Precious Or Grotesque?

Film, Hollywood, Objectivism, Pop-Culture, Reason, The Zeitgeist

The following excerpt is from this week’s WND.COM column, “Precious Or Grotesque?”:

“….What is so grotesque about the film ‘Precious’ is not the actress—who seems pleasant enough—so much as the film; the fiction, the yarn it spins and the emotions it calculatingly elicits. ‘Precious’ is intended to tug at every single sentimental fiber in a person’s being.

Mired in the misery of Harlem, the ugliest, fattest, most abused and tormented young girl is kicked about some more after spending earlier formative years as the ugliest, fattest, most abused and tormented child in the world, born to the cruelest most craven parents ever, who—although they don’t sacrifice her in a ritual murder—make up for this show of restraint by beating, impregnating, and infecting their daughter with HIV. …

“‘Precious’ … is a gratuitous orgy of pornography, pathology, and sentimentality. It is extreme fiction aimed at exaggerated emotion.” …

THE COMPLETE COLUMN IS “Precious Or Grotesque?”

Do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

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CBOafs Scores Always Way Off

Debt, Democrats, Economy, Government, Healthcare, Political Economy, Regulation

Has any bill passed by Washington ever come in on or under budget? Of course not, but faith runs eternal among the faithful. Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon has said what I did in my last column, “Heeere’s Health-Scare”: “Ultimately, the CBOafs’ forecast is only as good as their premise, which is faulty” (my version). “The Democrats have required the CBO to adopt some really unrealistic assumptions … even if those projections are accurate, politics gets hold of that program. And people start demanding more out of that program” (Cannon’s).

Here are some facts from a research paper authored by FreedomWorks Foundation:

* “The Medicare Program: When Medicare was instituted in 1965, there was no Congressional Budget Office. Instead, in 1967 House Ways and Means analysts estimated the cost of the program. Medicare, they predicted, would cost $12 billion in 1990. (1) They were wrong—by a staggering factor of 10. The actual spending in 1990 was $110 billion. (2) And Medicare costs continue to skyrocket. Through the first 9 months of 2009, Medicare has cost taxpayers $314 billion and that price tag continues to grow by 10%. (3)

In the case of the Medicare Program, the government estimate was off by over 816%. If the CBO estimate for the Senate health care bill is off by the same percentage, then the price of reform may be as high as $7.74 trillion.”

Update II: Canadian Anti-Coulter Cretins Crave ‘Positive Space’

Ann Coulter, Canada, Christianity, Fascism, Free Speech, Individual Rights, Judaism & Jews, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Liberty, Political Philosophy

I’m so very pleased that Ann Coulter has, by necessity, turned her wrath on one of the most oppressive instruments in the Canadian state, the Human Rights apparatus. The Human Rights Commission, a Kangaroo court, operates outside the Canadian courts, affording its victims none of the defenses or due process the courts afford. For example, mens rea, or criminal intention: the absence of the intent to harm is no defense in this “court.” Neither is truth.

The apparatchiks of this machine have designated certain groups as protected species. Thus, the bedrock of western law, the rights of the individual, is turned on its head. Based on your membership in a group, you get to claim protected species rights—and acquire a lien on the property of other groups, who become prime potential offenders. The quasi-judicial Tribunal then acts on these definitions in the substance of its decisions. It’s all great for social cohesion.

And the designations keep growing. Last I covered the quasi-courts, it was deliberating as to whether to extend protection against discrimination on the grounds of “social conditions.” In other words, much like in the US, you do not posses absolute rights to your property. However, over and above the infraction against freedom of association and property that is American Civil Rights law, the Canadian kangaroo code would make it an offense to refuse to rent your apartment, for example, to a welfare recipient.

Devastating complaints have been launched against individuals whose speech the protected species dislike, often bankrupting and destroying innocent individuals guilty of exercising property rights or expressing politically incorrect thoughts.

In a truly free society, the kind we once enjoyed, one honors the right of the individual to associate and disassociate, invest and disinvest, speak and misspeak at will. Simple. So long as your mitts stop at my mug, you ought to be free to do as you wish. (Including ingesting drugs and ending one’s life, for vices are not crimes. “If for harming himself a man forfeits his liberty, then it can’t be said that he has dominion over his body. It implies that someone else—government—owns him.”) People ought to be arrested only for crimes they perpetrate against another’s person or property.

Particularly apt is Ann’s swipe, in “Oh Canada,” at the mob mentality and congenital stupidity issuing from the free-thinking Millennials (whom I’ve described at length in “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable”):

the Ottawa University Student Federation met for seven and a half hours to hammer out a series of resolutions denouncing me. The resolutions included:

“Whereas Ann Coulter is a hateful woman;

“Whereas she has made hateful comments against GLBTQ, Muslims, Jews and women;

“Whereas she violates an unwritten code of ‘positive-space’;

“Be it resolved that the SFUO express its disapproval of having Ann Coulter speak at the University of Ottawa.”

At least the students didn’t waste seven and a half hours on something silly, like their studies.

Update I (March 25): Where do you think “The Silly Sex?” would land this writer were she to return to Canada? Or “Women Who Wed the Wrong Wahhabi”? Or “‘Obsession’ By Muhammad”?

Update II: Coulter has never called for the conversion of Jews, as Myron (and lefties) contends. I’ve long since “Disentangled [That] Coulter/Deutsch Dust-Up”:

Although some Christian denominations have watered it down, a general filament of the Christian faith is the belief that salvation is predicated on accepting Christ. If Coulter were more than a brash, bonny (if bony) babe, she’d have explained that doctrine: To get past the Pearly Gates, Christians believe one has to accept Christ.

“But is belief in ‘perfection’ or ‘completion’ through Jesus tantamount to hostility to Jews?” asked Gabriel Sanders of the Jewish daily “Forward.” And he replied, quoting Yaakov Ariel, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a specialist in Jewish-Evangelical ties: “A conservative, Jesus-oriented faith doesn’t mean, in and of itself, that people are anti-Jewish. Some of the more favorable attitudes toward Jews have developed in Evangelical circles.”

Police State Shaking In Its Goose-Stepping Boots

Democracy, Democrats, Fascism, Law, Terrorism, The State

It’s the leading story on just about every cable network. “House Democrats are concerned about their security due to increased threats since Sunday’s vote to pass the health care bill.”

A grim-faced House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer held a news conference, where he bemoaned that “a significant number, meaning over 10” Democrats “had reported either threats, vandalism or other incidents. Capitol Police officials have briefed House Democrats on reporting suspicious or threatening activity and taking precautions to avoid ‘subjecting themselves or their families to physical harm,’ said Hoyer, D-Maryland.”

Hoyer was flanked by a chap called Jim Clyburn who mouthed cliches about the lessons of history, and threw the kitchen sink of civil rights, holocaust, homophobia in for good measure.

Most other news outlets ran with this story, against a backdrop of besieged Democrats speaking about the need for security details to guard their homes and families and wallowing in horror stories about a handful of disenfranchised voters who seem to have lost faith in the vaunted American mobocracy. (Your wishes to be left alone are ignored in a democracy?! You don’t say.)

Good luck to you in trying to get a security detail should your family come under threat or should your boyfriend threaten to kill you. The sponger class has no perception of how rarefied and cloistered is its worthless, parasitic existence.

How ludicrous and contemptuous for the political class (and its media sycophants), backed as it is by the tanks that took out tots at WACO, to put on this show—aimed at depicting a tiny number of angry voters who dared to step out of line as Timothy McVeighs in the making.