Economics By Cartoon

Current Events

The best commentary on Fed policy currently out there is a do-it-yourself animated short called Quantitative Easing Explained.

By Amity Shlaes, 01.17.11, 6:00 PM ET
http://www.forbes.com


The best commentary on Fed policy currently out there is a do-it-yourself animated short called Quantitative Easing Explained. The 6-minute, 48-second cartoon features two stuffed animals, drawn in Pokémon style, talking about monetary policy. Specifically, the bears--or are they dogs?--point out the illogic in the official Federal Reserve position that today the danger of deflation is greater than that of inflation. The animals also criticize the Fed officials' recent pursuit of QE2, the acronym for its decision to inject $600 billion into the economy. More than 3.5 million people have watched the video, and it was posted on YouTube in November.

The big question is why a home movie gets through to people in a way that a million words of news commentary have not. The answer is that news commentary has been corrupted, perhaps irreversibly, by an attachment to economic theory. The first kind of theory at issue here is Keynesianism, which assumes that stimuli from government, a category that includes QE2, are beneficial. Keynesianism also assumes a tradeoff between unemployment and inflation. Finally, Keynesianism emphasizes the consumer (demand) at the expense of business (supply). Here are several typical Keynesian sentences that you hear or read in the traditional news.- Consumer spending makes up 70% of the economy.- Growth is coming, so that means we can expect inflation.- Federal spending or the Fed's easing will stimulate the economy.

Monetarism, another theory, has alsodone its share of corrupting. This theorysays that if something seems wrong inthe economy, the solution lies in adjusting the amount of money pumped into it.

These theories do not suffice to explain current events. If many prices are going up--as the video asks--why do we still call our money problem "deflation"? The vanity that is economic discourse puts a high penalty on appearing ignorant or stupid. After all, economists are supposed to be super-smart, smarter than everyone but physicists and mathematicians. John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman preached different philosophies but shared one thing: a withering contempt for students who couldn't keep up with the rest in a seminar. There is a lively debate about whether Friedman himself would have supported QE2. I believe not. But the Friedmanian emphasis on monetary policy helped to make Ben Bernanke's QE2 possible.

The seminar culture carried over to the salon of general economic discussion. Journalists don't clarify. Instead, they become graduate students, journeymen who pander to the masters, professional economists. No one dares to suggest that if high-end theory is so difficult to understand it may not be the best theory. No one dares admit he is less than 100% sure, to quote Mr. Bernanke in his recent 60 Minutes appearance. To talk in anything other than Keynesian or monetarist terms is to ensure you'll be shut out of the salon.

Hence the cartoon. This medium calls the academics' bluff. Cartoons do not even aspire to the salon. What a cartoon video says, in effect, is: "I don't care if I'm called stupid; I'm a cartoon. What I care about is trying to discuss the economy in plain English." Readers and viewers are so relieved to be free of the obligation to appear erudite that they turn to the cartoon in droves. The same phenomenon has produced another unlikely economic messenger: a rap video. A mock rap debate between John Maynard "Let-the-Spending-Soar" Keynes and the Austrian School economist Friedrich "Too-Much-Aggregation" von Hayek has received 1.7 million hits on YouTube.

Switching media represents a sacrifice in content. My own effort in a new medium is a graphic novel version of my economic history book, The Forgotten Man. Starting out at 100 pages, The Forgotten Man Graphic has to date more than doubled. That's because, as the artist, Paul Rivoche, notes, the old truism has it backwards: A picture isn't worth 1,000 words; in fact, it often takes 1,000 pictures to convey a word.

What the national leap to these new media tells us is that many Americans are desperate. They want to know what must be changed--or kept the same--in the U.S. economy. Professional economists may be on the trail of the answer, but to find it they have to dedicate more time to inquiry and less to self-important obfuscation. Seminars were tolerable at 4% unemployment. At over 9% they're too expensive. That's arithmetic anyone can understand, whether in the classroom, in the newsroom or when looking at a cartoon.

Amity Shlaes, senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations; Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author; Lee Kuan Yew, minister mentor of Singapore; and David Malpass, global economist, president of Encima Global LLC, rotate in writing this column. To see past Current Events columns, visit our Web site at www.forbes.com/currentevents.

Is Saudi Arabia Opening Up?

The fight between Islamic reformers and hardliners deserves our full attention.

By Daniel Pipes
http://www.nationalreview.com
January 4, 2011 12:00 A.M.

The Breakwater Beacon at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia. Photo: Lehva

On Jan. 1, 1996, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz became regent and effective ruler of Saudi Arabia. His 15th anniversary this week offers an opportunity to review the kingdom’s changes under his leadership and whither it now heads.

His is perhaps the most unusual and opaque country on the planet, a place without a public movie theater, where women may not drive, where men sell women’s lingerie, where a single-button self-destruct system can perhaps destroy the oil infrastructure, and where rulers spurn even the patina of democracy. In its place, they have developed some highly original and successful mechanisms to keep power.

Three features define the regime: controlling the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, subscribing to the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, and possessing by far the world’s largest petroleum reserve. Islam defines identity; Wahhabism inspires global ambitions; and oil wealth funds the enterprise.

More profoundly, wealth beyond avarice permits Saudis to deal with modernity on their own terms. They shun jacket and tie, exclude women from the workspace, and even aspire to replace Greenwich Mean Time with Mecca Mean Time.

Not many years ago, the key debate in the kingdom was that between the monarchical and Taliban versions of Wahhabism — an extreme reading of Islam versus a fanatical one. But today, thanks in large part to Abdullah’s efforts to “tame Wahhabi zeal,” the most retrograde country has taken some cautious steps to join the modern world. These efforts have many dimensions, from children’s education to mechanisms for selecting political leaders, but perhaps the most crucial one is the battle among the ulema, the Islamic men of religion, between reformers and hardliners.

The arcane terms of this dispute make it difficult for outsiders to follow. Fortunately, Roel Meijer, a Dutch Middle East specialist, provides an expert’s guide to arguments in the kingdom in his article, “Reform in Saudi Arabia: The Gender-Segregation Debate.” He demonstrates how gender mixing (“ikhtilat” in Arabic) inspires a debate central to the kingdom’s future and how that debate has evolved.

Current stringencies about gender separation, he notes, reflect less age-old custom than the success of the Sahwa movement in the aftermath of two traumatic events in 1979: the Iranian revolution and the seizure of the Grand Mosque of Mecca by Osama bin Laden–style radicals.

When Abdullah formally ascended to the monarchy in mid-2005, he ushered in an easing of what critics call gender apartheid. Two key recent events toward greater ikhtilat took place in 2009: a change of high government personnel in February and the September opening of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (known as KAUST), with its ostentatiously mixed-gender classes and even dances.

Debate over ikhtilat ensued, with jousting among royals, political figures, ulema, and intellectuals: “Although the position of women has improved since 9/11, ikhtilat demarcates the battle lines between reformists and conservatives [i.e., hardliners]. Any attempt to diminish [the] enforcement [of gender separation] is regarded as a direct attack on the standing of conservatives and Islam itself.”

Meijer concludes his survey of the debate by noting that “it is extremely difficult to determine whether reforms are successful and whether the liberals or conservatives are making gains. Although the general trend is in favor of the reformists, reform is piecemeal, hesitant, equivocal and strongly resisted.”

The state under Abdullah has promoted a more open and tolerant Islam but, Meijer argues, “it is obvious from the ikhtilat debate that the battle has not been won. Many Saudis are fed up with the inordinate interference of religious authorities in their lives, and one can even speak of an anti-clerical movement. The liberals, however, speak a language that is alien to the world of official Wahhabism and the majority of Saudis and is therefore hardly likely to influence them.”

In brief, Arabians are still deciding, with the future course of reform as yet unpredictable. Not only do elite and public opinion play a role, but, complicating matters, much hangs on the quirks of longevity and personality — in particular, how long Abdullah, 86, remains in charge and whether his ailing half-brother crown prince, Sultan bin Abdulaziz, 82, will succeed him.

Saudi Arabia being one of the world’s most influential Muslim countries, the stakes are high, not just within the kingdom, but for Islam and Muslims generally. This debate deserves our full attention.

— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. © 2011 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.

Dead Zero: A word from the author

http://www.powerlineblog.com/
December 29, 2010 Posted by Scott at 5:00 AM

Stephen Hunter is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former chief film critic of the Washington Post. His most recent collection of film criticism is Now Playing at the Valencia. He wrote for us, most recently, here last week about the Coen Brothers' version of True Grit, now playing at a theater near you. (See below)

Steve is also the author of the Bob Lee Swagger series of novels followed by many Power Line readers. We invited Steve to write something for us about Dead Zero, the new novel in the series, published officially yesterday. Steve writes:

Some months ago a fellow attracted a lot of attention with the coinage "epistemic closure." The liberals loved the conceit, an allegation that the conservative mind was unalterably closed, sealed off, locked in the past. Actually, I thought it was pretty accurate: that's WHY I turned right 25 years ago, because I'm schooled in and prefer values that endure.

Moreover, the concept cannot but imply its own counter diagnosis, which might be called "epistemic promiscuity," a pathology from which liberals and liberalism surely suffer. Those folks are obsessed with what's new, hot, hip, with-it. They abandon ideas, policies and people with frantic abandon, moving ahead to grasp at the new concept on the cutting edge. Oh, how they love to be out front with their flashy, handsome John Edwardses and their Barrack Obamas; not for them the sure, the dowdy, the grimly duty-driven.

Somehow that conceit became the intellectual center of my new book, Dead Zero, a thriller (lots of gunfights, yes!) in which an administration, a department and an agency become hopelessly enamored of a new thing, in this case an Afghani politician named Ibrahim Zarzi, whom all believe will be Our Man in Kabul.

Alas, this belief arrives after a Marine recon battalion, much aggrieved of Zarzi's actions, has sent a sniper team to dispose of him. The team can't be recalled; it must be betrayed.

One man, a gunnery sergeant of legendary skills, survives the ambush and pushes on. No, his name isn't Bob Lee Swagger. Swagger is called in when that gunnery sergeant appears in DC six months later, still determined to put Zarzi into the hurt locker.

Swagger is recruited by the FBI to consult on the case, actually to run a sniper versus. sniper game on the Sergeant. This Zarzi, meanwhile, is toast of the town, hero of all the soirees, beloved by the media. He looks like Omar Sharif with cosmetic dentistry and carries on like a '30s movie star.

But you know Swagger: he's a realist. His strength is that, unlike so many in Washington, he sees what is, unfiltered by delusion. He looks at Gunnery Sergeant Ray Cruz and doesn't see rogue psycho, and he looks at Ibrahim Zarzi and doesn't see savior of our aspirations.

Almost immediately he begins to question the premise of the operation and tries to understand the dynamic of hidden forces at work, even as his exasperated supervisors--Nick Memphis of the Bureau and Susan Okada of the Agency, leading Task Force Sniper--try to control him.

Where is this going? It goes toward violence of the modern kind, fast, lethal, abrupt and high tech. And that's when it's best to have a guy like Swagger around, because he's a man who can handle the rough stuff.

I hope the book satisfies at the narrative level. That's the fun part. I hope it provokes at the cerebral level; that's the important part.

Stephen Hunter: True True Grit

http://www.powerlineblog.com/
December 23, 2010 Posted by Scott at 5:30 AM

Jeff Bridges in "True Grit"

Stephen Hunter is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former chief film critic of the Washington Post. His most recent collection of film criticism is Now Playing at the Valencia. We invited Steve to write something (anything) for us on True Grit, the new Coen Brothers film which opened around the country yesterday (12/22/10).

Based on Charles Portis's novel, the film is a remake of the beloved 1969 movie directed by Henry Hathaway for which John Wayne won his only Academy Award. Steve graciously accepted our invitation to write something for us about the film and turned in a luminous review:

The Coen Brothers' replicant of True Grit is close enough to its genre origins to refresh some of the great pleasures of the western: men with horses, men with guns, men with really cool hats, and men with faces. In fact the faces are the proper landscape of the picture, giant granite edifices carved with fissures and aroyos, flecked with wild vegetable growth, dusty and dangerous.

The most demonic of these belongs to Jeff Bridges, who plays the crazed and canny U.S. Marshal and honcho mankiller Rooster Cogburn behind a scraggly, patched, bearded, weathered and salted mug that looks like it could have been the outer surface of a Spartan shield. When he cranks up that one eye into a squint which is crushed flat by the weight of a collapsed brow and a tensed cheek, he doesn't look adorable at all, certainly not avuncular and mock-grandiose or ironic like the great John Wayne back in 1969, he just looks mean and when he's not kicking Indian children for the dang fun of it, squabbling over money, drunk or otherwise occupied, his grit is more than true, it's absolute. It's like he sees the world over the blade of a front sight.

You can't quite call the film "naturalistic," or claim that it's set in something called The Real West. The dialogue is too Victorian-ornate (a product of Charles Portis's original gem of a novella) but it is set in a world where the 1969 Henry Hathaway version doesn't exist, derived on a straight line from the Portis text. Any who attend hoping to bathe in the wake of the Duke's showy passage--he won his only Oscar for the role-- will be disappointed, for about 10 seconds.

Hallie Steinfeld and Matt Damon in "True Grit"

No, Bridges isn't John Wayne, nor is Hallee Steinfeld, who plays the willful Mattie Ross, Kim Darby. She's an authentic 14-year-old, callow and unformed, so the sexual tension of the original is replaced by something more Oedipal: she's the daughter he never had and doesn't know he missed, he's the father shorn of sentimental idealism and softness, living only for a dad's duty and in the end, his keenest is to protect his daughter. A signal moment: he rides a horse to death to save her, though she loves the animal and may hate him for it. He's fine with being hated if that's the price of his duty.

The plot, as many will remember, is primitive, goosed along now and then by a helpful coincidence. It is propelled by the conceit that her will is so strong that she bullies these brutish mankillers into submission and in the end, they're happier for yielding to her executive instincts. She withers them with wit and shrivels them with her own killer stare.

The strongwilled Mattie hires the dissolute Rooster to track down the man who killed her father, a venture that takes them into the dark interior of what was then Indian Territory and is now Okalahoma. They range west from Ft. Smith, Arkansas, accompanied by a dandy of a Texas Ranger improbably named LeBoef (Matt Damon) in search of the evil Chaney (Josh Brolin) who has thrown in with a gang of cutthroats and retardates led by Lucky Ned Pepper (Barry Pepper). Each of these fellows has a face that looks like a leather cushion dragged behind a pickup over 40 miles of bad road, so that the movie also has a tone of random grotesqueness for fans of bad orthodonture and nostrils the size of volcanoes.

But more importantly, True Grit is played straight, without wink or irony. The Coens impose classical discipline upon themselves. Why, it's as if these fellows never saw their own post-modernist films and are working in a year before the age dawned when all filmmakers have been to film school and have read all the back issues of Cahiers du Cinema.

I yearn to see an unrated version on DVD, so that Portis's considerable bloodshed will be liberated from the politeness of the PG-13 rating, but the Coens do at least as well as Hathaway did in staging action sequences and capturing the dynamic abruptness of the gun fight. It appears that Bridges is a real horseman as he is seen to ride hard at his opponents on a real mount, reins in his teeth, and a Navy Colt in each hand. The Duke, if memory serves, was clearly riding a saddle secured to the flatbed of a pickup truck in those scenes 40-odd years ago.

Perhaps you have to skew way old to enjoy the film as much as I did; but for me, it put in me a hunger for popcorn and those grenade-like Milk Dud things that exploded in a spew of industrial grade caramel and enameled your molars together for weeks.

Rev the scientific engine

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Sunday, January 2, 2011


New Republican legislators should come down Capitol Hill to the National Museum of American History, which displays a device that in 1849 was granted U.S. patent 6469. It enabled a boat's "draught of water to be readily lessened" so it could "pass over bars, or through shallow water."

The patentee was from Sangamon County, Ill. Across Constitution Avenue, over the Commerce Department's north entrance, are some words of the patentee, Abraham Lincoln:

THE PATENT SYSTEM ADDED

THE FUEL OF INTEREST

TO THE FIRE OF GENIUS

Stoking that fire is, more than ever, a proper federal function, so the legislators should be given some reading matter. One is William Rosen's book "The Most Powerful Idea in the World," a study of the culture of invention. Another is the National Academy of Sciences report "Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited," an addendum to a 2005 report on declining support for science and engineering research.

Such research is what canals and roads once were - a prerequisite for long-term economic vitality. The first Republican president revered Henry Clay, whose "American System" stressed spending on such "internal improvements." Today, the prerequisites for economic dynamism are ideas. Deborah Wince-Smith of the Council on Competitiveness says: "Talent will be the oil of the 21st century." And the talent that matters most is the cream of the elite. The late Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod said, "Ninety-nine percent of the discoveries are made by 1 percent of the scientists."

With populism rampant, this is not a propitious moment to defend elites, even scientific ones. Nevertheless, the nation depends on nourishing them and the institutions that sustain them.

U.S. undergraduate institutions award 16 percent of their degrees in the natural sciences or engineering; South Korea and China award 38 percent and 47 percent, respectively. America ranks 27th among developed nations in the proportion of students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering.

America has been consuming its seed corn: From 1970 to 1995, federal support for research in the physical sciences, as a fraction of gross domestic product, declined 54 percent; in engineering, 51 percent. On a per-student basis, state support of public universities has declined for more than two decades and was at the lowest level in a quarter-century before the current economic unpleasantness. Annual federal spending on mathematics, the physical sciences and engineering now equals only the increase in health-care costs every nine weeks.

Republicans are rightly determined to be economizers. They must, however, make distinctions. Congressional conservatives can demonstrate that skill by defending research spending that sustains collaboration among complex institutions - corporations' research entities and research universities. Research, including in the biological sciences, that yields epoch-making advances requires time horizons that often are impossible for businesses, with their inescapable attention to quarterly results.

An iconic conservative understood this. Margaret Thatcher, who studied chemistry as an Oxford undergraduate, said:

"Although basic science can have colossal economic rewards, they are totally unpredictable. And therefore the rewards cannot be judged by immediate results. Nevertheless, the value of [Michael] Faraday's work today must be higher than the capitalization of all shares on the stock exchange."

The last Congress's misbegotten stimulus legislation - an indulgent and incoherent jumble of pent-up political appetites - may have done large and lasting damage by provoking a comparably indiscriminate reaction against federal spending. This will be doubly dangerous if a curdled populism, eager to humble elites, targets a sphere of American supremacy and a basis of its revival - its premier research universities. "Gathering Storm" says that because of the recent recession, many universities - during 2008 and 2009, endowments of public and private institutions declined an average of 18.7 percent - "are in greater jeopardy than at any time in nearly a century."

Granted, political correctness and academic obscurantism in some disciplines - mostly the humanities and social sciences - of some elite universities have damaged the prestige of the institutions and irritated substantial portions of the public. But the public should not now be punished by penalizing, with diminished funding, the scientific disciplines that have been mostly innocent of the behaviors that have sometimes made academia a subject of satire.

Richard Levin, economist and Yale's president, asks: Would Japan's growth have lagged since 1990 "if Microsoft, Netscape, Apple and Google had been Japanese companies"? Japan's failure has been a failure to innovate. As "Gathering Storm" says: Making the government lean by cutting the most defensible - because most productive - federal spending is akin to making an overweight aircraft flight-worthy by removing an engine.

Christian Bale Summons a Fallen Man’s Delusions

By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
December 30, 2010

THE first time you see Christian Bale in “The Fighter,” you might gasp. He’s playing a true-life broken-down ex-boxer, Dicky Eklund, and he’s sitting on an ugly sofa wearing acid-washed jeans, a half-buttoned shirt, a glaze of oily sweat and not an ounce of fat. With his hunched shoulders and sunken eyes he looks caved in, almost collapsed. The life starts to seep back in when he begins talking, but when he loosely swats the air, his fingers remain splayed as if they had forgotten how to curl into fists. As the words keep coming, so does the life, and soon those hands are coiled hard, jabbing the air and knocking down ghosts.

In "The Fighter," directed by David O. Russell, Christian Bale, above, portrays Dicky Eklund, an ex-boxer and drug addict, and half-brother to the title character, played by Mark Wahlberg.

Directed by David O. Russell, “The Fighter” centers on Mr. Eklund’s younger half brother, Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a junior welterweight. For much of the film, which begins in 1993, a tamped-down Micky flails in the shadow of his louder, showier brother who is also his trainer, their differences partly conveyed through the contrasting performances of the actors playing them. With his naturalistic delivery and relaxed animal physicality Mr. Wahlberg doesn’t seem to be acting, while a twitchy, jumpy Mr. Bale all but pinwheels off the screen. Mr. Wahlberg’s acting seems more a matter of being, while Mr. Bale’s appears self-consciously performed. Each explores a life lived on and off the stage of the ring, but in Mr. Bale’s deep-tissue turn as an addict, the tragedy of a life is wholly embodied.

When next you gasp at Mr. Bale, it will likely be because of his performance’s outrageous comedy, no small thing given Dicky’s desperate straits. Straight from the onetime mill town of Lowell, Mass., the real Mr. Eklund took to fighting jockeys when he was 12. He married at 16; was a father by 17. By 20 he had lost his most famous fight, an inglorious 1978 slugfest with Sugar Ray Leonard during which Mr. Leonard, after tripping over one of Mr. Eklund’s legs, fell to the canvas, and Mr. Eklund coolly stepped over his opponent’s upturned face. It was a brief victory lap: the next time Mr. Eklund showed up on HBO, he was smoking rock in the 1995 documentary “High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell.”

You see high points and low from that 1978 fight throughout “The Fighter,” including in a crack-house scene seven and a half minutes from the start. “Sugar Ray might have some trouble tonight,” an announcer warns — while back in the film Dicky’s bobble head lurches in and out of the frame. Eyes fixed, Dicky looks as if he’s shadowboxing in a room filled with the haze of 1,001 crack hits. As Dicky moves back, as if in retreat, his head and fists dart in and out of the frame as his harsh breathing keeps time with his hands. He then pauses, closes his eyes and gently leans forward and back as if summoning a dream — or about to nod out — while an announcer describes the long-ago Dicky as “a young man who can punch.”

This reverie comes to an abrupt end when Mr. Russell cuts to Dicky’s friend and comrade in crack, Boo Boo (Paul Campbell), who stands slack jawed and still, as if waiting for his next directorial cue. The image of the gaping Boo Boo is comic and somewhat absurd, but Mr. Russell pushes the moment into darker realms by joining it to an audio clip of one of the 1978 fight announcers declaring that the boxers are physically well matched. Mr. Russell cuts back to Dicky, now slightly farther away from the camera. Dicky and Boo Boo continue throwing punches that don’t land, a pitiful burlesque that Mr. Russell cross-cuts with clips from the Leonard-Eklund match, a juxtaposition that makes the crack-house scene more pathetic.

By connecting the 1978 fight and its drug-addled mirror image, Mr. Russell immediately conveys what Dicky lost, literally and in every other way, and the glory he yet clings to. Even in the crack house he remains the champ, though now he has to play that part, which he does habitually and with exaggerated and often self-parodic flair. Such role playing evokes a truism from Jerry Stahl — a writer and former addict (heroin, coke, you name it), known for his memoir, “Permanent Midnight,” and novels like “I, Fatty” — who observed that “all junkies are inherently actors because they have been scamming so long.” As Dicky, Mr. Bale wears the haunted face of the actor-scammer, with darting eyes and dissembling flamboyance.

Back at the crack house, after Dicky’s dreamy timeout, Mr. Russell cuts to a medium shot of Boo Boo pretending to pummel Dicky in the stomach, the faked blows accompanied by the hard, somewhat hollow, body-on-body thumps of landed punches. Dicky is no longer in retreat but neither is he fighting back. Instead, with his arms bent and hands up in the brawler’s come-hither (whaddya got?) stance, Dicky begins to steadily advance toward Boo Boo while uttering a short succession of animalistic “gwahs.” In an uneasily funny few seconds Mr. Bale and Mr. Russell bring to life both Dicky the pugilist and Dicky the scrapper, the guy who in and out of the ring didn’t just get into trouble, he also came right at it.

Dicky’s crack-house braggadocio comes to a climax with Boo Boo hitting the ground as if from a blow, the moment intercut with the 1978 fight. Mr. Russell crops the real bout so you can’t see that Mr. Leonard tripped, a cheat that preserves Dicky’s misremembered triumph. He thrusts his arms in the air and again steps over a fallen man. A few cuts later Dicky is bending into the frame toward his reward, the camera following him as he — and the shot — lean toward a waiting crack pipe. But just before he draws in the smoke, Mr. Bale does something extraordinary: He drains the animation from his face and turns his buggy eyes into fathomless pits, revealing the death mask beneath Dicky’s wild pantomime of life.

In one minute of screen time Mr. Bale, ably assisted by his director, the cinematographer and editor, has replayed the entire tragic sweep of Dicky’s life, with its bruising knockdown fights and addictively crippling highs. Right then someone reminds Dicky that he’s supposed to be training Micky at the gym. The camera swoops in for a close-up of Dicky’s comically startled face as he yells “What?,” the tight, drumlike skin punctuated by the dark O of his mouth. And then Dicky is off and running down Lowell’s brightly sunny mean streets. As his loose arms and legs spin in circles, he looks a little like the Road Runner, though more like a fugitive clown. He’s a riot, that Dicky, and he’s running for his life.

Big Labor’s Snowmageddon Snit Fit

Politicized and abusive unions were deadly during the blizzard.

By Michelle Malkin
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 31, 2010 12:00 A.M.

Instead of plowing the streets, this driver was caught snoozing Monday morning from 9:30 to at least 11 on 14th Avenue near 149th Street. (New York Post)

Diligent English farmers of old once shared a motto about the blessings of work: “Industry produces wealth, God speed the plow.” Indolent New York City union officials who oversee snow-removal apparently live by a different creed: Sloth enhances political power, Da Boss slow the plow.

Come rain or shine, wind, sleet, or blizzard, Big Labor leaders always demonstrate perfect power-grabby timing when it comes to shafting taxpayers. Public-sector unions are all-weather vultures ready, willing, and able to put special-interest politics above the citizenry’s health, wealth, and safety. Confirming rumors that have fired up the frozen metropolis, the New York Post reported Thursday that government sanitation and transportation workers were ordered by union supervisors to oversee a deliberate slowdown of its cleanup program — and to boost their overtime paychecks.

Why such vindictiveness? It’s a cold-blooded temper tantrum against the city’s long-overdue efforts to trim layers of union fat and move toward a more efficient, cost-effective privatized workforce.

Welcome to the Great Snowmageddon Snit Fit of 2010.

New York City councilman Dan Halloran (R., Queens) told the Post that several brave whistleblowers confessed to him that they “were told (by supervisors) to take off routes (and) not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file.”

Denials and recriminations are flying like snowballs. But even as they scoff at reports of this outrageous organized job action, the city sanitation-managers’ unions openly acknowledge their grievances and “resentment” over job cuts. Stunningly, sanitation workers spilled the beans on how city plowers raised blades “unusually high” (which requires extra passes to get their work done) and refused to plow anything other than assigned streets (even if it meant leaving behind clogged routes to get to their blocks).

A Sanitation Department spokesman would not comment until he saw the pictures, and he did not answer questions about the agency's sleeping-in-the-truck policy.(New York Post)

When they weren’t sitting on their backsides, city plowers were caught on videotape maniacally destroying parked vehicles in a futile display of Kabuki Emergency Theater. It would be laugh-out-loud comedy if not for the death of at least one newborn whose parents waited for an ambulance that never came because of snowed-in streets.

This isn’t a triumphant victory for social justice and workers’ dignity. This is terrifying criminal negligence.

And it isn’t the first time New York City sanitation workers have endangered residents’ well-being. In the 1960s, a Teamsters-affiliated sanitation workers’ strike led to trash fires, typhoid warnings, and rat infestations, as 100,000 tons of rotting garbage piled up. Three decades later, a coordinated job action by city building-service workers and sanitation workers caused another public trash nuisance declared “dangerous to life and health” in the Big Apple.

New Yorkers could learn a thing or two from those of us who call Colorado Springs home. We have no fear of being held hostage to a politically driven sanitation department — because we have no sanitation department. We have no sanitation department because enlightened advocates of limited government in our town realized that competitive bidders in the private sector could provide better service at lower cost.

And we’re not alone. As the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan reported: “The largest study ever conducted on outsourced garbage collection, conducted by the federal government in the 1970s, reported 29 to 37 percent savings in cities with populations over 50,000. A 1994 study by the Reason Foundation discovered that the city of Los Angeles was paying about 30 percent more for garbage collection than its surrounding suburbs, in which private waste haulers were employed. A 1982 study of city garbage collection in Canada discovered an astonishing 50 percent average savings as a result of privatization.”

Completely privatized trash collection means city residents don’t get socked with the bill for fraudulently engineered overtime pay, inflated pensions, and gold-plated health benefits in perpetuity — not to mention the capital and operating costs of vehicles and equipment. The Colorado Springs model, as city councilman Sean Paige calls it, is a blueprint for how every city can cope with budget adversity while freeing itself from thuggish union threats when contracts expire or cuts are made. Those who dawdled on privatization efforts in better times are suffering dire, deadly consequences now.

Let the snow-choked streets of New York be a lesson for the rest of the nation: It’s time to put the Big Chill on Big Labor–run municipal services.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Today's Tune: U2 - New Year's Day (Live)

Government by Regulation

Death counseling by administrative fiat

By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 31, 2010 12:00 A.M.

Most people don’t remember Obamacare’s notorious Section 1233, which mandated government payments for end-of-life counseling. It aroused so much anxiety as a possible first slippery step on the road to state-mandated late-life rationing that the Senate never included it in the final health-care law.

Well, it’s back — by administrative fiat. A month ago, Medicare issued a regulation providing for end-of-life counseling during annual “wellness” visits. It was all nicely buried amid the simultaneous release of hundreds of new Medicare rules.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D.,Ore.), author of Section 1233, was delighted. “Mr. Blumenauer’s office celebrated ‘a quiet victory,’ but urged supporters not to crow about it,” reports the New York Times. Deathly quiet. In early November, his office sent an e-mail plea to supporters: “We would ask that you not broadcast this accomplishment out to any of your list…e-mails can too easily be forwarded.” They had been lucky that “thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it…The longer this regulation goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it.”

So much for Democratic transparency — and for their repeated claim that the more people learn what is in the health-care law, the more they will like it. Turns out ignorance is the Democrats’ best hope.

And regulation is their perfect vehicle — so much quieter than legislation. Consider two other regulatory usurpations in just the last few days.

On December 23, the Interior Department issued Secretarial Order 3310, reversing a 2003 decision and giving itself the authority to designate public lands as “Wild Lands.” A clever twofer: (1) a bureaucratic power-grab — for seven years up through December 22, wilderness-designation had been the exclusive province of Congress, and (2) a leftward lurch — more land to be “protected” from such nefarious uses as domestic-oil exploration in a country disastrously dependent on foreign sources.

The very same day, the president’s Environmental Protection Agency declared that in 2011 it would begin drawing up anti-carbon regulations on oil refineries and power plants, another power grab effectively enacting what Congress had firmly rejected when presented as cap-and-trade legislation.

For an Obama bureaucrat, however, the will of Congress is a mere speed bump. Hence this regulatory trifecta, each one moving smartly left — and nicely clarifying what the spirit of bipartisan compromise that President Obama heralded in his post-lame-duck December 22 news conference was really about: a shift to the center for public consumption and political appearance only.

On that day, Obama finally embraced the tax-cut compromise he had initially excoriated, but only to avoid forfeiting its obvious political benefit — its appeal to independent voters who demand bipartisanship and are the key to Obama’s reelection. But make no mistake: Obama’s initial excoriation in his angry December 7 news conference was the authentic Obama. He hated the deal.

Now as always, Obama’s heart lies left. For those fooled into thinking otherwise by the new Obama of December 22, his administration’s defiantly liberal regulatory moves — on the environment, energy, and health care — should disabuse even the most beguiled.

These regulatory power plays make political sense. Because Obama needs to appear to reclaim the center, he will stage his more ideological fights in yawn-inducing regulatory hearings rather than in the dramatic spotlight of congressional debate. How better to impose a liberal agenda on a center-right nation than regulatory stealth?

It’s Obama’s only way forward during the next two years. He will never get past the half-Republican 112th what he could not get past the overwhelmingly Democratic 111th. He doesn’t have the votes and he surely doesn’t want the publicity. Hence the quiet resurrection, as it were, of end-of-life counseling.

Obama knows he has only so many years to change the country. In his first two, he achieved much: the first stimulus, Obamacare, and financial regulation. For the next two, however, the Republican House will prevent any repetition of that. Obama’s agenda will therefore have to be advanced by the more subterranean means of rule-by-regulation.

But this must simultaneously be mixed with ostentatious displays of legislative bipartisanship (e.g., the lame-duck tax-cut deal) in order to pull off the (apparent) centrist repositioning required for re-election. This, in turn, would grant Obama four more years when, freed from the need for pretense, he can reassert himself ideologically and complete the social-democratic transformation — begun Jan. 20, 2009; derailed Nov. 2, 2010 — that is the mission of his presidency.

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 the Washington Post Writers Group.

Mike Krzyzewski: 880 wins won't dampen his drive and respect for Dean Smith

By John Feinstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Friday, December 31, 2010; 1:06 AM

Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski waves to the crowd after Duke's 108-62 win over North Carolina-Greensboro in an NCAA college basketball game in Greensboro, N.C., Wednesday, Dec. 29, 2010. Krzyzewski moved past longtime rival Dean Smith into second place on the men's all-time wins list. (AP)


GREENSBORO, N.C. - A little more than 24 hours before he went past Dean Smith on the all-time wins list for college basketball coaches, Mike Krzyzewski threw his team out of practice.

"I didn't just get angry," he said that afternoon. "I worked my way up to being really angry."

All of which may explain, at least in part, why Duke's 108-62 rout of UNC Greensboro on Wednesday night was Krzyzewski's 880th career victory - one more than Smith and 22 fewer than Bob Knight.

Soon after telling his players they were soft and spoiled and nowhere close to being ready to play in the ACC, Krzyzewski got on a private plane and flew to Washington to watch a high school junior play. That night he was back on the practice court, giving his players a chance to show him they weren't as soft and spoiled as he had told them they were.

At 63, Krzyzewski still gets angry and he's still relentless. He completely understood the significance - especially in the state of North Carolina - of his 880th win because of his respect for Smith and because of how his career at Duke began.

"All of that said, I'll be glad when it's over," he said Wednesday afternoon, sitting in his customary seat - second row, right side, next to the window - as the Duke team bus rolled down I-85 to Greensboro. "We're a team in transition right now and there's a lot we have to do before Sunday [the ACC opener against Miami] and going forward to get these guys accustomed to playing without Kyrie [Irving]. Yesterday morning they just weren't getting any of that.

"That's why I got angry. I've been blessed with the ability to get angry. Anger is good when you use it to make something better. Most of the time I can do that."

Until Irving, the star freshman point guard from New Jersey, seriously injured his big toe on Dec. 4 in a game against Butler, Duke was an overwhelming favorite to win a second straight national title. Without Irving, the Blue Devils are still a deep, talented team but are now one of many that might be good enough to make a deep run in March.

Irving's foot is in a cast and will be re-examined next week. The worst-case scenario is surgery, which would end his season. The best case is the toe might heal on its own by the end of the regular season.

That's why Krzyzewski is obsessing about recasting his team, because almost every player must play a different role with Irving gone. That's why, as touched as he was by the lengthy ovation he received when the game ended Wednesday evening, he wanted to put it behind him so he could stop talking about Dean Smith and start worrying about Nolan Smith and his ability to run Duke's offense.

In advance of the milestone, Krzyzewski said all the right things about Smith - things he truly believes: Smith made him better because he set the bar so high at Chapel Hill, just eight miles down the road from Durham and the program he took over in 1980. He respected Smith because he did things the right way - he won with good kids and took care of his players from the day they set foot on campus.

"Dean made my job a lot harder," Krzyzewski said. "He wasn't the only one. Jimmy Valvano won a national championship at [North Carolina] State my third year. Bobby Cremins had a fantastic program at Georgia Tech. Lefty [Driesell] was doing great work and so was Terry Holland. It was an amazing league. But Dean was the benchmark. And because he was so good he forced me to be better."

There were people who couldn't stand how good North Carolina was in Smith's heyday and there are people who can't stand how good Duke is now. Several years ago, Smith pointed out that the pressure was tougher on Krzyzewski than it was on him. "There wasn't nearly as much media," he said. "There was no Internet. Every game wasn't on television. I know I wouldn't have enjoyed all the attention the best teams get now. I think Mike handles it very well."

Krzyzewski's greatest strength may be his ability to make failure work for him: to learn from it and grow from it. Just before his players got off the bus Wednesday, he showed them a tape of great players and coaches talking about winning championships and what it means. "I showed them this tape before practice yesterday," he said. "They didn't respond to it at all. I want to give them another chance."

A couple of hours later, they jumped to a 15-2 lead and never slowed down. When the buzzer sounded, no one had left in spite of the score. Mike Dement, the UNC Greensboro coach who was a volunteer assistant for Krzyzewski in his third season at Duke, walked over to offer congratulations.

The two men were standing on almost the exact same spot where Krzyzewski and Smith first shook hands at the end of a game a little more than 30 years ago in the old, early-season Big Four Tournament. North Carolina was about to win, 78-76. The Duke fans were cheering that night, too - glad the game had been close.

With his players inbounding with one second on the clock, Smith, who always believed in fast postgame exits, walked briskly to shake Krzyzewski's hand. Looking at the clock, Krzyzewski angrily said, "The game's not over, Dean."

As it turned out, in the grand scheme of things, he was right. The game was just beginning.

For more from the author, visit www.feinsteinonthebrink.com.

As Gay Becomes Bourgeois

An ironic progressive victory

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 29, 2010 12:00 A.M.

The cast of "Modern Family" gathers 'round the table together in this shot for Emmy magazine's Issue No. 3.

So now openly gay soldiers get to fight and die in neocon-imperialist wars too?

David Brooks saw such ironic progressive victories coming. In his book Bobos in Paradise, he wrote that everything “transgressive” gets “digested by the mainstream bourgeois order, and all the cultural weapons that once were used to undermine middle-class morality . . . are drained of their subversive content.”

Two decades ago, the gay Left wanted to smash the bourgeois prisons of monogamy, capitalistic enterprise, and patriotic values and bask in the warm sun of bohemian “free love” and avant-garde values. In this, they were simply picking up the torch from the straight Left of the 1960s and 1970s, who had sought to throw off the sexual hang-ups of their parents’ generation along with their gray flannel suits.

As a sexual-lifestyle experiment, they failed pretty miserably, the greatest proof being that the affluent and educated children (and grandchildren) of the baby boomers have re-embraced the bourgeois notion of marriage as an essential part of a successful life. Sadly, it’s the lower-middle class that increasingly sees marriage as an out-of-reach luxury. The irony is that such bourgeois values — monogamy, hard work, etc. — are the best guarantors of success and happiness.

Of course, the lunacy of the bohemian free-love shtick should have been obvious from the get-go. For instance, when Michael Lerner, a member of the anti–Vietnam War “Seattle Seven,” did marry, in 1971, the couple exchanged rings made from the fuselage of a U.S. aircraft downed over Vietnam and cut into a cake inscribed in icing with a Weatherman catchphrase, “Smash Monogamy.”

Today Lerner is a (divorced and remarried) somewhat preposterous, prosperous progressive rabbi who officiates at all kinds of marriages — gay and straight — and, like pretty much the entire Left, loves the idea of open gays becoming cogs in the military-industrial complex.

The gay experiment with open bohemianism was arguably shorter. Of course, AIDS played an obvious and tragic role in focusing attention on the downside of promiscuity. But even so, the sweeping embrace of bourgeois lifestyles by the gay community has been stunning.

ABC’s “Modern Family” characters Cam (Eric Stonestreet) and Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson)

Nowhere is this more evident — and perhaps exaggerated — than in popular culture. Watch ABC’s Modern Family. The sitcom is supposed to be “subversive” in part because it features a gay couple with an adopted daughter from Asia. And you can see why both liberal proponents and conservative opponents of gay marriage see it that way. But imagine you hate the institution of marriage and then watch Modern Family’s hardworking bourgeois gay couple through those eyes. What’s being subverted? Traditional marriage, or some bohemian identity-politics fantasy of homosexuality?

By the way, according to a recent study, Modern Family is the No. 1 sitcom among Republicans (and the third show overall behind Glenn Beck and The Amazing Race) but not even in the top 15 among Democrats, who prefer darker shows like Showtime’s Dexter, about a serial killer trying to balance work and family between murders.

Or look at the decision to let gays openly serve in the military through the eyes of a principled hater of all things military. From that perspective, gays have just been co-opted by The Man. Meanwhile, the folks who used Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell as an excuse to keep the military from recruiting on campuses just saw their argument go up in flames.

Personally, I have always felt that gay marriage was an inevitability, for good or ill (most likely both). I do not think that the arguments against gay marriage are all grounded in bigotry, and I find some of the arguments persuasive. But I also find it cruel and absurd to tell gays that living the free-love lifestyle is abominable while at the same time telling them that their committed relationships are illegitimate too.

Many of my conservative friends — who oppose both civil unions and gay marriage and object to rampant promiscuity — often act as if there’s some grand alternative lifestyle for gays. But there isn’t. And given that open homosexuality is simply a fact of life, the rise of the HoBos — the homosexual bourgeoisie — strikes me as good news.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Why Muslims must look in the mirror

By M. ZUHDI JASSER
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
December 30, 2010


If 2010 was the year America finally woke up to political Islam's ne farious reach on US soil, with luck 2011 will be the year we launch an offensive against it. One way to begin that process is through hearings that Rep. Peter King (R-NY), the new chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, plans to hold on American Muslim radicalization.

Attention to this issue offers an opportunity for American Muslims to confront the radicalization problem and provide solutions -- as only they can.

My group, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, believes these hearings will shed light on the diversity of American Muslims, giving our community a chance to step from behind the veil of Muslim victimization and address head-on the need for long-overdue ideological reforms.

Peter King: Will hold hearings on "homegrown radicals."

Alas, the announcement of the hearings has triggered heated denunciations by groups like ISNA, CAIR and MPAC, which try to deny and obfuscate the connection between "political Islam," or Islamism, and terror.

This year, the debate on the development of the Ground Zero mosque brought the discussion of political Islam to the front page of every newspaper. While raucous at times, it provided an opportunity for Muslims who don't toe the line of American Islamist organizations to present an alternative vision for American Muslims -- one based in American values and Muslim reform.

Unfortunately, political correctness still too often dominates incidents involving Islamists. This year, the Pentagon released a report on Maj. Nidal Hasan's Fort Hood attack, titled "Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood." The report was intended to convey to military commanders whatever lessons were learned from the incident, so as to prevent similar attacks in the future. Yet it never mentioned the word Islam or Muslim. Nowhere to be found was any dissection of Hasan's slide into militant Islamism or of his relationship with his homegrown jihadist mentor, Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki.

Meanwhile, President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg used the Ground Zero mosque controversy to tell the more than 70 percent of Americans who oppose the mosque that they were either wrong or confused. Discourse over recent arrests of jihadists in Portland and Baltimore focused on Islamist claims of FBI entrapment, rather than overdue introspection and calls for reform. Worries of Muslim victimization still rule the day.

Our national inability to discuss religious issues honestly is keeping American Muslims from having to accept the reforms needed to defeat political Islam and bring our faith into modernity. The victimization mantra feeds more Muslim isolation and radicalization.

A recent global study by the Pew Research Center showed that Muslims are aligning themselves more and more with Islamism. Of course, most major American Muslim groups, such ISNA, CAIR and MPAC, were built on some strand of that ideology. But knowing where most American Muslims fall in the spectrum of Islamism-vs.-liberalism, as King hopes to find out in his hearings, would be a key step toward counterradicalization.

The fact is, we can't go into 2011 without a discernable strategy on how to defeat Islamist radicalization. House hearings on Muslim radicalization would only be the first step toward finally crafting a US offensive against political Islam.

Again, only liberty-minded Muslims working from within Muslim communities can counter the narrative of Muslim victimization. But America needs to be unashamed of taking the side of those Muslims who advocate reform against political Islam.

In 2011, more Americans need to understand that jihadism is a natural by-product of a political Islam that is incompatible with Western secular democracies based in liberty. America is at war with theocratic Muslim despots who seek the imposition of sharia and don't believe in the equality of all before the law, blind to faith. They detest the association of religious freedom with liberty.

We need a coordinated national strategy of offense that gives Muslim youth an Islamic counternarrative, that defends liberty and that separates mosque and state.

The idea of the Islamic state must be left for history. It is time to help usher in a modern era for Islam and Muslims. Our national security depends on it.

M. Zuhdi Jasser, a physician and a former US Navy lieutenant commander, is the founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. info@aifdemocracy.org


Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/why_muslims_must_look_in_the_mirror_g6HY8SYPEtYo8gHubxnNhI#ixzz19bHafmlQ

Muslim Batman

[I'm certain that Christian and Jewish Batman will be soon making their appearance in DC Comics. - jtf]

Meet the New Batman: An Algerian Muslim Who Saves France from Nazis and Communists

by Warner Todd Huston
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/
December 27, 2010

Reality isn’t always very fun. Because of that many people turn to comic books for a little escapism. But there’s escapism and PC indoctrination. Sadly, it appears that DC Comics’ Batman is angling for the latter and not the former. You see, Batman has decided to hire a Muslim to “save France.”

First the reality. The country of France is having serious domestic problems between its immigrant Muslim community and those natural-born, European Frenchmen. Immigrants have been rampaging across the country for several years now. Clashes between police and large groups of rioting Muslim youth have wreaked havoc on the Gallic nation. Violence is all too common — it is woefully common for hundreds of cars to be lit afire in these riots and dozens of arrests to be made. It has the country split and frightened.

It has gotten so bad in France that in some parts of its cities, those parts controlled by marauding gangs of Muslim youths, whites never enter for fear of their lives. Not only that but not even police dare enter these areas. This dangerous situation does not seem anywhere near being solved. In fact, it’s just getting worse.

Now for the fantasy: enter The Batman.

DC Comics recently launched a series called “Batman Incorporated.” Essentially, Bruce Wayne (well-known as Batman’s alter ego to comics fans) is cruising the world setting up a “Batman” for major cities across the globe. These Batman figures, though, will not be vigilantes. They will be sanctioned by whatever local police force is in charge of the area in which the new Batman is operating. In the case of Detective Comics number 12 (Part one) and Batman Annual number 28 (Part two), Bruce Wayne has come to Paris, France to find a “French savior.”

The story reveals to us a cult-like group that is assassinating France’s fringe political figures. The cult’s goal is to cause unrest and riots to be led by the murdered political figure’s followers. This group hypnotizes its members to kill and then to commit suicide so that the cult cannot be discovered.

First a “popular” French union activist “with ties to the French Communist Party” is murdered. Next the leader of a “break-away Neo-Nazi Party” is killed. Then Batman discovers that a “minor diplomat” from Saudi Arabia is targeted. Batman tries to stop the assassination but is too late.


Batman turns to a man that he helped police arrest earlier in part one. When first encountered the young man was dressed in a skin-tight, black costume and sported a face mask. Batman arrested him when this man tried to involve himself in some rioting. Batman didn’t know the young masked man was actually trying to stop the riot but later learns of his good intentions. Consequently the Dark Knight decides to put this man to work to help stop the cult that is assassinating French political figures and causing riots.

In the course of this story Batman, aka Bruce Wayne, decides that this man should become the French representative of Batman Incorporated. As Wayne styles the man, he’ll be the “French savior.” He ends up calling himself Nightrunner.

So what’s wrong with all this? Only that it is completely absurd and so badly misleads people from any understanding of why riots are really going on in France that it almost qualifies as a crime itself.

You see, DC Comics has decided that the “French savior,” the French Batman is to be a Muslim immigrant. The character’s name is Bilal Asselah and he is an Algerian Sunni Muslim and an immigrant that is physically fit and adept at gymnastic sport Parkour. Apparently Batman couldn’t find any actual Frenchman to be the “French savior.”

The whole situation is a misreading of what ails France. The truth is, neither communist Union members nor “Neo-Nazi” Parties are causing riots in France. Muslims are. Yet DC Comics is absurdly making a Muslim immigrant the “French savior”? This is PCism at its worst. Not only that but it is pretty condescending to France, too. France is a proud nation. Yet DC Comics has made a foreigner the “French savior.” This will not sit well with many Frenchmen, for sure. Nor should it.


As DC told the tale of this character’s origin, it badly downplays the seriousness of the actual racial tension in France. In essence, all you get from the story is that “they hate us, and we hate them.” There is no attempt at all to explain the real underlying problem. The true cause of the riots and violence between Frenchmen of European stock and that of immigrant Muslim stock is glossed over as if it doesn’t even exist. DC Comics makes the whole problem as simplistic as mere racism as if that is all there is to it ignoring the fact that Islam is the single most important factor in the strife.

Unfortunately, readers of Batman will not be helped to understand what troubles are really besetting France. In this age when Muslim youths are terrorizing the entire country, heck in this age of international Muslim terrorism assaulting the whole world, Batman’s readers will be confused by what is really going on in the world. Through it all DC makes a Muslim in France a hero when French Muslims are at the center of some of the worst violence in the country’s recent memory.

But it isn’t surprising for DC, a comic book company that has a character whose creator based it on “corporate greed.” Nor is it surprising in an industry where tea party members are made the enemy of super heroes. For the character based on “corporate greed” look up DC’s Larfleeze character[1] and see the Marvel comic Captain America issue 602 where The Captain makes Tea Partiers into an enemy to America (Marvel later apologized).[2] For that matter, check out the words of the director of the new 2011 Captain America movie who said that his Captain America won’t be a big “flag waver.”[3] Imagine that. Captain America not being that into America.

These few examples aren’t the only ones, either. Among many other instances, last April the venerable Archie Comics announced they were adding a gay character[4] and back in 2007 movie makers announced that they intended to remove all mentions of the U.S. military from G.I. Joe (they later relented to a degree).[5]

It all adds up to a PCing of the American comic book industry that has been going on for far too long.


Links:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larfleeze

[2] http://www.publiusforum.com/2010/02/08/marvel-comics-captain-america-says-tea-parties-are-dangerous-and-racist/

[3] http://www.publiusforum.com/2010/07/22/new-captain-america-movie-dear-america-im-just-not-that-into-you/

[4] http://www.publiusforum.com/2010/04/23/gay-archie-comic-character-my-channel-2-news-response/

[5] http://www.publiusforum.com/2007/09/06/hollywood-gi-joe-no-longer-american-soldier-but-an-international-operative/

Related:

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2010/12/28/racists-batman-muslim-paris/

The Bell Tells for You

Hot Sensations Vs. Cold Facts

By Larry Bell, 12.27.10, 10:00 AM ET
http://www.forbes.com/

As 2010 draws to a close, do you remember hearing any good news from the mainstream media about climate? Like maybe a headline proclaiming "Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported: Global Warming Theorists Perplexed"? Or "NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase: Alarmists Fear Climate Science Budgets in Peril"? Or even anything bad that isn't blamed on anthropogenic (man-made) global warming--of course other than what is attributed to George W. Bush? (Conveniently, the term "AGW" covers both.)

Remember all the media brouhaha about global warming causing hurricanes that commenced following the devastating U.S. 2004 season? Opportunities to capitalize on those disasters were certainly not lost on some U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change officials. A special press conference called by IPCC spokesman Kevin Trenberth announced "Experts warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense activity."

But there was a problem. Christopher Landsea, a top U.S. expert on the subject, repeatedly notified the IPCC that no research had been conducted to support that claim--not in the Atlantic basin, or in any other basin. After receiving no replies, he publicly resigned from all IPCC activities. And while the press conference received tumultuous global media coverage, Mother Nature didn't pay much attention. Subsequent hurricane seasons returned to average patterns noted historically over the past 150 years, before exhibiting recent record lows with no 2010 U.S. landfalls.

Much global warming alarm centers upon concerns that melting glaciers will cause a disastrous sea level rise. A globally viewed December 2005 BBC feature alarmingly reported that two massive glaciers in eastern Greenland, Kangderlugssuaq and Helheim, were melting, with water "racing to the sea." Commentators urgently warned that continued recession would be catastrophic.

Helheim's "erratic" behavior reported then was recently recounted again in a dramatic Nov. 13 New York Times article titled "As Glaciers Melt, Science Seeks Data on Rising Seas."[1] Reporters somehow failed to notice that only 18 months later, and despite slightly warmer temperatures, the melting rate of both glaciers not only slowed down and stopped, but actually reversed. Satellite images revealed that by August 2006 Helheim had advanced beyond its 1933 boundary.

According to two separate NASA studies, one conducted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the other by the Langley Research Center, the oceans now appear to be heading into another natural periodic cooling phase within a typical 55- to 70-year dipolar warm/cool pattern. Although Greenland has recently been experiencing a slight warming trend, satellite measurements show that the ice cap has been accumulating snow growth at a rate of about 2.1 inches per year. Temperatures only recently began to exceed those of the 1930s and 1940s when many glaciers were probably smaller than now. (We can't be certain, because satellites didn't exist to measure them.)

A recent study conducted by U.S. and Dutch scientists that appeared in the journal Nature Geoscience concluded that previous estimates of Greenland and West Antarctica ice melt rate losses may have been exaggerated by double. Earlier projections apparently failed to account for rebounding changes in the Earth's crust following the last Ice Age (referred to as "glacial isostatic adjustment").

Nils-Axel Morner, head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden, argues that any concerns regarding rising sea levels are unfounded. "So all this talk that sea level rising, this comes from the computer modeling, not from observations. ... The new level, which has been stable, has not changed in the last 35 years. ... But they [IPCC] need a rise, because if there is no rise, there is no death threat ... if you want a grant for a research project in climatology, it is written into the document that there 'must' be a focus on global warming. ... That is really bad, because you start asking for the answer you want to get."

Studies by the International Union for Quaternary Research conclude that some ocean levels have even fallen in recent decades. The Indian Ocean, for example, was higher between 1900 and 1970 than it has been since.

Other world climate alarm bells chimed when it was reported in the media that September 2007 satellite images revealed that the Northwest Passage--a sea route between the U.K. and Asia across the top of the Arctic Circle--had opened up for the first time in recorded history. (This "recorded history" dates back only to 1979 when satellite monitoring first began, and it should also be noted that the sea route froze again just a few months later (winter 2007-2008).

The Northwest Passage has certainly opened up before. Diary entries of a sailor named Roald Amundson confirm clear passage in 1903, as do those of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police Arctic patrol crew that made regular trips through there in the early 1940s. And in February 2009 it was discovered that scientists had previously been underestimating the re-growth of Arctic sea ice by an area larger than the state of California (twice as large as New Zealand). The errors were attributed to faulty sensors on the ice.

But these aren't the sorts of observations that most people generally receive from the media. Instead, they present sensational statements and dramatic images that leave lasting impressions of calving glaciers, drowning polar bears and all manner of other man-caused climate calamities.

Many intentionally target impressionable young minds and sensitive big hearts with messages of fear and guilt. Take, for example, a children's book called The North Pole Was Here, authored by New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin. It warns kids that some day it may be "easier to sail than stand on the North Pole in summer." Imagine such images through their visualization: How warm it must be to melt that pole way up north. Poor Santa! And Rudolph! Of course it's mostly their parents' fault because of the nasty CO2 they produce driving them to school in SUVs.

Lots of grown-ups are sensitive people with big hearts too. Don't we all deserve more from the seemingly infinite media echo chamber of alarmism than those windy speculations, snow jobs and projections established on theoretical thin ice?

Weekly columnist Larry Bell is a professor at the University of Houston and author of Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax, which will be released on Jan. 1, 2011. It can be previewed at: www.climateofcorruption.com..


Link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/science/earth/14ice.html?_r=1

Kenneth Branagh Talks Thor

Kenneth Branagh is hammering away on ‘Thor’ — and those nasty rumors

http://herocomplex.latimes.com/
April 01, 2010 5:55 p.m.

It’s no surprise to learn that back in Ireland, young Kenneth Branagh — who would grow up to direct film adaptations of “Hamlet,” “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Henry V” — fell under the spell of tales about royal family intrigue, ancient rivalry and clanging battlefields. What is unexpected, though, is that epic of obsession was by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, not William Shakespeare.

“Growing up, my single comic book passion was Thor,” says the 49-year-old actor and filmmaker who surprised many industry observers by taking on the director’s job on the big-budget adaptation of the Marvel Comics thunder god. “From my time in Belfast as a kid, that’s the first time I came across that comic, really, exclusively, I don’t know why, but it struck a chord. I was drawn to it. I liked all the dynastic drama.”

For the uninitiated, the Marvel character Thor first appeared in the August 1962 issue of “Journey into Mystery” (it was a big summer for Marvel — the first Spider-Man comic book hits stands that same month) as an odd mix of Norse myth and Marvel’s distinctive brand of wildly kinetic cosmic melodrama.

With his winged helmet, magic hammer and odd old English diction, he fought evil aliens, ancient wizards and costumed crooks and even teamed up with Hercules in Marvel’s no-borders brand of mythology.

“Thor,” due in 2011, is filming now in Santa Fe, N.M., and stars newcomer Chris Hemsworth (who played the doomed father of James T. Kirk in last year’s “Star Trek“) will carry the magical hammer of Thor in the film, with Natalie Portman playing his mortal love, Jane Foster. Anthony Hopkins is Odin, Thor’s father, and Tom Hiddleston plays the thunder god’s duplicitous brother, Loki.

For both Branagh and upstart Marvel Studios (which arrived with a splash in Hollywood in 2008 with “Iron Man”) the cinematic mash-up of Viking deity and 21st century do-gooder will be a singular challenge in Hollywood’s crowded superhero sector.

The story is split between Asgard, the majestic and eternal home of the Norse gods, and the modern world, which Branagh says he views more as an opportunity than a challenge.

“Inspired by the comic book world both pictorially and compositionally at once, we’ve tried to find a way to make a virtue and a celebration of the distinction between the worlds that exist in the film but absolutely make them live in the same world,” Branagh said. “It’s about finding the framing style, the color palette, finding the texture and the amount of camera movement that helps celebrate and express the differences and the distinctions in those worlds. If it succeeds, it will mark this film as different…. The combination of the primitive and the sophisticated, the ancient and the modern, I think that potentially is the exciting fusion, the exciting tension in the film.”

It was a different sort of tension that put the film in headlines this week. Gatecrasher, a report in the New York Daily News gossip column, quoted unnamed sources that painted a picture of a sour movie set, with Hopkins making it clear to the crew that he thinks little of 26-year-old Hemsworth’s acting skills and Branagh growing frustrated with the Oscar-winning elder’s pessimism and complaints.

Hopkins was said to be outraged by the report. The 72-year-old Welsh actor issued this statement: “I am having the time of my life making Thor with Ken and Chris. They have made every day immensely fun and collaborative, and we’re all puzzled that someone would fabricate a story suggesting otherwise. I’m proud to say that Thor has been one of the great experiences of my career.”

Branagh, meanwhile, went on at length about the esprit de corps of his cast, which also includes Rene Russo, Kat Dennings, Ray Stevenson and Stellan Skarsgård.

There will also be elements that will move forward with Marvel Studios unprecedented plan to create a unified universe of heroes and stories that spreads across films, including the upcoming Captain America movie in 2011 and “Iron Man 2,” which arrives May 7 as one of the most anticipated movies of 2010.

“It’s going very, very well,” Branagh said Wednesday. “We’re in New Mexico now where we have a contemporary Earth part of our story. I guess we’re two-thirds of the way through the story and at this stage of the game what’s surprising and delighting me is the way the cast, the ensemble, has fused together. It’s kind of an interesting combination of very young and very experienced people and the double-up of that, it seems to me, is there is a lot of fire in the movie. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, it doesn’t try to be too solemn.”

Branagh made a point to praise Hopkins as ”an extraordinary actor with his Celtic passion and incredible technique” and said he has been a binding force for the film on the set and will do the same on the screen. The cast that plays Asgard’s royal family are “people who can embody larger-than-life characters but retain at the center a natural, recognizable, human dynamic … and these people run the universe.”

To read the rest of Geoff Boucher's article click on the link below:

http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2010/04/01/kenneth-branagh-and-thor/


Kenneth Branagh: ‘Thor’ required a ‘different kind of dance’ than ‘Iron Man’

http://herocomplex.latimes.com/
Sept. 16, 2010 12:24 p.m.

“Thor” director Kenneth Branagh is a big fan of the “Iron Man” tandem of director Jon Favreau and star Robert Downey Jr., but he says his entry into the ever-expanding cinema of the Marvel Universe will be quite different in tone and construction.

The “Iron Man” films, the box-office jewel of Marvel Studios, were filmed with an emphasis on bottling the on-set lightning of star Downey, and the actor’s improvisation work kept the harried writing team busy throughout the production as they tweaked and twisted the script to connect the dots between the star’s ad-lib riffs. That approach worked for a franchise that found its axis in the mercurial charm of Tony Stark, but Branagh said Thor’s tale of gods and monsters would not have benefited from a fast-and-loose approach.

“It’s a different story, and also, in that regard, Jon is a bit of a genius when it comes to that orchestration and getting the max out of another genius in Downey,” Branagh said.

“It’s how you dance pretty close to the edge to get the sort of modernity and the edge that ‘Iron Man’ has and the real sharp comic sensibility of those two men,” he said. “So it’s a different kind of dance.

“I think ‘Thor’ comes from a different place story-wise and character-wise. We have both Norse histories for Thor, hundreds of myths and fables told in many different ways, in addition to what Marvel has pillaged for the past 40 years or so to come up with their version of things, which sits in very strong structure, a really strong narrative structure.”

To read the rest of Geoff Boucher's article click on the link below:

http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2010/09/16/kenneth-branagh-thor-required-a-different-kind-of-dance-than-iron-man/

Benedict XVI's New Counter-Reformation?

Posted by Terry Mattingly
http://www.getreligion.org/
Saturday, December 25, 2010

Pope Benedict XVI and Monsignor Guido Marini

While it is hard to explain to outsiders, one of the most fascinating battles in the American Catholic church today is the one that pits the kneelers vs. the non-kneelers. I refer, of course, to the issue of whether bishops should — bowing to the modernization of ancient rites — attempt to prevent the faithful from kneeling before the altar as they receive Holy Communion during the Mass.

Let me explain: If people are allowed to kneel, that would mean that the Latin Mass is coming back and the next thing you know the pope will be seeking draconian student-life codes on Catholic campuses that prevent student funds from being used for activities that directly attack Catholic doctrine. It would be like the reforms of the Second Vatican Council never happened (or the spirit of the council has been quenched or something like that). Horrors. Then again, I am Eastern Orthodox, so I am biased.

This liturgical war is the subject that looms behind this fascinating, but consistently shallow, Washington Post piece that ran under the headline, “Pope’s master of liturgy helps Benedict restore traditions.” [1]

The bad guy in this piece is Monsignor Guido Marini, the relatively young Master of Pontifical Liturgical Celebrations for Pope Benedict XVI. The good guy is Archbishop Piero Marini, who held this post for two decades. The young man is into all (or most) things ancient. The older man is into all (or most) things modern and progressive.

The battle ground? The sights, sounds, smells and rubrics of the rites celebrated by the man who sites in the throne of St. Peter. Why does this matter? Change the words and the rites and you eventually change the doctrines. Both Marinis know that. Using the most loaded of images, the Post even suggests that the young liturgist is, with this pope, attempting a “counter-reformation.” Is that with our without a large “R”?

Here’s a sample of the warfare:

Since the Marini II era began in October 2007, the papal Masses clearly have a stronger traditional element. Guido Marini, who has degrees in canon and civil law and a doctorate in the psychology of communication, caused considerable consternation among some progressive Catholics in January when he talked to English-speaking priests about a “reform of the reform.”

In an interview Thursday, he argued that the changes should not be seen as a liturgical backlash to modernity but as a “harmonious development” in a “continuum” that takes full advantage of the church’s rich history and is not subject to what he has called “sporadic modifications.” Liturgical progressives, like Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie, Pa., are concerned that Marini considers the reforms of the 1960s ecumenical council known as Vatican II as being among those sporadic modifications.

At most papal Masses, a large crucifix flanked by tall candles is now displayed on the altar, even though many progressives say the ornaments block the view of the priest and the bread and wine. They argue that this obstructs the accessibility urged by liturgical reforms associated with the Second Vatican Council. Marini responds by saying that the crucifix reminds the faithful of who is really front and center in the Mass. He also says that the pope cannot sit in front of the altar when it bears the crucifix because “the pope can’t give his back” to sacraments on the altar.

Keep reading. It’s all here — Gregorian chants, fancy vestments, a few Latin rites, etc.

What is NOT here is the crucial third level of the drama. The story demonstrates that a battle is going on and even gives a few insights into what the battle is about. What is missing? That would be voices on the left or the right (but mainly the right) who can explain what the symbols represent. Readers are not allowed to listen to the doctrinal debates that add substance to the symbols.

In other words, what do these liturgical changes MEAN? Why are these fights packed with so much substance and emotion? Take this passage for example:

Piero Marini, who stepped down in 2007 after serving as the master of celebrations for 20 years, has championed the Vatican II reforms, including the simplification of rites that he believes facilitates active participation.

In the name of “inculturation,” or integrating church rites with local customs, the silver-haired Marini in 1998 accepted the request of local bishops to allow a troupe of scantily clad Pacific islanders in St. Peter’s Basilica to honor the pope with a dance during the opening liturgy of the Synod for Oceania. During John Paul II’s visit to Mexico City in 2002, Marini likewise granted a local bishop’s wish to let an indigenous Mexican shaman exorcise the pope during a Mass there.

Now that is a quick glimpse of true substance, a window into the third layer of the issues addressed in this news report.

Note: A practitioner of another religion — Catholic, polytheistic or some fusion of the two? — is allowed to exorcise demons from the pope, during a Mass. The Post flies right by this. Where are the voices that interpret the meaning of this extraordinary moment? Which divine power is casting out evil forces from the leader of the Catholic faith?

Methinks that the discussions behind closed Vatican doors about the theology built into that act probably lasted for more than a few moments. This was not idol chatter.

This is a great subject for a story. It contains many details linked to topics that are genuinely newsworthy. But where is the substance, other than the old theme that nasty people locked into the past still want to crush the brave voices of the new?


Link:

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/24/AR2010122403023.html