As readers of a conservative blog debated the subject of teacher salaries, a writer using the pseudonym "Observer" weighed in.
The West Bend teachers' salaries made him sick, the person wrote, adding that the 1999 Columbine High School killers had the right idea.
"They knew how to deal with the overpaid teacher union thugs. One shot at a time! Too bad the liberls (sic) rip them; they were heros (sic) and should be remembered that way," the writer said.
But police say the writer was a teacher himself--and the past president of a teachers union--apparently posing as a teacher-hater.
James Buss was arrested Thursday by West Bend police, and the 46-year-old Cudahy man could face criminal charges. He has been suspended from his job as a teacher at Oak Creek High School.
The Journal-Sentinel story includes an odd correction: "Because of an editing error, an article . . . incorrectly stated that police said he was 'apparently posing as a teacher-hater.' That statement was not made by police." We guess that means it was made by Owen Robinson, who runs the blog on which Buss allegedly made the comment.
Robinson "said Friday that it seemed that 'Observer' was 'posing as a conservative, right-wing whack job to discredit' the Web site's discussion of teachers' salaries. Robinson also criticized Buss' arrest as an overreaction." We have to agree, although we'll admit that at some level it pleases us to see a teacher rather than a child on the receiving end of such excess. The really interesting question is whether the school district will try to fire Buss--and, if so, whether the union will defend him.
On his blog, Robinson reports that he gave the police the commenter's IP address, through which they were able to trace him. Blogress "Mary" of Freedom Eden has some pertinent observations on the disinhibiting influence of online communication:
When will people learn that posting anonymously on the Internet is not the same as being anonymous? . . .
Buss is certainly paying the price for posting irresponsibly.
It appears that he may have posted while drunk or otherwise impaired. Under the influence of DailyKos?
More likely, I think he utilized the technique of attempting to disguise himself with multiple misspellings and poor punctuation. (I'm assuming that Buss, the teacher, is more proficient at writing than his posts reveal.) Don't be so sure of that.
Posted by: Mike ||
12/04/2007 08:29 ||
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Why? How about this....countries that allow a small minority of people to grab/steal all wealth in a country, leaving the rest of the population in chaos scrounging for the few remains, starts to seem like not such a good deal to a lot of people. Watch the U.S. too as it's not impossible to think that it could happen here...starting to look a lot like we've been plundered by Wall Street.
#2
Leo Naphta, the great character of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain": "Its (youth's) deepest desire is to obey."
Like ants. Or honeybees. But not like my kids.
#5
. . . starting to look a lot like we've been plundered by Wall Street.
Is this just "populist" demagougery in the tradition of Huey Long, or subtle anti-Semitisim (e.g.,Weasel Wesley Clark's crack about the "New York money people)? Or is there even a meaningful difference between the two?
(Ever notice that Hugo Chavez is just the Spanish-language translation of Huey Long? Or that Osama sometimes sounds just like your average Mk.1 Mod.0 anti-globalist?)
Posted by: Mike ||
12/04/2007 9:32 Comments ||
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Why?
Russia has no democractic tradition. Venezuela has precious little democratic tradition. That's pretty much it in a nutshell.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/04/2007 9:43 Comments ||
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Never heard of Huey Long, but after a quick look, isn't it interesting that he was a politician during the great depression?
Oh, and by the way....I didn't know....Happy Chanukkah Stan O'Neil and Kathleen Corbet and everyone else I'm missing...
#11
Dostoevsky nailed this tendency in his "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter from The Brothers Karamazov. Wretchard has quoted from it rather extensively over the years.
#12
WAFF.com > NEWSWEEK [12/01/2007] - THE WAR IN THE KREMLIN. *OTOH, WAFF Poster believes that Russia is being de facto governed by MOBSTERS??? Recall EDGAR CAYCE'S WARNING ON "A MOB RULE" but for the USA??? REGNUM.RU > UKRAINIAN ANALYST:PUTIN IS EXPANDING HIS CONTROL OF THE SITUATION IN RUSSIA.
See also REDDIT/TOPIX > WHY VENEZUELANS VOTED AGZ CHAVEZ.
Muslims meet up for the annual Texas Dawah Conventiona, what could possibly go wrong? You may remember that two years ago Yahya Ibrahim, who was to be a featured speaker, was denied entry into the U.S. by Customs agents.
The event is being billed as "focusing on the family", but the speakers include known associates of convicted terrorists, terror supporters, and 9/11 skeptics. In addition to the various seminars, some of them given by supporters of the most conservative brand of Sunni Islam, the event will also have a variety of carnival rides--and a petting zoo!
What's interesting about this year's meetup of Islamists in the U.S. is that an FBI agent will be a featured speaker. Ironically, Special Agent Randall Clark appears to be on the cyber crimes task force. Given that Islamists are experts at using the internet to propagandize and recruit new blood for jihad, you'd hope he was there in a monitoring capacity.
Don't count on it. Instead I suspect he's there in a PR capacity or to discuss his real expertise, which is in online child pornography cases. I'd suggest that Muslim children are far more at risk of watching online beheading videos or clips of U.S. soldiers being hit by IEDs than kiddie porn.
Also on the stage will be Officer Muzaffar Siddiqi, who leads the Houston P.D.'s Muslim outreach and diversity training program.
Who else is speaking at what is billed as the "largest Islamic convention in the southwest"?
Page 2
Musa Maguire. The name may not sound familiar, but maybe you know his cousin "Sulayman". Doesn't ring a bell? Well maybe you'll recognize his given name John Walker Lindh. Musa Abdun Nur Maguire is best known for his defense of his cousin's treason fighting for the Taliban. He calls Lindh a "authentic American hero".
To show you how screwed up our Federal government is, your tax money is subsidizing Musa: In 2004 he was the recipient of a Fulbright grant to take K-12 teachers to the Middle East. Read the post, in it Musa describes how Salafis (who are the Sunni Islamists with the same political goals as al Qaeda) cured him of his extremism and how convicted jihadist Ismail Royer should get a Fulbright and not jail time.
johari_abdul_malik.jpgImam Johari Abdul-Malik (pictured right). Abdul-Malik is the number one fund raiser for the Ali Asad support committee which is trying to free convicted terrorist Ali Asad Chandia. Chandia, a Maryland school teacher, was convicted of providing material support to the Lashkar-e-Taiba terror organization and assisted Ali al-Tamimi, the spiritual leader of the Virginia Jihad Network.
He is the imam of the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va, where convicted terrorist Ahmed Omar Abu Ali worshiped. Abu Ali has admitted to meeting with Zubayr Al-Rimi, al Qaeda's #2 man in Saudi Arabia while studying in Mecca. Malik was outraged at Omar Abu Ali's prosecution for plotting to kill the President of the United States and once called him the "Rosa Parks of the Muslim community".
Abdul Malik is most famous for his support of Hamas.
Dr. Salah As-Sawi. Vice President of the Sharia Academy, the mission of which is "to disseminate proper and authentic Islamic knowledge based on the principles of Ahlus-Sunnah Wal-Jamaah". Longtime readers know that Ahlus-Sunnah Wal-Jamaah is what Salafists call their version of conservative Islamic law.
What they mean by it is that they are followers of "authentic" Islam, as understood by the first generation of followers of Mohammed. In other words, they want to return to a 7th century version of Islamic law. Generally you and I would call them "Wahabbis", although they hate this term.
He is perhaps most notorious as a 9/11 skeptic and as the man who penned a counter-fatwa forbidding Muslims to join the U.S. military in any actions against the Taliban in Afghanistan. He claimed "the Jewish media" had rushed to blame Osama bin Laden for 9/11.
Siraj Wahhaj: Formerly on CAIR's advisory board and an possibly unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Bombings. He denies he was ever on any list of unindicted co-conspirators, but bombing mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (the "Blind Sheikh) was a regular speaker at Wahhaj's At-Taqwa Mosque in Brooklyn. In addition, Wahhaj was a character witness in Rahman's behalf at his terrorism trial.
Rodney Clement Hampton-El, aka "Dr. Rashid", an Afghan veteran (fought with the mujahideen) and the group's "explosive expert", was also a worshiper at Wahhaj's mosque.
#3
Having a convention in Texas (we like your money) does not mean you are a tough as you think you are. If they are not polite, they may find out that even little ol' ladies carry .38's in their purses hereabouts. There are some neighborhoods where they should not pull the old shouting, screaming or shooting routine. People here believe in shooting back, and sometimes shoot first at a perceived threat. The defense lawyer's best tool in Texas is the "he needed shooting" defense. My advice: boys, do your shouting inside; presume everyone on the outside is heavily armed and can shoot.
This is not about Musharraf anymore. This is about clipping the wings of a strong Pakistani military, denying space for China in Pakistan, squashing the ISI, stirring ethnic unrest, and neutralizing Pakistans nuclear program. The first shot in this plan was fired in Pakistans Balochistan province in 2004. The last bullet will be toppling Musharraf, sidelining the military and installing a pliant government in Islamabad. Musharraf shares the blame for letting things come this far. But he is also punching holes in Washingtons game plan. He needs to be supported.
On the evening of Tuesday, 26 September, 2006, Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf walked into the studio of Comedy Centrals Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the first sitting president anywhere to dare do this political satire show.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: john frum ||
12/04/2007 00:00 ||
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If they forget, Islamabad can always remind them by giving them the same treatment that Uzbekistan did last year.
I think this guy is forgetting that unlike Pakistan, Uzbekistan did not sponsor the Taliban and al Qaeda.
#4
Riiight. The US wants to sow "unrest" in Pakiwakiland. Like they need help in that department. Maybe we could throw in some sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads...
#6
Currently, students are being recruited and organized into a street movement. The work is ongoing and urban Pakistani students are being cultivated, especially using popular Internet Web sites and online hangouts.
At a recent event a party guest was handing out a 6th grade class assignment her kid brought home: a survey on global warming attitudes. The first question gauged our concern over global warming; I marked not very concerned, which drew a wide stare from someone looking over my shoulder. Its like youre one of those people they sang about in Hair! People who dont care about war, or social injustice! Somehow not very concerned means youre a global warming denialist, and you would, if you had time and money, drive to the Arctic in a Hummer and push polar bears into the drink. With the windows down. And the heat on. No, it just means that I am not very concerned. I think energy conservation and alternate sources of power are good ideas in their own right, and must be pursued; I just dont think lower Manhattan will be awash in 2050 unless we cut carbon emissions to a level previously associated with the 15th century, and Im not going to live in a state of guilty panic over my carbon footprint. If others want to walk around wearing sandy underpants, fretting over what they cannot avoid doing and scolding others for buying produce shipped from Brazil instead of buying local, theyre welcome to it. Everyone needs a purpose in life.
Of course, their purpose is often at cross-purposes with your purposes. This article (h/t Insty & Samzidata) is blunt:
If the developed world is to implement the 80% cuts in carbon emissions the UN demands as part of the talks beginning in Bali today, the lives of our children will have to be dramatically different from everything we are currently bringing them up to expect.
Agreed. And if the developed world is to implement the 95% reduction in human population proposed by the Bilderbergers Ultra-Secret Herd-Thinning Initiative, our childrens lives will be drastically shorter than theyre being brought up to expect. So we had better take them to Disneyworld now, right? Something to think about when theyre fed into the bloody thrashing blades of the municipal Reduction Centres. Or you could note that reducing the population by 95% is probably not going to happen, any more than the developing countries will reduce their carbon output by 80 percent without mandatory sabot-insertion into every facet of modern industrial life.
There follows the usual tut-tutting about other peoples spending choices, which are always easy to mock and Ill happily play that game too, because people do waste money on stupid stuff. Not me, though. Theres nothing I buy to enhance my mortal existence that isnt a good idea whose merits can be proven empirically. Anyway: she wants a low-consumption economy, achieved by general societal consensus. If thats what a society wishes, fine; go ahead. Theres a precendent for pulling together and doing without: Hearteningly, we know it can be done - our parents and grandparents managed it in the second world war. Well, buzzbombs, firestorms, wholesale overnight urban destruction and the threat of a life writhing under the Nazi boot do focus the mind. As it turns out, though, her example of plucky Britons pulling together to defeat the Hun peril was not achieved without a few nudges from their betters:
In the early 1940s, a dramatic drop in household consumption was achieved - not by relying on the good intentions of individuals, but by the government orchestrating a massive propaganda exercise combined with a rationing system and a luxury tax. This will be the stuff of 21st-century politics - something that, right now, all the main political parties are much too scared to admit.
Its the rationing system some want, I suspect. It will be the job of the state to decide how many times a week you can eat meat, how many rooms you should have, what sort of vehicle you drive, how many times you may fly, how many toys you can buy your child.
Note: this is not to say people dont spend too much money on things they dont need. Its just not my place to request the state to keep them from doing so. In any case, I suspect that the impulse to bring all these untidy unhelpful examples of flagrant individualism under the steady hand of the Ministry of Rational Allocation has something to do with that fretful busybody insistence that people are simply not living right. If we had Star Trek replicators in every house that would conjure goods and meals out of boundless energy produced by antimatter teased from a three-micron fissure that opened into a universe populated entirely by unicorns who crapped antimatter in such abundance they were happy we used it up, and used their shiny pointy horns to poke more of it through the aperture into our dimension, columnists would bemoan the disconnect between labor and goods, and the soul-corrupting influence of endless ersatz vegetables. You cant win. Because you shouldnt.
Posted by: Mike ||
12/04/2007 12:24 ||
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Ahh... The Master Plan. Brought to you by the All Knowing Self Appointed Elite.
Where are the Founding Fathers when we really need 'em?
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
12/04/2007 13:52 Comments ||
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I wonder what would happen if we, as a people just said to the world's Chicken Littles "Oh yeah? Make me."
What would be their method of trying to compel us to comply?
#3
A RUMORMILLNEWS Poster's reported dream, describing DARK [Turbaned] STEPPE RIDERS/HORDE LEADERS OF EURASIA = FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE???, gives possible insight into when REGULATION, etc. is too much.
These RIDERS are angry at the unfair dark-covert manipulations and crimes committed agz their ethical Father, espec by his own Clan/Relatives + Govt. UNLIKE THEIR FATHER, whom on rare occasion was benevolent and willing to tolerate a sin or crime in the name of a greater common good, espec not fighting his own relatives-People, THESE DREAM "RIDERS" ARE ALL HATRED, REVENGE, AND AMBITION FOR TOTAL GENOCIDE AND DESTRUCTION, AGZ THEIR KIN, SOCIETY, GOVT. AND ALL HUMANITY IN GENERAL. "NUTHIN' SAYS LOVIN' LIKE GENOCIDIN' AND REVENGIN' AGZ YOUR COUSIN", aka "WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND".
Akin to RUSSIA [Kommersant] > Failure to stop or divert Iran from dev nuke weapons now, may in a decade result not only in a NUCLEAR-ARMED RADICAL IRAN = NUCLEAR-ARMED ISLAMISM/ISLAMIST XTREMISM, but a likely REGIONAL NUKE WAR IFF NOT GLOBAL NUKE WAR, as due or induced by Xtremist/Radical Islamist ambition?
Also from RUMORMILLNEWS > SHIFTAWARENESS.com > describes another Poster dream or vision of A MOON-COSMIC OBJECT COLLISION, whereupon the MOON OR THE OBJECT THEN CRASHES INTO THE EARTH [Comet Apophis 2030?]. * Character "VINCENT" as TOM CRUISE in "THE COLOR OF MONEY", starring a riccocheting billiard/pool ball. All together now, wid feeling, D *** NG IT, MAVERICK, ITS IN THE WAY THAT YOU USE IT ...! Holmes, Tuttle, and Chiron.
#4
Unfortunately for the Netters at RUMORMILLNEWS, etc, they and the World have to undergo and survive the pre-2030 events first. ALways bear in mind that HOLY MOTHER/MOTHER MARY, like a good MOther or Parent, punished her children in love - its GABRIEL that welds the EARTH- and UNIVERSE-DESTROYING big Big B-I-G BBBBIIIIGGGG WHIPPING BELT = HEAVENLY SWORD.
TEMPORAL > the SECULARIST = ATHEIST explanation is that the Earth wil undergo natural [spece] events; DIVINE/HEAVEN/RELIGIOUS > God will strike FIRSTLY at the sources of evil on Earth, Nations and Places, then ESCALATE HIS WRATH(S) FROM THERE UNTO "THE BIG ONE(S)". PC SECULAR WAFFLE-ISM > "ESCALATION", etc. IS NOT CONSCIENCE OR EXISTENCE OF ANY HIGHER ORDER UNTIL HUMANITY CAN QUANTIFY SAME.
On November 20, 2007 the United States Supreme Court made a historical decision regarding Constitutional Rights. The case, District of Columbia v. Heller, being the first case successfully appealed to the Supreme Court based on the Second Amendment since the flawed and unresolved case of US v. Miller circa 1939, had the result of shocking the political landscape across the nation.
In May of 2007, the DC Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling that had favored the 1976 ban on handguns in the city. The city appealed to the en banc court in the hopes that they would reverse the appeals decision. This did not happen. The en banc court upheld the appeal decision based on Second Amendment grounds leaving the District of Columbia in an unenviable position.
This set the stage for the resulting appeal to the United States Supreme Court. From this point on precedence was being set. The court, unable to reach a satisfactory outcome during the first discussion regarding cert, tabled the issue until a meeting could be arranged with all parties involved. This meeting took place on the morning of November 20, 2007.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Whiskey Mike ||
12/04/2007 11:45 ||
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I read The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife as well. I would have read The Amber Spyglass, but some kid filched my copy. The Golden Compass has now been made into a move coming out this week staring Nicole Kidman, and it is quite justly in my view drawing the ire of various Catholic organizations.
The linked to analysis in the previous sentence does a better job than I will, but any thoughtful person has to recognize that the book is an attempt to malign religion in general, and Christianity and Catholicism in particular. . . .
The main point of this post, however, is to point out an irony. The villains in the Golden Compass and sequels are the Catholic-Nazis -- a fair characterization of the book's point, since anytime you have villains running concentration camps with medical experiments, that is psychic charge you are invoking. But in fact, if you want to experience the flavor that contemporary fascism would have when translated into first rate children's literature, you cannot, in my view, do better than Pullman's series.
To be fair, I am not saying Pullman is some sort of neo-Nazi. I think his invocation of fascist themes and memes is probably unconscious. It is just that similar jobs tend to call forth similar tools. The European fascists generally and the Nazis in particular very much wanted to cut off the influence and ultimately destroy the Judeo-Christian God and the Church in particular. They had political reasons for wanting this, but also ideological and (weirdly) religious reasons. Not all of the Nazis were devotes of the occult, but many of them were, and the ones who were not very much understood the importance and power of building a fascist mythos which could motivate and inspire people. To put together their ideology, the Nazis pulled out of the great cesspool of European ideas a lot of nasty things that would have been much better left alone, but among them was the idea that Christianity, which they saw as nothing more than a kind of Judaism, severed people from their inner Nature spirit, their pagan, let's-run-through-the-woods-naked sort of thing. When Pullman has the Church taking children to camps to sever them from their daemons -- their animal-embodied-soul-mates that every whole person in his alternative universe has -- he is just parroting in kid lit form the old canard you could have picked up in a hundred disreputable places in Bavaria or Vienna in the 1930's. Or in the "global warming" Luddite community yesterday afternoon.
Another interesting parallel between Pullman's imaginative vision and that of those you might call the "esoteric fascists" is the blending of the occult and science. For those of you who don't want to read books on this stuff, think Hellboy. If you do want to read books, read anything by the very valuable Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. In Harry Potter, the magic is at worst morally neutral, often comic stuff. In LOTR, there is good and bad magic, but the good guys are good for the right reasons. Narnia, of course, is merely Christianity. Pullman's picture is a lot creepier. It is much more like the occult science one comes across reading about the 20th century fascists, with their fascination for both high technology, advanced physics and occult powers. Call me old fashioned, but mixing together weird physics and the occult just creeps me out. It makes me think of the "perverted science" that Churchill was right to worry about. I concede this is a subjective impression.
More obviously, all of this, "eschew Christianity, children, and get in touch with your inner bear! It is powerful, and not the same sex as you are!" is pure New Age rubbish, which in turns owes a lot to the neo-paganism our jackbooted friends did so much to popularize and, one would have hoped, though vainly, discredit. Thus here is my larger point. The anti-modern, anti-religious, and anti-American fervor coming out of Europe these days, very much including the UK (and some culturally advanced spots in the US), is not what a lot of people seem to think it is. The Pullman books I view as rather typical. I think the standard view is to see anti-Judeo-Christianity as an aggressive secularism, that just doesn't want religion shoved down throats of good little atheist children who just want to learn evolution and get into a good university and go on to work in a big corporation someday. If only it were so. People have this Whiggish idea that first there was barbarian darkness, then Christianity, which was OK in its ways for civilizing things somewhat, but now it is time to move onward and upward already to a new, cleaner, more hygienic and more rational world, where bad old superstitions are respectfully laid to rest.
If only history were so orderly and kind. Unfortunately, the daemons won't stay in their cesspool. People, or Europeans anyway, keep wanting to shed their clothes and run through the trees. St. Boniface chopped down Thor's oak tree, but there seem to have been acorns everywhere. The thought here is like Chesterton's, that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything. But "anything" seems to be what sprouts up from what has been laid down, decade after century, on the smelly, and actively decaying floor of bad old Europe. I mean really, if you have a weakness for this sort of thing, why not just take the little guys camping, and lose the neo-pagan mythos brainwashing? Just a suggestion. Nothing like camping to sell you on the virtues of modernity.
No, I am not saying that if your kids go to see the lovely Ms. Kidman (definitely a draw in my case) in the Golden Compass, they will come home to start doing weird science experiments in your basement and start saying that the Christian god should be killed. Kids are smarter than that, for one thing. Most of them. On the other hand, you do not have to be the crazed, rosary clutching Catholic fanatic of Hollywood's paranoid imagination to think there is something, in fact several things, pretty darn creepy not far below the surface of Mr. Pullman's oeuvre. My hope is that the movie will bomb, and Hollywood will have to go back to less alluring efforts to corrupt the young.
Posted by: Mike ||
12/04/2007 11:04 ||
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#1
I have not yet seen the movie, but I recognise a deliberate smear when I see one.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
12/04/2007 14:00 Comments ||
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If this film tanks at the BO (because by all early accounts it sure stinks like it), one can't help but begin to wonder how much longer Hollywood can continue this pace of commercial flops.
(Although it was recently pointed out to me that while it failed miserably to meet expectations, Lions for Lambs did manage to make a profit-- just barely. And by profit I mean when you don't take any marketing costs into account when looking at the numbers.)
TMQ asked in August whether the three Golden Compass books would carry their very strong anti-Christian view onto the silver screen -- the first big-budget installment opens this week. In the Golden Compass trilogy, God is both a fraud (a space alien pretending to be divine!) and the source of every evil in the universe; Christianity is "a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all"; God has created not heaven but hell and sends all souls, even those of the righteous, to hell; Christian churches are run by corrupt power-mad conspirators whose goal is to abolish pleasure in life; the quest of the astonishingly competent English schoolgirl who is the trilogy's heroine is to locate ancient magical objects that will allow her to kill God and free the world from religion.
So TMQ wondered whether this anti-Christian worldview would make it into the movies. Hanna Rosin reports in the latest issue of The Atlantic Monthly that every trace of religion has been removed from the first Golden Compass flick. God is never mentioned, and the Bad Guys -- who in the books are priests of the Magisterium -- are just generic smirking guys in black robes whose organizational affiliation is never explained. This seems to me an outrageous cop-out. I thought Philip Pullman's Golden Compass books wildly overstated the case against religion, using the harebrained pretense that if faith disappeared, Earth would instantly become a paradise. But anti-religion views are perfectly valid and deserve to be aired; why shouldn't moviegoers get to see a big-budget attack on Christianity? This would be the honest way to film the Golden Compass books.
Should the film series make it to the end of the trilogy, producers will face a real challenge. In the third volume, "The Amber Spyglass," much of the action occurs in hell, where the innocent are being eternally tormented -- the astonishingly competent English schoolgirl leads a commando raid into hell, with the goal of releasing souls to oblivion. In the third book, there's also a phony cloud nine, run by the malevolent false God; a key character is an evil, sex-obsessed archangel whose mission, assigned by God, is to spread human misery; the action builds up to the good characters physically killing God. How is Hollywood going to pretend that has nothing to do with religion?
Posted by: Mike ||
12/04/2007 17:13 Comments ||
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#6
I would ask all the anti-Christian bigots out there writing books and making movies to please list all the enlightened, benevolent, rights-respecting atheist-controlled societies that have existed.
Let's see, um, Soviet Union?
No.
Mao's China?
Guess not.
Khmer Rouge Kampuchea, the NKors?
Errrrr.....not them either.
Since the rise of atheism to predominance in Europe and in certain sectors of America (education, infotainment) has there been a concomitant increase in rights and free speech and diversity of ideas and tolerance of other people's religions (like - gulp - Christianity), or a decrease?
Get back to me, 'k? Because from where I see it, Christian societies at least have a chance of being decent ones. There hasn't been a decent atheist society in human history. And I predict there never will be.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
12/04/2007 17:43 Comments ||
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#7
I couldn't finish the book---I definitely not going to see the movie.
#8
Compass put my 17 year old into a deep funk when he was 14. We won't be going, renting or buying.
If you were out to make money at Christmas Time with Childrens Sci-FI, A Wrinkle In Time would have been a pretty sure bet. It also would have capitalized on the recent death of the author.
If you wanted to stay away from Christian morality, producing an updated version of the White Mountains by John Christopher or the Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin could have also parlayed parent nostalgia into profit.
The beautiful part of free speech in America is that listening is not mandatory. Hopefully te theaters will be empty and the sound of one hand clapping will be the financier slapping himself in the forehead.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
12/04/2007 23:35 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
