UPDATED (8/8): Some Movies That Weather The Storms Of Time

Aesthetics, America, Art, Film, Technology

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Movies this viewer can watch again and again every few years: “The Perfect Storm”: I keep hoping George Clooney will scale the Wave, as well as the film about the 50 Year Wave: “Point Break.” Jaws (1 & 2): great. Special effects were better then than today’s digital, computer-generated crap.

As to my kind of feelgood movies: Let us ready the great “Death Wish” series, featuring Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey the avenger. That crime-riddled reality is upon us again, in the USA.

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A true American movie classic, where values are solid, is “October Sky,” which “tells the story of four [striving] boys in a poverty-stricken corner of Appalachia.” Mining has always been the saddest story of male heroism.

Tell me about your favorites in the Comments Section below. We all agree that “Gone With the Wind” stands unbeaten—it also serves up better history than offered by court historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.

UPDATED (7/31): “The Perfect Storm Swallows Sailors”

UPDATED (8/8):

UPDATE II (8/1): Ben Shapiro Uses The Left’s Logic To ‘Cancel’ John C. Calhoun

Cultural Marxism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Logic, Neoconservatism, Pseudo-history, Republicans, Secession, States' Rights, The South

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The other day on “Life, Liberty & Levin,” Ben Shapiro trashed, but absolutely rubbished, John C. Calhoun, one of America’s greatest political theorists, in the estimation of historian Clyde Wilson, editor of the John C. Calhoun papers, and the foremost scholar of Calhoun in our time. From what I’ve read of Calhoun’s works, I concur.

Especially magnificent is “A Disquisition on Government,” published in 1851, wherein Calhoun developed the profound idea of ‘two different modes in which the sense of the community may be taken.’ The one ‘regards numbers only.’ The other invokes an entirely different quality or dimension, over and above the ‘numbers.’”

I was inspired to apply Calhoun’s idea in “Has Trump Awakened John C. Calhoun’s Concurrent Majority?” The column is from the book, The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June, 2016).

The more important point is logical. Ben Shapiro trashes Calhoun using the logic of the left—namely that a towering American intellectual and statesman held views considered improper to the American Idiocracy of the 21 Century.

As Professor Wilson has brilliantly written, “This is not historical debate. It is the propaganda trick of labeling something you do not like in order to control and suppress it. Such are those who want the war to be all about slavery—hateful, disdainful, ignorant, and unwilling to engage in honest discussion.”

Another fundamental flaw in Ben Shapiro’s decidedly Republican view of America, expressed on “Life Liberty & Levin,” is the idea that his party is the Good Party.

Libertarians (check) don’t have a bone in the bi-partisan fight, except to advocate for the truth. And the truth is that lot of pseudo-history rests on the deification of, say, the Radical Republicans.

Here is the truth with a caveat: “The Radical Republicans were far more vicious and barbaric than the Antifa. The Republicans supervised the genocide of some 60,000 Plains Indians from 1865 to 1890, led by General Sherman himself”:

MORE:  “The Radical Republicans: The Antifa Of 1865,” September 6, 2017

UPDATED (7/22):

Great comment, Daffy Duck, aka Dale @dalerooster
One more thing: As someone who reads biblical Hebrew and gets it, I am Daisy Duck if Ben Shapiro knows any serious Hebrew, as boasted. Maybe Pidgin Hebrew, i.e., the Americanized crap they speak in Israel, these days.

NEW COLUMN: How Con Inc. Sells Out Dissidents To The Southern Poverty Law Center

Conservatism, Ethics, Free Speech, Media, Republicans

NEW COLUMN IS “How Con Inc. Sells Out Dissidents To The Southern Poverty Law Center.” It is currently on WND and The Unz Review.

Grubbing it with the SPLC and those conservatives who slip between the sheets with these scammers is ill-making. But, three years on, and my hand was forced by this fracas on Twitter. There was no option.

My thanks to WND, The Unz Review, American Greatness, Cassandra Fairbanks, Patrick Howley, and those who man-up.

Excerpt:

They’re unwilling to defend true dissidents, but Beltway lite libertarians and Con Inkers are forever genuflecting to privileged legacy journalists, who can afford to voluntarily leave their rich gigs in “protest” of cancel culture.

The Right hasn’t shut up about the New Yorker’s Andrew Sullivan, who is far less banal than the New York Times’ Bari Weiss. Both belong to the “nothing new, more of the same” neoconservative tradition. Her resignation antics are a storm in a C-cup; his “defiant” departure is the fussy equivalent (just for gay men).

For a more meaningful scandal, to the Right at least, consider the farce of a Conservative news and opinion organization (founded by a dragon slayer of a broadcaster), which has published lacerating pieces condemning America’s foremost hate group, yet has proceeded to purge writers, in compliance with the demands of said shakedown hate group.

American conservatism capitulating to America-haters? Negotiating with terrorists? Hypocrisy? Yes, yes, and yes.

Prone is the natural position of the Establishment Republican, Con Inker, neoconservative, whatever his latest opportunistic, political permutation may be.

The news site is the Daily Caller. The hate group is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The ransom demands issue from the illiterati of the SPLC, who regularly publish lists of—and hit pieces against—untouchable dissidents. They then proceed against us with all the vigor of a “a money grabbing slander machine,” to quote John Stossel, a veteran investigative journalist who has exposed this corrupt syndicate that lives off destroying people.

For his part, economist Thomas DiLorenzo has skillfully pried apart the revenue-rich, “racial racketeering” of the Southern Poverty Law Center, showing it to be nothing more than a “hate group hedge fund.”

Wrote the great leftist journalist Alexander Cockburn, in the New York Press, in 2007: “I’ve long regarded Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center as collectively one of the greatest frauds in American life. The reasons: a relentless fundraising machine devoted to terrifying mostly low-income contributors into unbolting ill-spared dollars year after year to an organization that now has an endowment of more than $100 million.”

An organization that shakes down paupers and pensioners to support its “ritualized forms of defamation.”

One would expect the Daily Caller, which has written against cancel culture and the Southern Poverty law Center, not to capitulate to such rot. But one would be wrong to expect principled positions from any Con Inc. org.

Opportunistic and prone are the only principles known to the D.C. media types. For they have no philosophy to speak of. Whatever political raiment he happens to be cloaked in—defeatism, hypocrisy and betrayal are the default positions of the D.C. “conservative” swamp dweller.

And so, July 7 saw Geoffrey Ingersoll, Daily Caller’s editor in chief, assume the supine position in a Twitter exchange, which ceded the terms of debate to the Democrats and their most diabolical proxies.

The Twitter entity before which Mr. Ingersoll was kneeling metaphorically in contrition was an account called “Sleeping Giants.” “They’re the worst,” attests Steve Bannon. They appear to be attached to a shakedown hub of cancel-culture activism. Illiteracy precludes any manifesto, but the constant nattering on a Twitter account has earned these cyberthugs a Wikipedia page.

To thrive, thugs need enablers. Enter Mr. Ingersoll.

First up on my Twitter feed, July 7, was a tweet from gutsy reporter Patrick Howley, founder of Big League Politics. …

…  READ ON. There’s lots of intrigue, unfortunately.

NEW COLUMN IS “How Con Inc. Sells Out Dissidents To The Southern Poverty Law Center.” It is currently on WND and The Unz Review.