The musical is a loathsome form of entertainment. To debase a great literary work like “Les Misérables” by putting Victor Hugo’s words to catchy, schmaltzy jingles, belted out by Hollywood starlets—this reflects on the miserable state of the culture.
Not that I follow the Golden Globes Hollywood awards itself, but I believe the production called “Les Misérables” was nominated in the “best musical or comedy” category.
It’s quite probable that the self-reverential (and self-referential) crowd involved in the “Les Misérables” production had not read or understood the book.
One Fox News anchor mentioned that this song-and-dance was based on a book written in the 1600s. “Les Misérables” was published in 1862. I doubt Victor Hugo was 200 plus at the time of publication.
As a child, I read “Les Misérables”; Harry Potter type literature was not around (or rather, not in-vogue) to contaminate the mind and the imagination with poorly written phantasmagorical folderol. There is nothing like an historical novel penned by a master, to both teach and excite the imagination.
I do not recognize the book I read way back, in the gush and tosh being disgorged in pixels and on paper about “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo. I’m sticking to the version I remember.
The “Les Misérables” I read as a kid was about France’s unfathomably cruel and unjust penal system, and the prototypical obedient functionary who worked a lifetime to enforce the system’s depredations.
A similar power (Uncle Sam) and its enforcers recently hounded Aaron Swartz to death. (As a lefty, Swartz would not have defended my rights to be left alone by government, but then we libertarains are not like them. And more of us (libertarians) than them (leftists) understand that “Patents And Copyrights Undermine Private Property.”)
Thank you all, on Facebook and beyond, for wishing me a happy birthday in so many nice ways.
These many wishes, mostly from strangers, made me think of the one and only message I took away from Gran Torino, an awfully mundane, politically correct flick, in which the white old veteran is depicted as the rank racist; his Hmong neighbors—a South-east Asian minority that contributes significantly to crime in the US—act as founts of multicultural wisdom.
You Know You’re a GUN CONTROL HYPOCRITE IF….
You consistently call a magazine a clip
You think an AR 15 is an assault rifle
You have armed security guards
You are in possession of an illegal magazine while arguing gun control on national television
Your kids have armed security guards
Your kids’ school has 11 armed security guards
You think a .223 is a military round
You think the thing that goes up is a barrel shroud
Your husband used to sell crack
Your husband raps about crack
When you hear the words “fast and furious,” you think, “Oh, great movie.”
You rule a country where a large part of the city from which you originated is a killing zone, even though no one is allowed to carry a firearm.
You’ve never held a gun.
You’ve never shot a gun
You’ve never read the Second Amendment and looked beyond the mere words on the paper. …
“If you’ve ever carried concealed, if you’re Piers Morgan, if you own a knife, if you live in a gated community—anyone in the “Demand a Plan” video—the first thing out of your mouth when you heard about the Sandy Hook shooting was gun control.”
You own a gun-free zone establishment.
You drafted an assault-weapon’s ban but you carry concealed.
You think the NRA is the KKK.
…If you’ve ever used a gun in a movie.
If you don’t know the difference between a high-capacity magazine and a standard capacity magazine
You think hollow-points are cop killer bullets.
You think there’s a gun-show loophole.
Everything you know about guns is from TV and movies. You think cops are expert gunmen.
[SNIP]
If you ask me, hypocrisy is too soft and imprecise a word for the detritus of humanity described by Brother “Noir.”
UPDATE I (12/31/012): LOTT LOSES. Piers Morgan refuses to allow guest John Lott to speak to the issue of statistical murder rates and gun ownership. But then Dr. Lott does not try to make a point, now does he? Meek and ineffectual is the word when it comes to to the so-called right and its defense of rights.
MORGAN: National handgun ban. And it was incredibly effective. Australia, the same thing.
Now, John Lott, your answer is more guns makes America safe, even though you look at the statistics, you have 300 million in circulation and you have the worst gun murder rate of any of the wealthy countries of the world by a massive multiple.
How do you justify the claim more guns makes more safe people in America? I don’t — don’t get it. JOHN R. LOTT, JR., AUTHOR, “MORE GUNS, LESS CRIME”: Every place that guns have been banned, murder rates have gone up. You cannot point to one place, whether it’s Chicago or whether it’s D.C. or whether it’s been England of whether it’s been Jamaica or Ireland… MORGAN: That’s a complete lie. LOTT: It is not! MORGAN: It’s a complete lie! MORGAN: The gun murder rate in Britain is 35 a year average! LOTT: Do you understand… MORGAN: You need to stop repeating a blatant lie about what happened in other countries! LOTT: Look, sir… MORGAN: Thirty-five gun murders a year… LOTT: You don’t — you… MORGAN: No, you’re not going to get away with this! LOTT: No! Just one… MORGAN: You lied about it the other day! LOTT: Sir…
MORGAN: Thirty-five gun murders a year in Britain, 11,000 to 12,000 in America! LOTT: You… MORGAN: Stop… LOTT: No! You don’t even understand simple math! MORGAN: What you say drives Americans… LOTT: Can I explain something… MORGAN: … to go and buy weapons… LOTT: Well, there’s a difference between… MORGAN: … to defend themselves! LOTT: … saying something’s low and that it increased. What I say is there’s lots of reasons why murder rates differ across countries. But when a ban is put on, it still may end up being lower than someplace else, but it went up!
What’s so difficult about quickly interjecting a word about the meaningless of absolute murder numbers, absent other demographic data such as total population, where crime is concentrated and clustered—its racial and urban vs. rural complexion, etc.
The equal opportunity idiocy on Piers Morgan continues. “The 2nd Amendment didn’t take into account assault weapons,” says purveyor of pop spirituality, DEEPAK CHOPRA.
When they passed the 2nd Amendment, they had muskets. It took 20 minutes to load one, and half the time, you missed, OK? The 2nd Amendment didn’t take into account assault weapons, the fact that you can buy them through the secondary market or you can load up on ammunition through the Internet.
So, by logical extension, should the 1st Amendment also be contingent on the extent to which technologies can be used to the detriment of some? During the Founding, I presume, there were no megaphones or loudspeakers. Is Chopra implying that as offensive speech got louder and more easily transmitted, the Founders would have reconsidered the right to free speech? Regulated the Internet? Is anyone suggesting that had the framers, some of whom were inverters, foreseen today’s technological innovations, they’d have written a different document?
Of course that’s what’s implied by a statist like Chopra, whose inspiration is eastern mambo-jumbo, not John Locke.
The Bill of Rights is a document of individual liberties, setting limits on government, not a document meant to recalibrate individual liberties in light of each era’s technological innovations.
UPDATE III (1/2/2013):Hollywood whores. When are you going to boycott their pathetic products?
Tom DiLorenzo says that “Spielberg’s Lincoln movie is just another left-wing Hollywood fantasy.” Lincoln didn’t use his political heft to push for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. He did, however, push for an earlier iteration, the “Corwin Amendment.” It “would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery”:
Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Lincoln, is said to be based on several chapters of the book Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns-Goodwin, who was a consultant to Spielberg. The main theme of the movie is how clever, manipulative, conniving, scheming, lying, and underhanded Lincoln supposedly was in using his “political skills” to get the Thirteenth Amendment that legally ended slavery through the U.S. House of Representatives in the last months of his life. This entire story is what Lerone Bennett, Jr. the longtime executive editor of Ebony magazine and author of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, calls a “pleasant fiction.” It never happened.
It never happened according to the foremost authority on Lincoln among mainstream Lincoln scholars, Harvard University Professor David H. Donald, the recipient of several Pulitzer prizes for his historical writings, including a biography of Lincoln.
“I would like to correct one thing. The Congress that passed the Corwin 13th Amendment was not overwhelmingly Republican. There was a small House Republican majority but the (lame duck) Senate was Democratic (and only barely Republican if you count 14 Senators walking out) and a 2/3 majority is needed for an Amendment.
Nevertheless, Lincoln did almost nothing (and impeded efforts) to stop the impending Civil War during the nearly 10 months from his election to the Battle of First Manassas. A professor of history from LSU (whose name I regrettably forgot) went over all the proposed compromises and Lincoln’s opposition/inaction to preventing war.
Ironically, the Crittenden and Peace Conference Plan compromises would have confined the extension of slavery into Arizona and New Mexico – regions so barren that they did not become states for another 40 years – and not conducive to plantation slavery whatsoever! To keep slavery out of Arizona (!!), over 600,000 people died, a region got impoverished, with more wounded and PTSD and
drug addicted, the income tax imposed, etc.
