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Illegal immigration propaganda at LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

March 9, 2018 by Bookworm 8 Comments

For almost a year now, LACMA (aka the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) has been pushing illegal immigration propaganda at taxpayer expense.

lawless government DACA Illegal immigrants illegal aliens illegal immigrationLos Angeles County taxpayers cough up $29 million a year to cover operating costs for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, aka LACMA. I wonder if anyone asked them if they approve of the museum’s newest installation: Carne y Arena (literally: meat and sand). The installation is intended to give the average museum goer (who’s willing to sign a waiver) the illegal immigrant experience. Here’s how the museum describes the exhibition, which opened last July and ends at the beginning of this July:

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s conceptual virtual reality installation CARNE y ARENA (Virtually present, Physically invisible) explores the human condition of immigrants and refugees. Based on true accounts, the superficial lines between subject and bystander are blurred and bound together, allowing individuals to walk in a vast space and thoroughly live a fragment of the refugees’ personal journeys. An immersive installation that reunites frequent collaborators Iñárritu and Emmanuel Lubezki alongside producer Mary Parent and ILMxLAB, CARNE y ARENA is centered around a 6 ½-minute virtual reality sequence for one person that employs state-of-the-art immersive technology to create a multi-narrative light space with human characters.

“During the past four years in which this project has been growing in my mind, I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing many Mexican and Central American refugees. Their life stories haunted me, so I invited some of them to collaborate with me in the project,” Iñárritu says. “My intention was to experiment with VR technology to explore the human condition in an attempt to break the dictatorship of the frame, within which things are just observed, and claim the space to allow the visitor to go through a direct experience walking in the immigrants’ feet, under their skin, and into their hearts.”

That’s a pretty bland, abstract description. A pro-illegal immigration Proggie friend of mine, though, went and was blown away by the wonder of it all. I’ve restated his glowing description in my own less glowing words, but the substance of what he said is still there.

The exhibition is meant to have you experience through virtual reality (it’s hot and sandy in the exhibition) what a Honduran, El Salvadoran, Merxican or Guatemalan experiences as he or she journeys north through the Sonoran desert to enter America illegally through Arizona. After you’ve signed a waiver, lest the good folks at LACMA make you uncomfortable, and taken off your shoes, your adventure begins.

Thrill to the experience of having border guards surround you with helicopters and vans to arrest you. Then, having gotten yourself (as promised) hot and covered with sand, you get to see videos of real illegal aliens reenacting their experiences for the camera. (I assume it’s some form of PTSD psychotherapy for illegal aliens.) [Read more…]

Filed Under: Immigration Tagged With: Alejandro G. Iñárritu, illegal aliens, Illegal Immigration, Jay Carney, LACMA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Propaganda

Children’s literature: as didactic as ever, only with Progressive goals

November 8, 2017 by Bookworm 27 Comments

Children’s literature once taught children to avoid danger and be good boys and girls; now it primes young people to accept a Progressive political agenda.

Children's Literature 1810The other night I went to an event at our local independent bookstore. I, along with about thirty other women and a few men, listened to presentations about both children’s and adult’s books as potential holiday gifts.

None of the books were my cup of tea because they were all “quality literature.” Or put another way, they were all the kind of books that would end up in Oprah’s Book Club. My rule of thumb is that I will never read an Oprah-recommended book. Her taste in books and mine are so diametrically opposed that it’s a given that, if she likes it, I’ll hate it.

Oprah likes books that are artsy, meaningful, politically correct, and written in high-brow language. I like thrillers, murder mysteries, romances, and non-fiction. We do not intersect.

Because of my low-brow tastes, had I not gone to this bookstore event, I would have been unaware of the didactic material being pushed as children’s literature for the Progressive, upper-middle-class household.

When I think of didactic children’s literature, I think of fairy tales and books published between 1750 and 1850 or so. Fairy tales may not seem obviously didactic, but they are — or at least some are. Don’t talk to strangers says Little Red Riding Hood. Don’t sleep with “a prick” when you’re still young says Sleeping Beauty. Be a hard worker of good cheer says Cinderella. Don’t accept food from strangers says Snow White. Throughout the world, fairy tales urge girls to be meek and chaste while urging boys to be brave and adventurous. Those aren’t politically correct messages, but history is what it is.

In addition to the didactic fairy-tales, there were others, hundreds of others, that were directed at peasants who gathered around fires on dark nights. They had no purpose but to entertain. They were cruel, rude, licentious, amusing, and frightening. But still, there was always that subset that reinforced society’s messages about sexual roles and safety. Even though the stories weren’t directed specifically at children, the messages were.

Beginning in the late 1700s, publishers began to promote books that were, in fact, directed specifically at children. Many of the writers were religious and, of these religious writers, many subscribed to a fire and brimstone Evangelical Christianity. This was openly didactic children’s literature. In poems and prose, children were warned away from dangerous activities lest horrible things happened (fire, drowning, maiming, poverty, starvation, mad dogs, insane asylums, hangings, you name it), and they were encouraged in good behavior (sitting quietly, obeying their parents, studying their Bible, etc.). These were books of the “teach and preach” variety.

Today, when we look at these books, with their overt threats of punishment and their heavy-handed encouragement for socially- and religiously-acceptable behavior for boys and girls, we tend to laugh . . . and then congratulate ourselves on writing much more subtle, sophisticated, and enjoyable books for children. None of that heavy-handed Christian stuff for our little darlings. Our books teach them to enjoy the world around them, to play well with others, and to love politically correct causes, to admire minorities, and to fear whites. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Children, Lefties on Parade, Political correctness Tagged With: Children's Literature, Dave Eggers, Didactic Literature, Her Right Foot, Immigration, In The Midst of Winter, Isabelle Allende, Jason Reynolds, Katherine Applegate, Marvel Comics, Miles Morales - Spider Man, Propaganda, Spider Man, Wishtree

Ken Burns on the Tet Offensive: the good, the bad, and the propaganda

October 3, 2017 by Bookworm 29 Comments

Ken Burns’ manages to be mostly honest in a stunning look at the Tet Offensive, but what he leaves out is as important as what he includes.

Tet Offensive Vietnam WarHere in the Bookworm home, we’re still working our way through Ken Burns’ Vietnam War documentary. Last night, we got to the part about the Tet Offensive. Having recently been in both Hue and Saigon, the footage of the running battles really resonated with me.

I don’t know why it is, but I find that wars are always more real to me when I see the actual ground on which they took place. When I travel, I visit battlefields, and that’s despite the fact that I’m stunningly unversed in battlefield tactics. Over the years, I’ve visited Carthage, Waterloo, Ypres, the Somme, the Ardennes, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Yorktown, and others I can’t remember now. After seeing the footage of the Tet Offensive, and combining it with my personal visual reference points, I have a better sense of the battle that raged then.

Overall, Burns did an extremely good job of explaining the larger outlines of the lead-up to the Tet Offensive and the offensive itself. He explained the North Vietnamese thinking about a major assault that would cause South Vietnamese troops to defect and the populace to side with the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars.

Of the battles themselves, Burns uses footage that helps explain why almost 80 journalists lost their lives in Vietnam. These journalists were right there with the US troops filming away. I got breathless watching because the sense of immediacy was overwhelming. This was Call of Duty, except with real Americans shooting real guns at real enemies, with the enemies shooting back.

Burns makes it plain that the Tet Offensive was a disaster for the North Vietnamese. Not a single South Vietnamese soldier defected; civilians just hid from the fury, fearing the communists even more than their own government; the North Vietnamese lost almost as many fighters in the Tet Offensive as America did over the course of the entire Vietnam war; and the American military proved itself in battle to superb in terms of courage, strategy, and tactics.

Regarding those casualties, this data from the Wikipedia article on all three phases of the Tet Offensive tells you all you need to know about winners and losers: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Vietnam Tagged With: Democrat Party, Ken Burns, LBJ, Lyndon Johnson, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, Propaganda, Terry Garlock, Tet Offensive, Vietnam War

Progressives’ crude political commentary about North Korea [NSFW]

September 27, 2017 by Bookworm 9 Comments

Given a vexing, dangerous, and complicated problem like North Korea, Progressives reduce the issue to school-boy sniggering about sexual prowess.

North Korea Propaganda anti-AmericanOne of the things that distinguishes Progressives from Conservatives is that the former are certain that they’re very smart. For example, they point out that wealthy Blue enclaves have a disproportionate number of America’s college graduates. This argument erroneously conflates intelligence with a college degree, something that has some virtue on the STEM side of college but is laughable when it comes to the liberal arts.

The same argument also erroneously conflates academic prowess (which is a form of intelligence) with wisdom or ethical sense. In the face of that argument, I always like to point out that Radovan Karadžić was a psychiatrist. That didn’t stop his genocidal mania.

Progressives also like to boast that all sorts of scientific studies show that they’re smarter than Conservatives. They haven’t quite grasped, of course, that social science studies are never really scientific because objectivity is impossible and biases seem inevitable.

You probably remember that a much-lauded study proclaiming that conservatives are psychotic had to be retracted entirely because the study’s results were reversed. In fact, it was the Progressives who showed more psychotic traits.

That’s not the only purportedly scientific study slamming conservatives. Universities routinely churn out studies showing that Conservatives are stupid, ill-informed, evil creatures. Lost in this self-defined world, they’re shocked when reputable polls show that Conservatives are actually more knowledgeable than Progressives.

Progressives also struggle to understand complaints that their methodology shows bias. It didn’t seem to occur to them that, if you prepare a study examining whether children in religious or atheist households are more moral or generous, you’re going to get skewed results if all your metrics are about Progressive ethics (morality is shown by being open to transgenderism) instead of being about Conservative ethics (personal generosity to the poor). [Read more…]

Filed Under: Donald Trump, Lefties on Parade, North Korea Tagged With: Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un, North Korea, Nuclear Weapons, Progressives, Propaganda, Radovan Karadžić

Movie Review: Their Finest

May 9, 2017 by Closet Conservative Critic 1 Comment

Our Closet Conservative Movie Critic explains how Their Finest just missed being a powerful, charming take on women’s role in England’s WWII propaganda.

Their Finest Movie ReviewI saw the trailer for Their Finest, and it was an engaging preview. It had all the markings for my kind of movie: History, Charm, Love, Humor, and all centered around the world of movie-making. Movies about “making movies” almost always strikes a chord with me. This movie has received almost exclusively positive reviews, and is going over well with the public. This all of course sets expectations way too high. With that kind of build-up, maybe it’s not surprising that I did not enjoy Their Finest.

All the humor, charm, and magic that was in the trailer was never transferred to the 2-hour feature version. It was slow, methodical, melancholy, and really lacked the big moments the trailer seemed to imply it was going to have.

The movie centers on three young lovers in London in 1940. Eight months after World War II began, England suffered a big blow in the retreat from Dunkirk. Morale is low, and the Germans are bombing London in their night raids. The protagonist, played by Gemma Arterton, is hired by the British Ministry to spice up their propaganda movies with her angle on female dialogue and perspective. There is a love story triangle that goes in ways the viewer might not expect, and there is a tragic loss that is more bizarre (if not ludicrous) than sad. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Hollywood Tagged With: Gemma Arterton, Propaganda, Their Finest, War Movies, World War II

VICE News uses one illegal immigrant to push anti-Trump propaganda

March 17, 2017 by Bookworm 13 Comments

VICE News’ sob story about an illegal immigrant forced to cross legally into Canada to escape the evil Trump was truth to Leftist, but propaganda to me.

Illegal immigrant immigration sanctuary citiesThe other night, I found myself sitting with a Progressive friend and watching VICE News, which is a Bill Maher production that runs on HBO. In other words, a savvy viewer understands that the producer is a hard Left Progressive who is pushing his beliefs on a cable channel that has a relentlessly hard Left orientation. VICE’s story about the sufferings an illegal immigrant forced to go to Canada was no exception.

The story (not a news report, but a story) focused on a poor El Salvadoran man who’s been living in the US illegally for seventeen years; got married to a woman who is here legally, although she’s apparently not an American citizen; and has two young children. The children, presumably, have been enjoying the benefits, such as they are, of growing up in America.

According to the immigrant (whose name I have forgotten), were he to return to El Salvador, he would have only two choices: join a gang or watch his family be killed. However, with Donald Trump in office threatening actually to enforce the laws of the land, the immigrant is too frightened to stay in America and has decided, instead, to go to Canada. Although Trump has been president for less than two months, there’s already a new underground railroad through Leftist churches to make it easy for him to do so.

As the story progresses, we see the immigrant sitting alone in a Buffalo safe house; we hear the minister going on about his church’s role in the slave-era Underground Railway; we see his cute children badmouthing Trump; and we see his entire family decide to make the journey to Canada so that they can stay together. As part of all this, VICE, with tears it its eyes, and without any apparent irony, talks about the difficult hurdles he’ll have to cross because of Canada’s strict immigration laws. Canada’s strict border enforcement is somehow mutated into a good thing because it has the possibility of mercy, while America’s attempt at reinstating existing border laws just a fraction as strict as those in Canada is the ultimate evil.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Immigration, Media matters Tagged With: Canada, El Salvador, Illegal Immigration, Media Bias, Propaganda, Rule of Law

Learning to love the brilliant and controversial Milo Yiannopoulos *UPDATED*

February 19, 2017 by Bookworm 25 Comments

Milo Yiannopoulos

[And timing is everything. The day after I wrote an encomium to Milo, who speaks forcefully about (among other things) gender dysphoria and the danger to children in bathrooms, PJ Media claims he supports gay pedophilia — or, at least, being a provocateur, provocatively says things he implies he does. Milo is certainly firm in his outrage against the accusation. His defense makes sense to me, especially given how familiar I am with gay culture thanks to growing up and working in SF. This new data point doesn’t change the main points below. Here’s the deal: gay culture is different and one of Milo’s strengths is that he says America should not subordinate itself to gay culture.]

UPDATE: Milo seems to have been destroyed. Despite his books status as a best seller, Simon & Schuster has dumped it. Breitbart is silent about him.

As best as I can tell, thanks to Stephen Green’s research, these are the two worst things Milo said that would lead to an accusation that he’s a pedophile:

Milo’s money quote, which was edited out of the video, is this:

The law is probably about right, that’s probably roughly the right age. I think it’s probably about okay, but there are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age, I certainly consider myself to be one of them, people who are sexually active younger. I think it particularly happens in the gay world by the way. In many cases actually those relationships with older men…This is one reason I hate the left. This stupid one size fits all policing of culture. (People speak over each other). This sort of arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent, which totally destroys you know understanding that many of us have. The complexities and subtleties and complicated nature of many relationships. You know, people are messy and complex. In the homosexual world particularly. Some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, the sort of coming of age relationships, the relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are, and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable and sort of a rock where they can’t speak to their parents. Some of those relationships are the most -”

And this was edited out as well:

“You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means. Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13-years-old who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty. Pedophilia is attraction to people who don’t have functioning sex organs yet. Who have not gone through puberty… That’s not what we are talking about. You don’t understand what pedophilia is if you are saying I’m defending it because I’m certainly not.”

In other words, Milo never said that he had sex with little boys or that he intended to do so. What he did say was that older gay men often introduce younger gay men into sex. I certainly saw that enough when I was living and working in San Francisco. It was too common practice for sexually confused 20 or 22 year olds to be taken under the wing of a 30 or 40 year old gay man. It was not pedophilia, it was gay mentoring and it’s obvious that Milo is referring to that practice.

As for Milo’s comment about pedophilia being a perverted passion for children who have not gone through adolescence, he’s correct. He’s also correct that children mature at different speeds. In my neighborhood, one kid at 12 had a nascent mustache and a voice deeper than my husband’s. Another finally got his growth spurt when he went off to college, although he’s still not shaving. Having said that, Milo made it clear that, given this variability, he has no problem with the current age of consent laws.

It’s very disturbing that this take-down of one of the most effective voices for conservativism came from the #NeverTrump crowd having a petty pique fit over Milo’s invitation to CPAC. Having said that, the information was out there, and if the renegade right hadn’t published it, the Lefties would have and in a way that was even worse.

I’ve heard from friends that Lefties are already piling on to this man who did nothing wrong other than making observations about the realities of the gay world and the physical maturation process. More than that, I find it incredibly ironic that this tut-tutting comes from the Left. These are the same people who demand that condoms, birth control advice, and abortion information should be given to kids as young as 11 in their schools, and who insist that a child can get an abortion with an adult okaying it something that is, of course, the best possible way for a true pedophile to destroy any genetic evidence of his crime.

And by the way, if this seems familiar, you’re seeing the same takedown that the Left and #NeverTrumpers did to Trump. He observed accurately enough that, if you’re rich and famous, women will indeed let you do anything to them. He did not say that he took advantage of this reality, yet he was instantly called a molester and subjected to the harshest castigation. And of course, most of the screaming came from the same side that was fine with Clinton raping women and using the pressure of his fame and power to coerce a women young enough to be his daughter to engage in a sordid workplace affair.

This whole thing sickens and disgusts me. We are in a political sewer in our country.

And now back to my original post.

Milo Yiannopoulos — rude and crude, but also smart, brave, funny, and bitchy. He’s a necessary counterweight to Progressives’ lethal Political Correctness.

milo yiannopoulosWith a swirling debate about whether Milo Yiannopoulos will be a keynote speaker at this year’s CPAC, I have a confession: I didn’t like Milo Yiannopoulos when he first popped up on my radar. At a first, superficial, glance, he was everything that rubs me the wrong way: His humor seemed to rely on crude insults and too often to trade in racial and religious stereotypes, he relentlessly leveraged those insults and stereotypes into media face time which seemed to drag conservativism down not build it up, and he had that whole drag queen vibe. I have issues, which I’ll explain in a few minutes, with the drag queen vibe. Having reached these conclusions, I dismissed Milo. There. Done.

The thing is, if you’re a conservative, Milo is not a person who can be — or should be — dismissed. I first got an inkling of this from my teenage son. Sick and tired of being on the receiving end of misanthropic third-wave feminist tirades at his school (which cannot be challenged because doing so is an unacceptable manifestation of cisgender male privilege and domination), he headed to the internet looking for rebuttals to these feminists. Even if the school’s uber-liberal environment bans voicing the rebuttals, at least he had the comfort of knowing they were there.

My son’s research led him directly to Steve Crowder and Milo. He appreciated Crowder’s unflinching, and almost invariably funny, take Islam’s issues with the West and he was completely awed at Milo’s ability to (in my son’s words) “destroy those feminazis.” My son therefore insisted I watch Milo’s epic feminazi destruction in action. I agreed, somewhat worried that I’d get one of Milo’s unpleasant, uber-queenie, racist, shock-value moments. Instead, I got this:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Activism, Donald Trump, Political correctness Tagged With: Big Government, Bill Maher, Charlie Chaplin, Der Fuehrer's Face, Disney, Donald Duck, Donald Trump, Immigration, Islam, Kinsey Sicks, Larry Willmore, Mel Brooks, Milo Yiannopoulos, Progressives, Propaganda, Springtime For Hitler, The Great Dictator, The Producers

Whatever happened to the idea that dignity is a virtue?

February 15, 2017 by Bookworm 8 Comments

The Negro Soldier an homage to dignityI’m too young to remember a time when dignity was considered a virtue, not only in individuals, but in entire groups. The other night, I was reminded of what I missed when I watched a 1944 U.S. Army Propaganda film, The Negro Soldier, which Frank Capra directed. The Army commissioned the movie because it was trying to reach out to blacks who were unwilling to enlist in the fight.

The movie qua movie was a resounding success, undoubtedly paving the way for Americans accepting Truman’s executive order integrating the military and, perhaps, moving the American conscience forward towards the Civil Rights movement:

The film began shooting in 1943. The movie crew traveled the United States, visiting over 19 different army posts. The final movie totaled 43 minutes long and received official support in 1944. At first, The Negro Soldier was intended for only African American troops; however, the creators of the film decided that they wanted to distribute the film to a wider military and civil audience. Nobody was certain what the impact of the film would have on viewers, and many people feared that African Americans would have a negative response to the film. However, when the first African American troops saw the film, they insisted that all African American troops should see it. Furthermore, after both African Americans and whites were surveyed about their response to the film, the filmmakers were shocked when over 80% of the white population thought the film should be shown to both black and white troops, as well as white civilians.

Although the Wikipedia article from which I quoted, above, does not say it, TCM stated that blacks did in fact respond to the movie’s message by enlisting in significant numbers. I think you’ll see why if you take the time to watch the movie yourself. Because of it’s importance in American history, the U.S. National Archives restored it and you can see the entire movie here:
[Read more…]

Filed Under: African-Americans Tagged With: Beyoncé, Busta, Daryl Davis, Dignity, Frank Capra, KKK, Martin Luther King, Propaganda, Racism, The Negro Soldier, U.S. Army, WWII

Hillary adulation continues unabated in a post-truth America

January 22, 2017 by Bookworm 10 Comments

An extreme bit of Hillary adulation showed up on my Facebook feed today:


In case the “see more” button on the post doesn’t work, this is what Andrew Mayzak had to say:

Can we talk about this for a minute?

This is a Yale-educated law professor, First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State who:

-Endured 25 years of smear campaigns
-Lost the Electoral College by 80,000 votes
-Won the popular vote by 3 million votes
-Attended her opponent’s inauguration
-Received no handshake from Trump
-Was booed by the crowd when she appeared

And goddammit… LOOK at her. Polished and confident, wearing white for the Suffragettes, her husband taking *her* arm instead of the other way around.

Symbolism matters.

Perseverance matters.

She matters.

This is the godmother of New America, a rational, pragmatic, imperfect human being who was born 50 years too early for her gender to be a non-issue in an election.

While she missed the presidency, she arrived just in time to show us all, in unflinching terms, the deep undercurrent of sexist double standards in our society.

And in doing so, she taught generations of girls and women that yes, you DO matter and yes, you CAN do anything.

From my viewpoint, that Hillary adulation is appalling, not just because it’s slobbering sycophancy that should embarrass anyone over the age of seven, but because so much of it is untrue. Underlying all the untruths is a disturbing refusal to recognize that even that best person occasionally has feet of clay. For example, even those of us who support Trump acknowledge his foibles. I’m putting my faith in his presidency being the necessary corrective to the last 8 years and, indeed, the last 25 years, but I’d be a fool if I didn’t acknowledge that he’s vulgar, self-absorbed, and manipulative. As for his relationship to the truth, I see him guilty mostly of puffery (i.e., exaggeration) than out-and-out dishonesty — which is not virtuous, but it’s not a cardinal sin.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Hillary Clinton, Lefties on Parade Tagged With: Hillary Adulation, Hillary Clinton, Left, Propaganda, Truth

Political proselytizing should not happen in public school

December 14, 2016 by Bookworm 7 Comments

Public school is not the place for politicians to proselytizeBack in the 1960s and 1970s, state and local politicians did come and give talks at whichever public school I happened to attend at the time. The politicians’ topics were invariably uplifting things about civic involvement, public service, the great people of San Francisco or California, or similar anodyne, non-partisan stuff. Those days are over.

House Rep. Jared Huffman (D – Marin County) gave some young teens at a Marin public school a full-throated defense of hard-Left Progressive politics, along with a reminder to oppose President-Elect Donald Trump:

Congressman Jared Huffman did not hold back Tuesday as he discussed next month’s inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump with Mill Valley Middle School students.

[snip]

Huffman, who was elected last month to his third term, went to the middle school to talk with eighth-graders after receiving a batch of letters from them. The letters expressed opposition to the $3.7 billion Dakota Access Pipeline project proposed to carry crude oil from the Bakken fields in Western North Dakota to Illinois. [No doubt written as a school assignment, if I know my Marin public schools . . . and I do.]

[snip]

Huffman said people across the nation will have to engage if they want to fight Trump’s interests, such as softening environmental regulations and deporting undocumented immigrants.

He said more letter-writing and other actions might be necessary in the next four years.

Huffman discussed complexities he sees as problematic under a Trump administration, including the former real estate tycoon’s business dealings. He referred to reports earlier this week that suggest Turkey’s government is leveraging Trump’s business interests with the arrest of Barbaros Muratoglu, a businessman with close ties to Trump.

“I think the deeper we look into that, the more we’re going to consider that this web of business interests he has all over the world — Japan, Russia and all these different countries — will make it very hard for us to have confidence that he’s governing in the interest of our country and not in the interest of the Trump corporation,” he said.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Education, Lefties on Parade Tagged With: Education, Jared Huffman, Politics, Propaganda, Proselytizing, Public School

Hillary’s coronation, Trump’s defenestration, and the madness of the media

August 7, 2016 by Bookworm 12 Comments

Another false narrative, because the actual footage shows that Trump was not mocking a reporter (see link at bottom of this post)

Another false narrative, because the actual footage shows that Trump was not mocking a reporter (see link at bottom of this post)

Up until 2008, although the media was already reliably Leftist, it still kept up the pretense that it was objective. In every election year, it interspersed its cheerleading for the Democrat candidate and put-downs for the Republican candidate with occasional stories that praised the Republican with faint damns, and that damned the Democrat with faint praise. In that far distant time, journalists still spoke about reporting as if their profession required them to relay facts instead of spinning them.

Everything changed in 2008. With the first black Democrat candidate for president, the Leftist collective that is the American media felt that it had a moral imperative to ensure that Obama won. It began the righteous charge, therefore, by destroying Hillary during the primaries (clearly, a “first sort of black president” trumped a “first sort of woman president”).

Then, having performed that job, the media turned its collective wrath on McCain, even while singing endless paeans to the wonder that was Obama, the magic negro, the racial healer, the smartest person in every room, and the guy with the great crease in his pants. The media was so committed to its mission that it ignored entirely basic reporting obligations, such as determining whether Obama’s academic record supported his much-vaunted intellect; whether his professional career suggested a competent man; whether his Christian faith comported with core Christian doctrine or was just a weekly anti-American grievance gathering; and whether his associations throughout his life were of the type (anti-American, anti-semitic, anti-white, etc.) that might give ordinary voters some concern.

Indeed, rather than reporting on Obama, the media did the opposite: anyone who did good, old-fashioned legwork to learn more about the man who wanted to take the helm in America was a racist. If you wished to avoid that repellant label, you took Obama at face value, reserving your reportorial skills for destroying Sarah Palin (whose life, unlike Obama’s, was already an open book).

Once Obama became president, it was pretty obvious that the media had oversold him. He wasn’t a racial healer, he wasn’t the smartest man in the room, he wasn’t a competent manager, he wasn’t a committed Christian, and he was still palling around with anti-American activists, although his palling around now took him all over the world. He elevated Muslim and illegal immigrant concerns over American rights, was (and is) hostile to the Constitution, hated Israel, lied like a rug about Obamacare, and generally was at his best only when he was slow jammin’ on late night talk shows. Everything else . . . meh, not so much.

In 2012, the media did exactly what it had done in 2008. It reported positively on Obama, and negatively on every Republican during the primaries and on Mitt Romney after the primaries. However, possibly nervous about a wholesale repeat of its 2008 campaign for Obama, the media still practice a little bit of reportage that included damning Obama with faint praise, and praising Romney with faint damns. For the most part, though, the media made it clear which candidate it thought should win.

I mistakenly believed in 2012 that the American people, educated by the chasm between the Obama promise and the Obama practice, would have been put wise to the fact that they were not getting actual news (that is, “just the facts”) but were instead on the receiving end of a steady diet of Democrat-party campaign material. Given how bad things were for Democrat players and politics in 2012, I therefore assumed that a savvy public would understand the propaganda and vote Obama out of office. I erred.

While I may have erred in 2012, the media learned its lesson — it can say anything, and it can hide anything, and the uninformed will follow its lead . . . sometimes even as that same credulous public mumbles despairingly that the media is no longer publishing actual, you know, news.

Indeed, the relationship between the public and the media today reminds me of an old cartoon showing a man and a woman sitting at the breakfast table. The man has a newspaper open before him, and says to his wife, “It says here that you shouldn’t believe everything you read.” To which the wife quite naturally responds, “Don’t believe it.”

Of course, having sinned twice and been rewarded, the media is now sinning with over-the-top gusto. No more feeble attempts at even-handedness. Reporters are openly feeding at the Jon Stewart trough. There are no MSM stories about Trump’s success as a businessman, about the people loyal to and respectful of him, about the generous or moral stands he’s taken over the years, or about the fact that his business success shows that he’s actually rather risk-averse, rather than the opposite. Every news report first claims that everything he says is a lie, only to back off from those claims days later, in small print or lost links.

Instead, the media is in a shark-feeding frenzy, with Trump as the chum. Having propped him up during the primaries (“Let’s promote the most unelectable primary candidate for the Republican party”), reporters are going in for the kill. Moreover, they’re going in for the kill with shoddy, dishonest reporting, and they refuse to back down even when proven to have lied. For them, every story about Trump is a successful example of the “Big Lie.”

Meanwhile, when it comes to Hillary, the media is happy to let her vanish for 246 days. They’re happy to report her press releases as news. They’re happy to downplay the fact that she proved to be the greatest national security risk in American history. They’re happy to ignore the fact that she sold out America to fund herself and her husband. They ignore the lies, the physical problems, the mental weirdness, the corruption, the repeated job failures, and all the other stuff that should be on the front page of every paper along with the reporting on Trump.

You’ve notice, I’m sure, that I didn’t put any hyperlinks in the above narrative. Instead, I’m going to link here to a series of articles that prove my point:

The really sad bad news?  Nobody is listening to conservative media except for those who have already bought into the conservative premise. The MSM owns American brains.

Trump didn’t kick a baby out of a campaign rally (and Glenn Kessler gets kudos for reporting on that), but the MSM narrative continues unabated. (More here from the baby’s mom.)

Matthew Vadum has an in-depth, well-sourced discussion of the points I made above.

No, Donald did not mock a disabled reporter; the media just spun it as if he did.

So-called journalists who should be reporting on Hillary are instead cheering for her (after lobbing meaningless softball questions at her).

Negative articles about Trump overflow every MSM outlet, while the negatives on Hillary don’t even make the bottom of the last page.

And don’t forget Pat Caddell’s scathing denunciation of Reuters for gaming the polls to promote Hillary.

Oh, and speaking of Reuters, both Reuters and Getty have almost surreptitiously published photos of Hillary practically being carried up some stairs. That is, the photos are uploaded on their sites, but they haven’t used them in any stories. Unfortunately, Drudge found them anyway:

Hillary barely manages to climb stairs

 

There’s something very wrong with Hillary and Scott Adams is right to say that the American people should demand to see her health records (and Trump’s too, for that matter).

Honestly, I’m at the point where I’m going to vote for Trump just as an act of hostility to the American media.

Filed Under: Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Media matters Tagged With: Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Hillary Can't Climb Stairs, Hillary Clinton, Media Bias, Propaganda

Government gaslighting: California PUC pushes dodgy climate science

April 13, 2016 by Bookworm 7 Comments

When did the earth's climate not changeI got an email from PG&E.  I’ve made a few changes and interlineations:

A Message from the California Public Utilities Commission

This month* your utility bill will include a credit identified as the “California Climate Credit.” Your household and millions of others throughout the state will receive this credit on your utility bills.  [Couldn’t they just lower my taxes — which goes up to 13/3% — and not use my money for Leftist propaganda?  Oh, wait!  They can’t.  The state is broke.]

This payment comes from a California program that is fighting climate change. [Hello!  Idiots!  The climate has been changing since the earth’s first birthday.  PBS’s Nova had a great episode on the Vikings and the announcer didn’t even choke when he noted that part of their ability to colonize Iceland and Greenland was because it was much warmer back then.]  Your Climate Credit is designed to help you join in these efforts. You can use the bill savings from your Climate Credit however you choose [at least they’re not mandating how we spend it . . . yet], but you can save even more money by investing the savings in energy-saving home upgrades, including more efficient lights and appliances. You can find more information and receive rebates for these and many other energy-efficient choices for your home at www.EnergyUpgradeCA.org/credit.  [I’m going to use it to offset state, federal, and local gasoline taxes, which add $0.61 to the cost of every gallon of gas sold in California.]

The Climate Credit is one of many programs resulting from landmark legislation called the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Together, these programs are cutting pollution [good], creating jobs [hah!], and investing in cleaner energy and transportation [with transportation bills benefitting the politicians who passed the Global Warming Solutions Act because they get donations from the unions that benefit from the surprisingly few jobs that are created.]. For more information about climate change science and programs to reduce carbon pollution, visit www.climatechange.ca.gov https://wattsupwiththat.com/.

With California promoting ideology in emails to consumers, I’d like to quote former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, from The Case For Democracy: The Power Of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny And Terror (2004 hardback edition):

[Read more…]

Filed Under: California, Climate change, Free speech Tagged With: California Climate Credit, Climate change, Natan Sharansky, Propaganda

Donald Trump, Open Primaries, and the Rise of the Xenophobic Democrat

March 2, 2016 by Bookworm 39 Comments

Donald Trump[Someone commented rightly that “xenophobic” refers to unreasonable fears, and we conservatives agree that illegal immigration and unchecked Muslim immigration are a problem. I’m using the term “xenophobic” in the context of other Democrats who see the “Trump traitors” as unreasonably fearful. See, e.g., Robert Reich saying anyone who supports Trump is xenophobic.]

I was not surprised to learn that Donald Trump swept those states with open primaries. I have vociferously opposed open primaries from the moment a proposition to turn California into an open primary state first appeared on the ballot.  Indeed, writing on the subject almost two months ago, I predicted exactly the outcome we’re seeing now.

My core argument is that primaries are not meant to be pre-election elections, winnowing the total number of candidates from all parties down to two. They are instead meant to be the time during which people allied with a specific political ideology select the candidate they wish to have represent them before the American people in November. If that party’s candidate is shut out of the election process long before the nation starts paying serious attention to the messages, that party’s free speech is effectively stifled when it matters most. I continue to believe that I am correct.

I met one of the driving forces behind California’s open primary law, a bright, charming, fairly moderate Democrat. Back then, I wrote that he and other open primary supporters claimed open primary laws would end extremist candidates and, instead, drive voters towards a moderate middle:

As he saw it, under the old system, parties would use the primaries to elect purist candidates who represented the extremes of their position. Come the election, there were no moderate candidates on the ballot. He saw this as the reason that California was such a fiscal disaster: Because Democrats are the majority, nothing tempered them. He believed that, open primaries, when financial moderates from either party were on the ballot, ordinary people would be drawn to these candidates, and would even cross party lines to vote for them. Only moderate and fiscally sound candidates who appeal to the masses in the middle would win the top two spots on the November ballot.

I was less sanguine. Writing in January about our discussion, I stated that, in addition to my core concern — which is that open primaries stifle political speech when it matters most — I worried about it giving rise, not to moderation, but to extremism. Because I have no shame when my crystal ball works accurately, I’m going to quote my prediction at length:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Conservative ideology, Lefties on Parade Tagged With: Democrat Xenophobes, Donald Trump, Left's March Through Institutions, Propaganda, Reagan Democrats

A few thoughts about the dangerous influx of Muslim “refugees” into Europe

September 6, 2015 by Bookworm 50 Comments

Arabs countries and refugeesIn no particular order, my thoughts about the mass Muslim invasion of Europe:

The poster to the left implies that Muslim countries are heartless, which they are. But they’re also pragmatic. They’re refusing to accept those so-called “refugees” because they understand that there are terrorists embedded within them. The “refugees” are a Trojan horse. Pamela Geller is right on the money:

The question no one is asking is why all these people, all of a sudden? Did millions of Muslims across the Middle East and Africa get a text message that said, go now? This is clearly orchestrated, and as I previously reported, ISIS warned Europe of an invasion of “migrants.” This, too, is an act of war. How many jihadists are among the hordes?

Normal refugees are starving, shell-shocked women, children, and old men, fleeing with nothing but the shirts on their backs.  This current batch of “refugees,” however, is dominated by hordes of healthy looking young men, who somehow managed to hang onto their selfie-sticks, expensive smart phones, and calling plans.

Here’s a little photographic proof.  These Yazidi Christians are refugees, walking across deserts — women, children, and old men — with those left behind being crucified, behind, raped, enslaved, etc.:

yazidi_106

Meanwhile these plump, affluent Muslims show no signs of being refugees from horror:

Syrian refugees pose for photo using selfie stick. #RIPEurope #HelloCaliphate pic.twitter.com/yVSc5ctrb6

— Bill O’Keefe (@DefendWallSt) September 5, 2015

If you read beyond the heartrending Leftist headlines (or “weaponized emphathy“), you will see that the real stories make it clear that this is an invasion of Muslims picking up where their forebearers left off in 1683. Islam has always wanted Europe.

And speaking of which, this is all Obama’s and Europe’s fault. All of it. Like the scorpion, Islam is what Islam is. Just as water will force its way through any available seam or crack, so too will jihadists. It’s what they do. The only way to prevent them from engaging in their innate behavior is to corral them within their own borders. The Middle East pre-Obama may not have been a very nice place, but it was quiescent.

With Obama’s response to the so-called Arab Spring, all the boundaries are gone. Obama pushed out a stable leader in Egypt; unleashed horror in Libya; destroyed the peace in Iraq; did nothing to aid the Green movement against the mullahs in Iran; and, out of that same deference to the mullahs, allowed Bashir Assad to proceed unchecked in Syria.

In other words, wherever he could, Obama fomented the spread of Muslim violence and terror within the Middle East. His manifest goal was to advance the interests of both the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran (a conflicting goal admitted, because the former is Sunni and the latter Shia), leading one to conclude that he intended for the Middle East to explode and, like a ruptured, infected pustule, to spread its poison everywhere.

So why do I blame Europe too? Because Europe has spent the last forty years funding the worst elements in the Middle East, both to keep the flow of oil heading its way, and to destroy those living Jews in Israel who are an ongoing reminder to Europe of each nation’s complicity in the Holocaust. After all, even those nations that were themselves victims of the Nazis gleefully helped the Nazis round-up and slaughter Jews.

Europe is also a reminder to be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. Europe wanted a Judenrein continent. Well, as matters now stand, their malevolent oral and financial attacks on Israel will have succeeded, once and for all, in driving the Jews out. But by empowering the Muslims, their tactics will also drive out the Europeans, whether by turning them into refugees, or through their slaughter, conversion, or enslavement.

But Bookworm, you sound so callous, so hard? What about the children?

What about them? They’re pawns and pawns always get sacrificed.

As you know, when the world is upset, and most certainly when non-Judeo-Christian cultures are involved, the children always die. That’s a dreadful reality. If we save the Muslim children, we doom the nominally Christian European children, and vice versa.

Because once the fight is fully engaged, the children always suffer first, it’s important when the fight begins to ask which culture is the one most likely to lead to future generations of healthy, happy, peaceable children. It’s not the Muslim culture, which happily sacrifices its little pawns to the greater Muslim good.

But what about that poor two-year old and his father’s heartrending story. Pardon my language (and you know I seldom swear), but his story is BULLSHIT. I knew that immediately when I saw a quote from the father saying that, as he was trying to rescue his family, the two-year-old who died cried out “Please don’t die, Daddy.”

Have you ever had a two-year old in your life, especially one who is on the younger side of two as that poor dead baby obviously was? “Please don’t die, Daddy,” is not what actual two-year olds say in moments of crisis. Instead, they are inarticulate screamers.

Once you figure out that someone has told one major lie, it’s not hard to figure out that they’ve told lots of major lies. The Muslim Issue details the many massive holes in the father’s story. These are just a few:

Abdullah was never on that boat to watch his wife and children drown. That’s why he was the only survivor. The first time he learned of their death was from the hospital after the photos of his young son was circulating in the media. Listen to all the contradictions and holes in his story.

This was an attempt to send his wife and children into Europe before his own arrival to apply for refugee status as a lone woman with children, while they never even lived in a war zone.

[snip]

This is what he told the press initially, as reported in the Guardian yesterday:

“I took over and started steering. The waves were so high and the boat flipped. I took my wife and my kids in my arms and I realised they were all dead,” he told AP.

Let’s look at all the details of his story.

The report according to Abdullah’s own words is that he lived in Turkey for three years and prior to that he had lived in Damascus. His sister makes the story even more confusing saying that Abdullah was a barber originally from Damascus, who fled from Kobani to Turkey but “dreamed of a future in Canada” for his family. Was he living in Damascus or Kobani? Kobani is over 500 kms from Damascus.

After “fleeing” from “war zone” Kobani he now wants to return to Kobani to attend — a funeral. Huh…? So he’s safe to fly back by plane to Kobani and attend a funeral. And guess what? ISIS was not even in Kobani when Kurdi claims his family “fled” from ISIS.

ISIS was not in Damascus either three years ago when Kurdi claims he lived there. ISIS entered only a small rural part of northern Damascus last year and targeted a remote refugee camp with “Palestinians” earlier in 2015 and were pushed out. ISIS is present in a quarter of the country in Northern Syria, not in the South.

While Western media reports that he was trying to reach Canada, Swedish media are being given reports by Kurdi that he was trying to reach Sweden and that he had been receiving FREE housing in Turkey for three years. Abdullah claims he was trying to reach Canada but was denied asylum – while Canadian authorities say they have never received any application from him at all. Which story does Abdullah want to stick to?

We are once again being grossly manipulated into feeling compassion for an invading force by having that force sold to use as a pathetic band of refugees.

And finally, let’s be honest — no sane society should ever, ever, ever invite a horde of Muslims in. Remember what I said about conquest being in their nature? Even if every one of these health, military aged men was in fact a refugee, all those men will still play the scorpion to the helpful frog and kill it.

Muslims are not like other faiths. Even the Jews that Europeans so hate never forced conversions or raised arms. Indeed, they never did anything, which is what forced the Europeans to rely on conspiracy theories that had them busily connecting invisible dots with imaginary lines to justify the horrors they visited upon an insular, non-conquering culture. Muslims, however, are in-your-face conquerors, which their prophet required them to do.  That they follow this dictum closely is borne out by 1,400 years of Muslim history.

Writing at Declination, a descendant of Armenians who escaped the massacre thanks to a kind Muslim, understands that Islam is like no other religion, political movement, or ideology. We make a terrible error pretending that its practitioners are, en masse (as opposed to individually) just like us:

But back to the central point, why, then, if America sheltered my family, must the West turn back the refugees of Syria, of Somalia, of Libya?

Because they bring the source of infection with them. Armenians had managed, through some strength I sometimes find difficult to fully grasp, to hang on to their European culture and Christian religion through millenia of conflict with Islam. They had stubbornly resisted assimilation into Islam and its ideals. These refugees, for all that my heart yearns to give them sanctuary and a place to escape to, nonetheless carry Islam with them.

There are good Muslims in the world, and I want to make this clear. My own family lived only because an Ottoman official warned my great-grandfather that genocide was coming. This man, whose name I cannot remember — something that genuinely pains me, for my grandfather died when I was young and his stories are almost dream-like to me, now — paid for the ticket to America for my family, for English language lessons, and everything else needed to escape before it was too late.

I hope that I will meet this good and righteous man in the life to come. I hope God saw fit to accept him into His kingdom.

But Islam nonetheless is a contagion, even if some maintain a stubborn moral immunity to the infection. Where Islam goes, this violence will follow. You will never save all the little boys, you will never stop the slaughter. All you will do is bring it to your own shores.

And if there is something I know for certain, it is that my ancestors did not escape Islam only to see their descendants fight it again, once more in their own homes.

There are many good Muslim people around the world, I’m sure of it. But we cannot make policy based upon individuals. To survive, a society has to make policy based upon its best guess about how a mass of individuals will behave. Using history as our guide, the best guess is that, if you invite millions of Muslims into Europe, they will not become Europeans; instead, in a very painful, ugly, bloody, expensive, destructive way, Europe will become Muslim.

If I were really being compassionate, I would say that we will take in these Muslim refugees, but that all children under the age of 14 must be placed in actively Christian families, baptized, and brought up in the Christian faith. I would also require all adult immigrants be forcibly assimilated into Western culture in every way possible. No creating sub-cultures in ghettos, banlieues and, eventually, entire towns.

Thinking about that last step, though, I’m not sure it’s possible. So here’s the deal: We’ll take the children, subject to the Christian upbringing condition described above, but the adults have to stay behind.

Filed Under: Barack Obama, Europe, Islam, Jihad Tagged With: Armenian Massacre, Europe, European Refugees, Jihad, Propaganda, Refugee Crisis, Syria, Weaponized Empathy

With “Non-Stop,” Hollywood doesn’t just jump the shark, it embraces it (BIG TIME SPOILER ALERT)

March 1, 2014 by Bookworm 22 Comments

non_stop_poster-620x356Just yesterday, I pointed you to Roger L. Simon’s post arguing that conservatives are making a terrible mistake when they bail on the movie industry. Our intensely media-driven age, means that increasingly hard-left Hollywood is a superb propagandist that often provides the only information people get on a subject. The beauty of Hollywood propaganda (if you’re a Leftist) is that it’s so subtle. Hollywood doesn’t do clunky Soviet-era posters; instead, as Ben Smith ably demonstrated, it wraps core Leftist messages in rip-roaring good humor, gauzy tear-jerkers, or uplifting homilies. Polemics put people off; entertainment sucks them in.

We’ve gotten used to the Leftist tilt in entertainment over the years. We whine about it to each other (as I have here, here, here, and here), but that’s about all that we do. We accept it as not a necessary evil but an inevitable evil. That attitude encourages a certain passivity.

Sometimes, though, it’s worth making a loud noise, and that’s the case with Hollywood’s newest action flick, Non-Stop. The film has a high-profile star (Liam Neeson), lots of interesting cameos and co-stars, a big budget, and a clever plot about a well-disguised terrorist on a plane who is killing a new victim every twenty-minutes. (Thinking about it, for all it’s flash and newness, the plot is simply a re-hash of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.)

Superficially, it sounds like a fun movie for those who, like me, enjoy a well-produced, fast-paced thriller/whodunnit. Indeed, John Boot, writing at the conservative PJ Media, says that it’s a fun movie, and enjoys the way the ending is unexpected. (He also noticed the Agatha Christie parallel.) It’s that surprise ending, though, that has stirred outrage across the conservative blogosphere. You see, it’s not merely a surprise, it’s a “jump the shark” kind of surprise.

(For the uninitiated, the phrase “jump the shark” originated with the last season of Happy Days, when the show had gotten irrevocably stale. In an effort to jazz things up, they put the Fonz on water skies and had him jump over a blatantly mechanical shark. If a show has to stoop so low, it should already have been put out to pasture. Since then, the phrase is used not only to describe shows that should long-since have been shark chum, but also to describe plot turns that are too stupid to exist even in the magical entertainment universe.)

SPOILER ALERT. NON-STOP’S PLOT DENOUEMENT WILL BE REVEALED BELOW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Judging by the movie’s review at Breitbart, John Boot is correct that Non-Stop’s creators managed to avoid having a predictable ending.  They did so, however, only by pushing a hard-Left world view that is going to be swallowed whole by every uninformed adolescent and young person who sees the movie.  That is, while one can appreciate that the ending makes for a good movie, it is so unreal — such a high jump over a such a hideous, faked shark — that it should be soundly castigated, rejected, and ruined.

As I mentioned above, the plot device is Agatha Christie on steroids:  people trapped in an enclosed space with a hidden killer bumping them off.  Today’s headlines say it ought to have been a Muslim, since they’re the ones using terrorism against the rest of the world.  If you’re a filmmaker who wants to add a good twist to reality, you make sure your terrorist is a well-disguised Muslim, along the lines of the British, Christian-born Black Widow who headed the grotesquely violent attack against a Kenyan shopping mall.

Having that kind of ending, however, would have failed to advance the movie’s real purpose:  propaganda.  Breitbart explains precisely what agenda the movie is pushing (and this is your last warning that there are spoilers ahead that will make watching the movie forever unnecessary):

Counting pilots and crew, there are around 150 souls on board. Marks has 20 minutes to figure out which one is the bad guy. Red herrings abound. Is it one of the many actors whose faces we recognize but names we can’t remember? People start to die. Marks is fingered as the hijacker. Who’s doing this? Why are they doing this? What is their motive?

Here’s the answer:

It turns out that the villain is not a hijacker but a terrorist — someone who wants to murder everyone on the plane to further a political goal.

You ready…?

The terrorist is a 9/11 family member. Yes, you read that right; the terrorist is a 9/11 family-member who lost a loved-one in the World Trade Center on that terrible September morning.

It gets worse…

After 9/11,  this 9/11 family member-turned-terrorist then joined the military but found himself disillusioned by the pointless wars.

And now…

The 9/11 family member-turned-terrorist is upset because America hasn’t done enough to ensure there will never be another 9/11. And so he figures that if he can get an air marshal blamed for a terrorist attack, America will wake up and anally probe us before we’re allowed on a plane, or something.

It gets worse…

The villain’s sidekick is a member of the American military willing to murder 150 innocent people for a payday.

It gets worse…

The one passenger on the plane who is forever helpful, kind, reasonable, noble, and never under suspicion is a Muslim doctor dressed in traditional Muslim garb including a full beard.

Screw you, Hollywood.

Non-Stop didn’t stop at just jumping the shark.  Instead, it embraced it and then made mad, passionate love to it.  The filmmakers weren’t going for an element of surprise; they were sending a message to those credulous,  uninformed Americans churned out by America’s public school system:  Americans are bad; Muslims are good.  Ignore the headlines telling you otherwise.*  Hollywood knows better.

So what can you do?  Well, I don’t recommend giving out spoilers unless people ask for them.  Otherwise, you will be deservedly hated.  However, to the extent that word-of-mouth is the most powerful advertising any Hollywood movie has, start mouthing off.  If someone you know, in real conversation or on social media, expresses an interest in it, you can honestly state something along the lines of “I heard it was stupid” or “It’s supposed to be really bad.  I’d never pay $14 to see a really bad movie.”

As a sort of tag, given that the movie stars Liam Neeson, I can’t help but remember that in January 2012, Neeson expressed a serious interesting in converting to Islam.  Maybe he’s done it already and this movie marks his coming out.

______________________

*The usual disclaimer:  Not all Muslims are bad.  Most Muslims aren’t bad, but to the extent that almost none of them take a stand against the terrorists in their midst, the silent majority are complicit in the Muslim-inspired terrorism taking place in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, Eurasia, the Middle East, and Asia.

Filed Under: Hollywood Tagged With: Hollywood, Liam Neeson, Non-Stop, Propaganda

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