Category Archives: Hollywood

Madonna Accessorizing Again

Africa, Celebrity, Hollywood, The Zeitgeist

Ankle biters are still a chic accoutrement in Hollywood. You know, “Angie” has not yet launched a trendy, new fashion line, so brown babies are still very much “in” with the idiots.

As toxic as a Madonna-style upbringing will be, you must admit that it is far preferable to growing up in Malawi.

Also, when “the Malawian man thought to be the biological father of a four-year-old girl Madonna hopes to adopt says he’s opposed to it,” you just know he’s looking to be bought out—enticed away from the baby bidding business.

“James Kambewa,” reports the Christian Science Monitor,” wears a necklace he made bearing his daughter’s name, has never held or even met her, and says he’s only seen her ‘in newspapers and TV, not face to face.'”

Suffer the children.

Updated: Rest Assured; George Clooney Is On Board

Africa, Barack Obama, Celebrity, Constitution, Foreign Aid, Hollywood, Political Correctness

What a relief. Yet another philosopher king, this time Clueless Clooney, has been recruited to steer the proverbial Ship of State to safety. The President and Vice President want you to know, as they “assured the actor and activist George Clooney last night,” that

“Bringing relief to the battered region of Darfur is a top priority for the administration.”

By breaking bread with Clooney, the “prudential” Obama-Biden pair is doing nothing Bush had not done before them. Or the Clintons, for that matter. Bush went from preaching “trade not aid,” and being charmingly unaware of celebrity, to instituting trade tariffs, and pledging to Bono a 50 percent increase in U.S. foreign aid over three years.

Expect an American nation-building “expedition” to Darfur, which will be greeted approvingly by the neoconnery and others on the left.

For those of you wishing to be reminded, if only out of nostalgia, of the constitutional position on foreign aid, the late Lord Peter Bauer had this to say about the “morality” of “taxpayer’s money compulsorily collected”:

“Contributors not only have no choice but quite generally do not even know they are contributing. It is sometimes urged that in a democracy taxpayers do have a choice, which restores the moral element to foreign aid. This objection is superficial. The taxpayer has to contribute to foreign aid whether he likes it or not and whether he has voted in its favor or against it.”

Update: Western economists like the great Peter Bauer, the foremost authority on development, had been condemning aid to Third World countries for decades. But in the PC order, it is only when an African reaches the same, derivative deduction that the case against foreign aid is given credence by liberals.

Updated: Nelson At Ninety

Celebrity, Crime, Hollywood, South-Africa, Terrorism

“Moody models, desperate divas and priapic ex-Presidents rubbed shoulders with politicians and pop stars. … They came, ostensibly, to pay homage to Nelson Mandela. Instead, the luvvies (as usual) seemed more in love with themselves.”

The British press, in this case the Daily Mail, has, at least, both the inclination and the ability to mock this repulsive event into meaning: give it the context it deserves. Here in the US there’d be only adulation, sans the edge you get in this piece.

British writers still have bite.

Indeed, Nelson has reached a ripe old age, which is more than many of his “subjects” can hope for.

Here are the latest, likely finessed, murder statistics from the South African Police Service:

From 2006 to 2007, 19,202 South African lives were lost (population 43,786,115). By comparison, the United States had 16,574 murders (population 303,824,646).

Update: “Medal of Honor for a Terrorist.”

Updated: Deifying the Dalai Lama

Celebrity, Hollywood, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-intellectualism, Reason

“… While the Dalai Lama seems a sweet enough fellow down to his conventional, simplistic, unoriginal quips, he is, nevertheless, a caricature, the creation of pseudo-spiritual, faux-intellectual liberal elites…”

More poignantly: “The story of Tibet is a story with more twists than a serpent’s tail. Unfortunately, most Americans are as unequipped as Lauren Caitlin Upton of the 2007 Miss Teen USA fame to locate Tibet on a map, much less preach about its politics…”

Read the rest in “Deifying the Dalai Lama,” my new WorldNetDaily.com column. (Readers of Barely a Blog will be familiar with the theme.)

Update (April 24): There’s an interesting new letter in our Comments Section from a skeptical (read: thinking) health-care professional who’s recently encountered the Lama.