Category Archives: Books and movies

America in the eyes of its domestic enemies

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This is the text that comes with the trailer:

Having made the second-highest-grossing political documentary of all time, the team behind 2016: Obama’s America is now, as promised, following up with America. Sending up some fireworks of his own to rival the ones 2016 generated, producer-writer and kind-of host Dinesh D’Souza says of his new docu, “We answer the central moral challenge of America’s critics, which is that America’s greatness is based on theft, plunder and oppression.” Listen for other red-button phrases from interviewees describing the USA as “the new evil empire” and a “predatory colonial power” as well as referring to Mount Rushmore as “a symbol of oppression and genocide to our people.” Director John Sullivan’s film comes out two years after its predecessors — hitting theaters on the Fourth of July.

It is these enemies who are now running America. There are some who believe that America can be restored to what it once was. But then I think of D’Souza’s up coming trial and I say to myself, it’s all over for America, all over.

The Basic Axioms and Principles of a Free Market Economy

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I didn’t even know this existed until today but have just come across it. It is a presentation I gave at the IEA in London in 2011 just as my Free Market Economics was being published. The sound is not that good but the points are a good deal less fluffy than the kinds of things you usually hear in such lists. This is not a homily about how economic activity involves trade offs or that incentives are important. This is about how the world is filled with uncertainty and that governments are hopeless at directing our resources in a productive way. This is about do’s and don’ts which is what a good economics book needs to set out.

“A lot of these guys are basically shysters and crooks”

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James Delingpole has a new book out, The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism: The Left’s Plan to Frighten Your Kids, Drive Up Energy Costs, and Hike Your Taxes!. He is being interviewed here by Ed Driscoll.

“I’m not a scientist and actually given what I’ve seen of scientists in my experiences following the global warming scam, I’m glad I’m not a scientist because a lot of these guys are basically shysters and crooks. They’re not some kind of white-coated elite with a special hotline to the truth. In fact, they’re just ordinary guys and girls trying to earn a living like the rest of us but slightly more dodgily than the rest of us in the one or two egregious cases.”

The left seems to have a system for achieving power by finding some element in every issue that is a giant step too far and then harping on it. No one is uninterested in “the environment” and everyone wants to preserve the planet whatever that might mean. But global warming is so inane and so lacking in evidence that it separates those who have common sense from some kind of herd of conformity. But it also absorbs almost all of the attention so that people who are not interested in seeing the Great Barrier Reef, let us say, ruined if it is in danger from some commercial proposal are still seen as outsiders to these crusaders for a green environment. Their extremism is the problem and their leaders are to an incredible extent in it for the money and political power it gives.

100-year collection of 85,000 historic films now on youtube

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This is quite extraordinary if you are the sort of person for whom history is of interest. The above video of the Rolling Stones arriving in Sydney in 1965 is one example out of 85,000 news reels that are now on Youtube. This is the full story found in Variety under the heading, British Pathé Uploads Entire 85,000-Film Archive to YouTube in HD:

British Pathé, the U.K. newsreel archive company, has uploaded its entire 100-year collection of 85,000 historic films in high resolution to YouTube.

The collection, which spans 1896 to 1976, comprises some 3,500 hours of historical footage of major events, notable figures, fashion, travel, sports and culture. It includes extensive film from both World War I and World War II.

“Our hope is that everyone, everywhere who has a computer will see these films and enjoy them,” British Pathé GM Alastair White said in a statement. “This archive is a treasure trove unrivaled in historical and cultural significance that should never be forgotten. Uploading the films to YouTube seemed like the best way to make sure of that.”

Personalities captured in the newsreels include Princess Diana, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro, John Lennon, Salvador Dali, Mother Teresa, Muhammad Ali and Charlie Chaplin. British Pathé already makes numerous clips available on its website free for personal use, and it licenses the archive to TV and film producers and other companies and organizations.

This is the link to the entire collection.

The invisible woman made to appear

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I have seldom experienced the tension of a movie in the way I did when watching The Invisible Woman . It is based on a 1991 book about a love affair between Charles Dickens and a young 18 year old girl, Ellen Ternan. Nothing of their correspondence has survived so the book was a recreation of how it might have been based on the few facts that are actually known. The Age reviewer gives it a very reluctant three stars but more accurate is the 84% given to it by audiences at Rotten Tomatoes. Even the critics were at 76%. And if you know nothing about the real Charles Dickens, or Wilkie Collins for that matter, watching the film is an education in both personality and the morality of the time. Highly recommended.

Gnostic Noah

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Noah, at least as a film, was an incoherent mash, or so I thought. But here is an analysis that provides an actually insightful look at the film and what it was about that goes off in a direction I would have neither the knowledge nor the background ever to have recognised. This is what good criticism is about. You learn something you didn’t know before and some work of art is interpreted in a way that takes you closer to what the artist had intended. The review is titled Sympathy for the Devil. This is the core insight:

In our day and age we are so living in the leftover atmosphere of Christendom that when somebody says they want to do “Noah,” everybody assumes they mean a rendition of the Bible story. That isn’t what Aronofsky had in mind at all. I’m sure he was only too happy to let his studio go right on assuming that, since if they knew what he was really up to they never would have allowed him to make the movie.

Let’s go back to our luminescent first parents. I recognized the motif instantly as one common to the ancient religion of Gnosticism. Here’s a 2nd century A.D. description about what a sect called the Ophites believed:

“Adam and Eve formerly had light, luminous, and so to speak spiritual bodies, as they had been fashioned. But when they came here, the bodies became dark, fat, and idle.” –Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, I, 30.9

It occurred to me that a mystical tradition more closely related to Judaism, called Kabbalah (which the singer Madonna made popular a decade ago or so), surely would have held a similar view, since it is essentially a form of Jewish Gnosticism. I dusted off (No, really: I had to dust it) my copy of Adolphe Franck’s 19th century work, The Kabbalah, and quickly confirmed my suspicions:

“Before they were beguiled by the subtleness of the serpent, Adam and Eve were not only exempt from the need of a body, but did not even have a body—that is to say, they were not of the earth.”

Franck quotes from the Zohar, one of Kabbalah’s sacred texts:

“When our forefather Adam inhabited the Garden of Eden, he was clothed, as all are in heaven, with a garment made of the higher light. When he was driven from the Garden of Eden and was compelled to submit to the needs of this world, what happened? God, the Scriptures tell us, made Adam and his wife tunics of skin and clothed them; for before this they had tunics of light, of that higher light used in Eden…”

And just one more bit but if these things interest you, read the full text:

The world of Aronofsky’s Noah is a thoroughly Gnostic one: a graded universe of “higher” and “lower.” The “spiritual” is good, and way, way, way “up there” where the ineffable, unspeaking god dwells, and the “material” is bad, and way, way down here where our spirits are encased in material flesh. This is not only true of the fallen sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, but of fallen angels, who are explicitly depicted as being spirits trapped inside a material “body” of cooled molten lava.

Admittedly, they make pretty nifty movie characters, but they’re also notorious in Gnostic speculation. Gnostics call them Archons, lesser divine beings or angels who aid “The Creator” in forming the visible universe. And Kabbalah has a pantheon of angelic beings of its own all up and down the ladder of “divine being.” And fallen angels are never totally fallen in this brand of mysticism. To quote the Zohar again, a central Kabbalah text: “All things of which this world consists, the spirit as well as the body, will return to the principle and the root from which they came.” Funny. That’s exactly what happens to Aronofsky’s Lava Monsters. They redeem themselves, shed their outer material skin, and fly back to the heavens. Incidentally, I noticed that in the film, as the family is traveling through a desolate wasteland, Shem asks his father: “Is this a Zohar mine?” Yep. That’s the name of Kabbalah’s sacred text.

I disliked the film because it did not conform to the biblical text either in relation to the story or the message. But as it turns out there is a lot more not to like than one would have ever known. The message of the film will pass everyone’s understanding other than the vegan nonsense so it is really not much more than an empty frame with no more influence on our culture than any other science fiction pot boiler. It is not its influence on anything that is troubling but as one further sign of our already existing decadence that makes the film notable. And I doubt that had those who financed the film known its true underlying message that it would have led them to hesitate for a second. Undermining the religious teachings of the West is the temper of the times in which we live which is a large part of the reason why our civilisation is in such peril.

Living life to the fullest

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There is an article today in the Wall Street Journal with the intriguing title, “Advice for a Happy Life by Charles Murray” that has as its sub-title, “Consider marrying young. Be wary of grand passions. Watch ‘Groundhog Day’ (again). Advice on how to live to the fullest”. Sensible all the way through but I will just highlight one of the five and you can read the rest for yourself, which you should do. You might then be interested in the book he’s written, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead, which I assume expands on the five points made in the article. This is Point 4:

Take Religion Seriously

Don’t bother to read this one if you’re already satisfyingly engaged with a religious tradition.

Now that we’re alone, here’s where a lot of you stand when it comes to religion: It isn’t for you. You don’t mind if other people are devout, but you don’t get it. Smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore.

I can be sure that is what many of you think because your generation of high-IQ, college-educated young people, like mine 50 years ago, has been as thoroughly socialized to be secular as your counterparts in preceding generations were socialized to be devout. Some of you grew up with parents who weren’t religious, and you’ve never given religion a thought. Others of you followed the religion of your parents as children but left religion behind as you were socialized by college.

By socialized, I don’t mean that you studied theology under professors who persuaded you that Thomas Aquinas was wrong. You didn’t study theology at all. None of the professors you admired were religious. When the topic of religion came up, they treated it dismissively or as a subject of humor. You went along with the zeitgeist.

I am describing my own religious life from the time I went to Harvard until my late 40s. At that point, my wife, prompted by the birth of our first child, had found a religious tradition in which she was comfortable, Quakerism, and had been attending Quaker meetings for several years. I began keeping her company and started reading on religion. I still describe myself as an agnostic, but my unbelief is getting shaky.

Taking religion seriously means work. If you’re waiting for a road-to-Damascus experience, you’re kidding yourself. Getting inside the wisdom of the great religions doesn’t happen by sitting on beaches, watching sunsets and waiting for enlightenment. It can easily require as much intellectual effort as a law degree.

Even dabbling at the edges has demonstrated to me the depths of Judaism, Buddhism and Taoism. I assume that I would find similar depths in Islam and Hinduism as well. I certainly have developed a far greater appreciation for Christianity, the tradition with which I’m most familiar. The Sunday school stories I learned as a child bear no resemblance to Christianity taken seriously. You’ve got to grapple with the real thing.

Start by jarring yourself out of unreflective atheism or agnosticism. A good way to do that is to read about contemporary cosmology. The universe isn’t only stranger than we knew; it is stranger and vastly more unlikely than we could have imagined, and we aren’t even close to discovering its last mysteries. That reading won’t lead you to religion, but it may stop you from being unreflective.

Find ways to put yourself around people who are profoundly religious. You will encounter individuals whose intelligence, judgment and critical faculties are as impressive as those of your smartest atheist friends—and who also possess a disquieting confidence in an underlying reality behind the many religious dogmas.

They have learned to reconcile faith and reason, yes, but beyond that, they persuasively convey ways of knowing that transcend intellectual understanding. They exhibit in their own personae a kind of wisdom that goes beyond just having intelligence and good judgment.

Start reading religious literature. You don’t have to go back to Aquinas (though that wouldn’t be a bad idea). The past hundred years have produced excellent and accessible work, much of it written by people who came to adulthood as uninvolved in religion as you are.

A Canadian view of Australian girls

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shaidle - confessions of a failed slut

I am reluctant to bring this up, but if ever I have seen need for a Racial Discrimination Act this is it. Kathy Shaidle, a Canadian blogger, is entitled to advertise her book in any way she likes, but still there is a certain profiling that leaves me somewhat nonplussed and decidedly uncomfortable. This is from her advertising promotion for her new book, Confessions of a Failed Slut:

As the only female columnist at controversial, conservative Taki’s Magazine, Kathy Shaidle soon found herself covering an unlikely beat: sexuality.

“Unlikely” because as the married, 50-year-old Shaidle explains, “my ‘number’ (as the kids call it these days) is so low that in certain Australian provinces I would still be considered a virgin.”

I take it that one’s number is the number of sexual partners one has had. And, of course, to refer to our political divisions as “provinces” is quite provincial but what would you expect from a Canadian? But if I understand the comparison she is making, the implication is that Australians are so sexually out there that an Australian maid with as few liaisons as Kathy has had would not even think of herself as ever having had sex at all.

It’s not even that I am insulted by the implication, although I am, but my main curiosity is where did such an analogy come from? Do Australian girls in Canada, or anywhere else for that matter, have a reputation somewhere along these lines. I am thankfully well past the age and inclination of ever having to enter into the sexual wilderness of the present day to find out for myself, but there is nothing I know of that makes me think of our local maidens as anything other than innocent, modest and pure, or no less so than anyone else.

There was a joke when I was young about a particular ethic group which went, what’s a virgin in such-and-such country, and the answer was the fastest girl in Grade 2. But we used to tell ethnic jokes in those days and it was just a joke without much more than a bit of fun (except for people of that ethnic group who didn’t find it funny at all). But Australians? I must do a bit of research.

In the meantime, I think there needs to be a reference to our Human Rights Commission so that if Kathy ever sets foot on these shores down under that she will end up facing the same kind of tribunal faced by her Canadian mates Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn.

Posted on the first of April 2014.

It was fated to be a hit

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Doris Day’s greatest song. It’s origins are completely unimaginable from the tune or the lyrics. This is from Mark Steyn:

It was written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans.

“Que Sera Sera” was a deal-clincher: Alfred Hitchcock wanted Jimmy Stewart for The Man Who Knew Too Much, his 1956 Hollywood remake of one of his early British films. But Stewart’s agency, MCA, told Hitchcock they’d only give him Stewart if he took another of their clients, Doris Day, as co-star. So Hitch agreed. Then Doris demanded a song. So Hitch caved again.

“We had never met him before,” Ray Evans recalled a few years ago. “And Hitchcock said, ‘I don’t know what kind of a song I want, but it’s got to be the kind of song that a mother would sing to a little child.’ The picture takes place in Europe and North Africa. Jimmy Stewart is a diplomat-” Mr Evans’ memory was a little faulty here: Stewart was playing a doctor. “-and Hitchcock said, ‘I’ve written it into the plot because it’s the part when the little boy is kidnapped, when Doris Day finally finds him. She finds him by singing the song and hearing him echo her in the distance and she knows where he is.’ But we got the title ‘Que Sera, Sera’ and wrote it on that basis and then we had to play it for Mr Hitchcock and he said, ‘Gentlemen’ – and Jay could imitate him very well. I can’t do that – he said, ‘Gentlemen, when I first met you, I didn’t know what kind of a song I wanted. That’s the kind of a song I wanted.’ He said, ‘Thank you very much. Goodbye.’ And we never saw him again.”

In the picture, with Doris Day singing to a young child, you can sense the director doesn’t know what he’s got – the artlessness of the song seems to have thrown poor old Hitch. Miss Day didn’t like it. She thought it was a child’s song and would never be a hit, so she did it in one take and said “That’ll do”, and it became the biggest hit of her career.

But aside from the genealogy, there is the philosophy behind the tune which is discussed by Steyn at the end of his piece:

The philosophy is bunk. Whatever will be is not what will be: We have the capacity to shape events and, if we don’t, they may well turn out to be far less congenial for us than they were for Doris Day.

For myself, I am a great believer in trying to steer events in the right direction but looking at how things are going, I’m not sure that Doris Day didn’t get it right after all.