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Juliet Naked
(Reviewed September 21, 2018)
An amusing but slight adaptation of a Nick Hornby novel which can laugh at its characters without precluding the possibility that they may laugh at themselves
Won't You Be My Neighbor?
(Reviewed September 20, 2018)
Did Mr Rogers’s extraordinary capacity for love end up producing a generation of haters?
Lady Bird
(Reviewed March 6, 2018)
A delightful and not entirely politically correct movie about growing up as a Catholic schoolgirl in 2002-2003
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
(Reviewed February 22, 2018)
An occasionally amusing parable of guilt and forgiveness whose setting in small-town America, like the prejudices of its author, does it no favors
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Diary
ENTRY from November 18, 2020
“The Blob has won,” wrote a despondent correspondent of the (London) Sunday Telegraph the other day. “That’s the end of our dreams of a new, dynamic, independent country.” He was referring to the departure of Dominic Cummings, a close adviser of the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who was widely understood to be the latter’s point man in efforts to reform what is sometimes called in Britain (as it is here), “the deep state.” There, it is also called “the blob,” a term coined by Michael Gove, one of Mr Johnson’s cabinet colleagues, to describe the recalcitrant education bureaucracy in that country when he was education secretary.
Obama foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes referred to America’s interventionist defense and foreign policy establishment as “the blob,” but I think we should apply it to the whole of our own deep state, which President Trump likes to call “the Swamp,” and which, for the last four years, has preferred to style itself as “the Resistance.” Swamp, Resistance or Blob, the American version also believes it has won with the apparent election of Joe Biden.
I don’t know if you remember the 1958 film called The Blob — which gave a young Steve McQueen his first starring role — but it was set in the Philadelphia area, which also appears to have played a role in the newest revival of the blob. The original one didn’t win, however, but was stopped by CO2 fire extinguishers, frozen solid and dropped by parachute into the Arctic where it was expected to remain immobilized, if not dead, for “as long as the Arctic stays cold.”
 Before there was Howard Kurtz’s Media Madness, there was mine — now, alas, out of print but still available while supplies last for the cost of shipping and handling. Send $5.99 to me in care of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1730 M Street, Suite 910, Washington, D.C. 20036
 Also available, now in paperback and Kindle version, is Honor, A History, which was first published in 2006. A study of Western cultural artifacts, from the epics of Homer to the movies and TV shows of today, it is focused on explaining why Western ideas of honor developed so differently from those elsewhere — and especially from the savage honor cultures of the Islamic world. The book then goes on to trace the collapse and ultimate rejection of the old Western honor culture from World War I until the present day and to suggest the conditions that would have to prevail for its revival.
On Trump’s Decorum and the Media’s Lies.
October 1, 2020.
What, exactly, is this “decorum” in which Donald Trump is supposed to be deficient? — From The Epoch Times of October 1, 2020 ...
Full Article
Mostly peaceful.
September 30, 2020.
Why do the media sacrifice what little remains of their credibility to deny the obvious violence of revolutionary activity in our streets? — From The New Criterion of September, 2020 ...
Full Article
Chewing the ‘Could’: From Climate Change to Breonna Taylor.
September 24, 2020.
On the media's penchant for treating hypotheticals as fact -- From The Epoch Times ...
Full Article
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