosely based on a Jack London book by the same name.

Jack London’s stories of tenuous life in the Yukon and Alaskan interiors are the stuff of pre-internet American boyhood. Just like coonskin Davey Crockett hats were all the rage among American boys in the 1950s and 1960s after Fess Parker starred in the same-named TV show, so too did London inspire many young men to get their forestry degree, build a canoe, cut down their grandmother’s favorite apple tree with a hatchet, or move to Alaska. His stories of nail-biting survival and creeping or sudden death in the boreal forests and frigid back country rang true, and a number of movies have been made about them. Some better than others, but all of them pretty good just because the story line is great.

London’s story about a young man caught at sundown in the winter time Alaskan bush, unprepared for the minus-forty-degree night, who gets down to his last match and finally succeeds at lighting a life-saving fire, only to have the snow from the branches above fall and smother the fire, is classic.

This latest iteration involves an unrealistic CGI human-like dog that giddy un-wilderness urbanites will fawn over. It also includes Harrison Ford, a man blessed with poor acting skills who nonetheless has landed a huge list of Hollywood roles and who made a huge pile of money. Play acting and playing dress-up; not exactly brain surgeon level or even bank teller level stuff.

And to be fair, Ford’s best movie roles are those that fit his kind of simple, bland, taciturn persona, like the Jack Ryan character, or Indiana Jones, or the emotion-less Blade Runner cyborg cop. Or those roles that are actually enhanced by his lack of acting skills, like Star Wars‘ Han Solo. Whenever Harrison Ford is tasked with actually acting, his lack of nuance or depth shines through bright and shiny. One suspects that this Call of the Wild will be one such role and performance. Or maybe not, because the 2020 movie poster for it shows Ford looking all serious and taciturn.

Now, because I am a wilderness hunter, fisherman, and trapper, any new movie like Call of the Wild immediately gets my attention. Bad acting or no, evil corrupt anti-America Hollywood or no, CGI human dogs or no, it is a movie I would naturally be inclined to go see. It is about nature and outdoor adventure, my favorite things. However, Harrison Ford finally performed honestly the other day and thereby blew up any chance of me seeing his film, and probably many other people feel the same way.

Last week, Ford appeared on not-funny Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show, and blasted Preident Trump, calling him “a son-of-a-bitch.”

Out of nowhere, and for no particular reason. Other than pandering to Hollywood.

What a shame, because at one time Ford was a spokesman for Conservation International, a worthy environment protection organization. His other opinions about so-called climate change and carbon reduction are the usual Hollywood hypocritical hilarity, because Ford is also the guy who flies his own plane on a 400-mile round trip to get a single hamburger to satisfy his craving for fast food. Talk about a carbon footprint, and yet his lecturing never ends.

Now, everyone is entitled to their opinions, and like Ford, I am entitled to mine, too. And my opinion is that I will not support with movie ticket purchases those celebrity Hollywood actors who insult me, my values, my lifestyle, or the people I vote for. So I will not be answering Harrison Ford’s Call of the Wild. Though I might play it on one of the many black market bootleg websites, just so I can take from Ford a tiny bit of what Ford took away from me: A good feeling.

Below is just one video of Harrison Ford actually whining about his wild success, as if it ruined him as some sort of serious artiste. Oh please. Ford is just another out of touch, spoiled rotten Hollywood jerk. Where is comedian Ricky Gervais when we need him most? Every Hollywood actor like Harrison Ford should have to spend a week with Gervais following him or her everywhere they go, commenting on their vapid lives and stupid statements.

Arsonists burning down America accuse NRA + good gun owners

If you have any interest in what is happening in America, and no I do not mean the latest Hollywood family-rotting junk movie release or the latest sound-alike violent-thug rap song on iTunes, but rather the latest and most serious sociopolitical developments in the greatest and freest nation in the world, then you must watch the brief footage of last week’s Philly shoot-out (posted below).

Nothing captures what is happening in America, and why it is happening, better than the headline-grabbing shoot-out between ultra violent career criminal Maurice Hill and the Philadelphia police.

  • Despite facing scores of Philly police officers armed with AR15s and M4 automatic versions of the AR15 rifle, Hill was neither killed nor did he out-gun the police facing him, though he did lightly wound six officers who were brave enough to boldly charge into the building in which he held a hostage
  • Hill is a many-time convicted illegal drug and gun felon who was legally barred from owning any guns at all, including a sporting rifle like the AR15
  • Hill is a many-time convicted violent felon, whose many violent crimes with firearms landed him in court many times, but not doing any real jail time afterwards. As a result, Hill was a classic catch-and-release career criminal who should be in jail for decades but who is free among good law abiding people to purvey his happy life of crime, all gratis of liberal judges and district attorneys.
  • Hill did not have to commit his latest violent crime, but he was enabled by white liberals who hold that criminals like Hill are “victims” and law-abiding Americans are criminals
  • Hill was cheered on by dozens of local citizens, who also aggressively jeered the police officers there, threw trash on them, and challenged them to physical conflict
  • Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney immediately showed up on the scene and blamed the police, blamed guns, blamed private ownership of guns, blamed the National Rifle Association, blamed the American voters and taxpayers. Kenney did not blame career criminal Maurice Hill for the situation, nor did he blame the culture of violence in which Hill grew up and which is reinforced daily by violent Hollywood movies, violent anti-police rap music, an activist media that blames American freedoms, and white liberals like Mayor Kenney

For decades white liberals like mayor Jim Kenney have performed arson on America, and now they are blaming law-abiding gun owners and the non-gun-owning citizens who support their rights for the resulting conflagration.

For many decades white liberals in politics, in the media, in academia, in public and private schools, in unions, in the destructive anti America groups like the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center, and especially in the corrupting Hollywood media-entertainment octopus complex have done their utmost to set fire to America and burn it to the ground.

White liberals’ singular goal appears to have been to eventually re-make America into some different new utopia polity with an all- powerful government at its center, instead of the sovereign citizen voter whose power has always been diffused across the country, as demonstrated by the genius Electoral College. Having a powerful centralized government and no individual rights will allow liberals to force Americans to live exactly the way liberals think they must live, to make the “correct” choices.

And part of this white liberal arson program is to then blame the victims of their arson. Which means that after destroying America’s cities, ruining the families and communities of American Blacks and turning them into part of the fake liberal grievance factory, creating lawlessness by willfully failing to enforce the law (immigration, gun laws) on the one hand and then breaking the law on the other, white liberals can turn around and demand more “gun control” and demonize innocent Americans who have done nothing wrong.

Disarming law-abiding citizens is the primary goal of white liberals. Liberals have no interest in controlling crime, as proven by their judges’ and DAs’ failure to enforce gun laws on the books across the nation. Rather, they seek to remove the one great barrier to their dreams of unfettered tyranny, an armed citizenry.

White liberals own the Philly shoot-out. Maurice Hill is a direct product of white liberals and the Democrat Party; Maurice Hill is the left’s latest and greatest creation. Because Hill both implements the violent chaos and bodies in the street that the left needs to blame their political enemies, and he embodies the fake grievance victim who is never responsible for his violent actions.

Maurice Hill enables the Democrat Party to blame guns, blame America, blame Americans, and so the Democrat Party will continue to produce as many Maurice Hills as they can. I think there were about 56 Maurice Hills in Chicago last week, and about 34 the week before, despite all of Chicago’s cutting-edge “gun control.”

Like Chicago, Philadelphia now burns, and the Democrat Party cheers.

You want to end violent crime, and help American Blacks? Stop voting for Liberal Democrats, and start voting for officials who promote old-fashioned values like following the law, making good choices, foregoing immediate gratification for eventual big success, self reliance, community, family.

Here is the Democrat Party’s Maurice Hill 1, 2, 3, 4

100 years of Liberalism = mass shootings

Since the 1917 violent triumph of Socialism in Russia, communists have more aggressively spread their efforts world-wide. There is no secret about this. Lots of official information outlets of openly socialist and communist organizations precisely describe their goals and targets, past and present. Cambodia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, now Venezuela, all fell victim to socialism.

Where socialists have failed to openly gain control in democracies, like America and Britain, because their intended victims have more say through voting, they have mostly gone vague. Vagueness allows socialists to talk in circles and in generalities, avoiding the unpleasant hard realities their policies will truly mean for hard working Americans and Britons.

In that vein, for decades the Democrat Party purveyed a more palatable-sounding ideology than socialism or communism. They became Liberals. Liberalism, now called “progressivism” and its advocates “progressives,” is still the same old evil socialism; it is just more incremental than the overtly revolutionary form of the 1917 Soviet Union’s tyranny.

And so for one hundred years, liberals in American government have steadily introduced policy after policy, regulation after regulation, textbook after textbook, slowly changing American culture from the inside. For one hundred years liberals have used America’s democratic form of government (technically America is a republic, but loosely speaking we are governed by democratic principles) to achieve non-democratic outcomes. That is, liberals have used America’s freedoms and government to implement anti-freedom and anti-America policies and changes to our national fabric.

In general, American liberals have sought greater government power over the citizenry, a diminishment of individual rights, a lessening of the individual ability to stand up to and prevail against the kind of overwhelming government power America was originally founded to prevent. Their assault on America has at its core a determined corrosion of American identity and norms; that makes it easier to sell their anti-America, anti-freedom laws, regulations, and policies.

So, for example, by inverting the First Amendment, liberals have removed God from the public square. To liberals, any practice of religion in public is officially establishing religion. By gaining control of public schools through teacher’s unions, and then removing God’s values from those schools, liberals removed the ancient barriers and social mores that glued Americans together.

We can go down a list of liberal laws and policies that have been inflicted on America, and we can talk about how liberals have captured institutions like media, entertainment (Hollywood’s violent movies and ultra-violent video games), and academia, but let’s just say that after one hundred years of liberals tearing away at America’s social fabric, they have succeeded in destroying a great deal of what held America together.

Hearing liberals talk about more gun control is like watching people remove the wheels from my car, and then tell me how dangerous it will be to drive it and how I need to just give them the car keys.

I grew up in a rural community that had more guns, and more cows, than people. We all owned guns from an early age, and we suffered no gun crime. No mass shootings, no individual shootings. My 7th grade biology teacher reloaded my 7×57 Mauser rounds for me. In 7th and 8th grades I took my deer rifle on the school bus from home to Park Forest Junior High School in State College. The gun was placed inside my locker, and at the end of the school day, we students who had brought our rifles joined together to go deer hunting at some local farm or forest. Someone’s parent was in charge of picking us up and taking us to the hunt, and someone else’s parent was in charge of picking us up and taking us all back home at dark. It worked just fine.

Fast forward 40 years and America is a different place. School kids are shooting each other, unlike any previous time. The wheels have come off!

What changed is the American culture that supported responsible gun ownership was weakened by liberals, who have sought to eliminate private gun ownership. The founding American culture that created and reinforced values like self-reliance, personal responsibility, deferring immediate pleasure and gratification in lieu of future success, and making good choices was all tossed away in liberal-controlled public schools and colleges.

Instead of good solid time-proven American values, liberals taught bozo ideas like “challenge authority” — meaning disrespect your parents, having babies out of wedlock is fun, killing babies at will is freedom, who needs Home Economics and a hard work ethic when the government will just give you taxpayer-funded welfare money, and so on. So the culture of America changed, and now many of our youngest seem incapable of living up to basic American norms while still being presented with basic American freedoms, like gun ownership.

Liberals created this failed culture in which young Americans shoot each other. Just look at every major American city: They are nearly all run by liberals, home to the latest and best liberal ideas, and yet they suffer the greatest social failure, financial failure, and violence.

Liberalism is not the solution, but the cause of all that ails America today, especially the mass shootings in liberal-controlled schools.

And so liberals now demand gun confiscation, and phony “universal background checks” that are designed to create lists of who has what guns, to make gun confiscation easier.

Liberals created all these problems in the first place, and more liberal policy ideas like “gun control” are simply adding fuel to the fire.

Many years ago I worked with a woman who specialized in creating problems and crises in our office, and once the interpersonal conflicts were going hot, she would then swoop in and aggressively demand to “solve” the very problems she had created. Her proposed solutions always left her with more authority and direct control over everyone around her. This is what the liberals and the Democrat Party are doing with guns. They created all this mass shooting business, and now they want to exploit the violence crisis they created to further their assault on the rights of law-abiding gun owners, who have no connection to crime but who stand between liberals and their dream of absolute tyrannical control over everyone in America, like their socialist brethren everywhere else.

At a certain point normal Americans have to wake up to this obvious situation, and stop voting for liberals and their deceptive ideas. Liberalism is not good for America. Turn it back, restore our founding principles as America’s norms, take back our government and our institutions from destructive liberalism.

Here (below) is retired US Army Col. David Grossman talking about why children are now killing each other. Grossman was the guy who taught American special forces troops how to overcome their natural human inhibitions in order to quickly kill their opponents, and who then witnessed an alarming generational change in how American youth perceived killing. If you care about what causes mass shootings, watch Grossman’s fascinating videos.

 

Paddling with Hollywood

Cheerfully our little crew paddled down the river, enjoying small Class II splashy whitewater rapids here and there, swift enough currents everywhere else that we need not really paddle much, if at all.

Turning aft, I squawked captain-like from my otherwise supine perch in the bow “Hard to the oars, ye pack o’ worthless lazy bones!”

The kids would laugh a bit at my best captain o’ the high seas bit, tepidly dip their paddles in the water like they were thinking about trying to paddle, and then go back to chattering amongst themselves about school, fellow students in school, classes, interpersonal politics and Politics with a capital P in school. Overall it was what had been hoped for when I made reservations with the outfitter the week before. Time with my kids and their friends, in nature, floating down a river, watching bald eagles, osprey, mergansers, wood ducks, migratory songbirds, deer, and on the lookout for bear.

Pausing to listen for and then spot white waterfalls cascading steeply out of the high canyon walls, I, the lookout, would occasionally point out where the crew could perhaps look up to if but briefly admire these little moments of grandeur passing by us. They did look the first half dozen times, and then tired of being bothered to do anything. I ended up dragging my hands in the cold foamy water, hoping to create some drag that would necessitate some serious paddling. When my hands turned red and then a purplish blue and stopped responding to commands to open or close, I gave up on influencing the kids in any way and just quietly admired the ride.

About two and a half hours into the drift, the kids started to sing. At first these were summer camp songs, and then theme songs from movies complete with beat-box noises from my daughter, and then songs from movies, mostly being rap-like. Their voices were sweet, and they would constantly run over each other, and then good-naturedly correct someone, and then try to get back on track in harmonic unison. Being of free and easy spirit, the kids were into having fun, and they would individually or together abruptly break out into a song-ending editorialization about the singer, the performer, the musician, or the movie the particular song came from.

The Earth Day environmental song, apparently popular now, was a big hit on our boat. They sang it over and over and over.

“And the zebra, I like how he says ‘I’m a zebra, I am striped, and I don’t know if I am black or if I am white’,” said the girl of this apparently surprising revelation, unaware that Dennis Prager, Rush Limbaugh, Larry Elder, and a slew of other radio talk show hosts and conservative politicians have been preaching an equal opportunity color-blind society for many decades.

And after about half an hour of back and forth chatter about this environmental planet cartoon movie and its song, it dawned on me that these kids are deeply enthralled by Hollywood and its entertainment business. They and their young impressionable minds are completely captured by images and made-up voices from highly paid songwriters and movie scripters, whose lines become memorized as moral guide posts along their young lives.

Many adults over the past ten or twenty years have bemoaned the advent of and then exponential increase in realistic at-home video games, the prevalence of handheld devices, and the trance-like state our children have grown up in glued to and Matrix-like plugged into these things. Well, I saw that we have transitioned beyond the gluing-in-and-tuning-out stage where we had to scream two inches from our kids’ face to ask them what they wanted for dinner.  Now we see the fruits of others’ indoctrination labors playing out over a decade or more: Our kids are wholly owned little robots of the entertainment industry, which is vacuous, morally bankrupt, materialistic, shallow, value-less, corrosive, and meaningless. No wonder our kids parrot all kinds of silly nonsense that emanate from movies and popular music; they are constantly bathing their brains in it.

And people like me thought the fight for America’s soul was a political one in Washington, DC!

Nope.

I learned on that day-long raft trip through spectacular natural beauty that the fight for a solid America is still at home, where we thought we had some influence, and we still might, and on college campus, where our parenting has been outsourced to welcoming Marxist professors eager to turn our kids inside out.

Yes, on this trip I had been paddling along with my kids and their friends, enjoying their happy company, but really I had been secretly and unknowingly paddling with Hollywood that whole way, and did not realize it until the very end, when I could say nothing.

The sea captain and his crew taking a break in a wondrous, magical waterfall in the middle of nowhere, on the run from Hollywood and pop culture