It was reported earlier today that over 1.4 million people on various Facebook pages were supporting a boycott of A&E for suspending Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson. That’s four times the 365,000 who’ve signed up for Obamacare. I’m not surprised. After all, unlike healthcare.gov, those Facebook pages actually work. 🙂
Duck Dynasty merchandise is flying off the shelves of Wal-Marts across the country. That expression of support has unintended consequences, however. A&E owns the Duck Dynasty brand, so they profit from those sales. Phil’s supporters should be buying only the Duck Commander merchandise, the brand that belongs to the Robertson family.
So you know where I’m coming from: I’m an atheist and I support gay marriage. But when I read the portion of Robertson’s GQ interview that led to all the outrage and his “indefinite suspension” by A&E, my reaction was, “Seriously? That’s what all the fuss is about??”
Except for the vagina-anus comparison and the more good ole boy tone, what Robertson said pretty much mirrors what Pope Francis has said: sex other than between a man and a woman in holy matrimony is a sin — but “We never, ever judge someone on who’s going to heaven, hell. That’s the Almighty’s job. We just love ’em, give ’em the good news about Jesus—whether they’re homosexuals, drunks, terrorists. We let God sort ’em out later, you see what I’m saying?”
Phil Robertson, who also doesn’t hate gays, but (like the Pope) thinks they’re sinners, and who thinks vaginas are preferable to anuses (but tempers that comment with the disclaimer “That’s just me”), is being banished from cable television for daring to state his beliefs.
I must say I’m starting to feel sorry for Christians in today’s America. The intelligentsia, ruling class, intolerant secular left — whatever you want to call them — seem to be emulating the Islamists in demanding that Christians not be allowed to profess their beliefs in public.
But I suspect that the LGBT-whatever community and the secular left are making a big mistake with this sort of nonsense. I think the Facebook likes and merchandise sales are just the very beginning of a big backlash that may be coming.
Thirty minutes of kick-ass rock 'n roll: Saving Abel entertaining the troops in Kuwait, courtesy of the new RightNetwork. Which, at a young age, already seems to have quite a bit of interesting content, including a video and column by Kelsey Grammer. And which may be available on demand on your TV (for instance, if you have Verizon FiOS, you lucky dog) — if not now, maybe soon.
The Flotilla Choir's marvelous "We Are the World" parody about "peaceful travelers" with guns and knives who just want to bring Gaza "some cheese and missiles for the kids" is once again available on YouTube. But why leave Combs Spouts Off? You can watch it right here.
This is a slightly different version, with some minor lyric changes (mostly improvements). And it includes more video clips of the "humanitarians" attacking the Israeli soldiers boarding their ship.
YouTube removed the video about a month ago and apparently restored it three days ago (judging from the comments). I guess the anti-Israelis running Warner Music and/or YouTube finally gave up on their ludicrous copyright infringement story. If song parodies constituted copyright infringement, Weird Al Yankovic would be selling tires or something.
The folks at LatmaTV who brought us the wonderful "We Con the World" have a new video. "Jihad is Sweet, Jihad is Fun" is performed by Iran's Ahmedido Domingo, Turkey's Erdogano Pavarotti, and Syria's Assad Carreras — The Three Terrors. Enjoy!
If you have an extra six minutes, watch the full Tribal Update of which the video below is a part. The portion of the "newscast" after the song is especially funny. It's in Hebrew, but subtitled (hide the Google ad covering the subtitles by clicking the X at its upper right).
And if you really liked "We Con the World," buy the T-shirt. I did.
Watch the Latma TV Flotilla Choir's marvelous "We Con the World." Then share it with your friends. Awesome, truly awesome! Bravo, Carolyn Glick and associates! (HT: Big Journalism)
UPDATE: Banned by YouTube! "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Warner/ Chappell Music, Inc."
UPDATE 2: Don't miss the new music video from Latma TV, The Three Terrors!
UPDATE 3 (7/10/10): It's back on YouTube (and below)! This is a slightly different version, with some minor lyric changes, and with more video of the "humanitarians" attacking the IDF soldiers boarding the ship.
This is probably the coolest economics lesson you'll ever see:
Your focus on spending is pushing on thread In the long run, my friend, it’s your theory that’s dead So sorry there, buddy, if that sounds like invective Prepare to get schooled in my Austrian perspective
Brought to you by the wacky folks at Econstories.tv, where you can watch while following along with the lyrics, download a free MP3 or AAC of the song, learn more about Keynes and Hayek, and contribute to help them with future projects.
Full disclosure: I'm a long-time supporter of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which is behind this project, and thus helped fund it.
Five years after Fox canceled the animated comedy, 20th Century Fox TV has officially struck a deal with Comedy Central to produce 26 original episodes of the Matt Groening series. It will return as early as mid-2010.
The studio doesn’t have a broadcast network deal yet, but it said it might yet reach an agreement for a network window.
“We’re thrilled Futurama is coming back,” Groening said. “We now have only 25,766 episodes to make before we catch up with Bender and Fry in the year 3000.”
After two episodes, Joss Whedon's new series, Dollhouse, hasn't clicked with me yet. But I'm willing to give the great Whedon some time. Eliza Dushku as Echo is pretty easy on the eyes, and it looks like her character (a mind-wiped "doll" who gets "programmed" with an artificial personality for each assignment) is going to evolve into someone viewers can actually care about and be interested in.
The second episode (which aired this past Friday) endeared itself to me with just one great line. Echo and her "handler," Boyd, are being hunted by a crazy with a bow. Boyd is wounded. At Echo's insistence (she has an outdoorswoman's personality for this assignment), he reluctantly hands her his gun, asking "Do you know how to use this?"
As she checks the pistol out confidently and competently, Echo replies, "I've got four brothers. None of them Democrats."
Webb Wilder and the Beatnecks will be performing in Knoxville this Saturday. They're playing two sets at Barley's Taproom, starting at 9:30 PM. If you're in the area, get yourself down there.
Wish I could be there. Nothing beats a Webb Wilder concert, and he never comes out this way anymore.
The long-awaited season premier of 24 didn't disappoint, IMHO, and my Dish DVR is set up to record the entire season. But I've got to say I'm with Jack on this — I really don't buy the idea that Tony Almeida is in cahoots with terrorists. I foresee suprises and plot twists aplenty.
Here's my real question, though: where the heck is Chloe??
UPDATE (1/12): I was right, and we only had to wait until hour 3 to find out that Tony's working undercover. And he's teamed up with Bill. And Chloe!
If you're a fan of the charming, quirky, and seriously surreal ABC fantasy series Pushing Daisies (I am), and you'll be in the downtown Denver area this Wednesday, September 17th (I won't be, darn it), drop by Larimer Square (1430 Larimer Street) between 10 AM and 2 PM. The "Mobile Pie Hole" restaurant will be there. They'll be giving out free pie, pie cutters, spatulas, etc., and playing footage from the show on plasma TVs as waitresses on daisy bicycles ride around.
If you've seen the show, that made perfect sense. If not, take my word for it, it'll be fun.
Other upcoming Mobile Pie Hole visits are scheduled in Dallas, Chicago, Philly, and NYC. More info at Pushing Daisies Touch of Wonder Tour (requires Flash player).
The new season of Pushing Daisies begins Oct. 1. If you've never seen it and have a broadband connection, check it out online — you can watch several complete episodes here. I bet you'll become a fan.
Four weeks ago, I noted that Hollywood's recent spate of anti-American propaganda films had been singularly unsuccessful:
The bad news is that Hollywood is relentlessly cranking out film after film intended to undermine support for the war against Islamofascism. The good news is that Americans are avoiding these propaganda pieces in droves. Most recently, Babel, The Kingdom, and Rendition have all bombed at the box office.
Add Brian De Palma's execrable Redacted to the list. In fact, put it at the top. According to a NYPost story quoted by JammieWearingFool, it may be the biggest box-office bomb ever. On its opening weekend, it took in about $25,000. No, I didn't accidentally leave off three zeros. Twenty-five thousand dollars. At what — about eight bucks a ticket? That means more people attended your average minor-league hockey game than saw this left-wing turkey.
JWF's post also has the unbelievable story of how De Palma is complaining that he's a victim. You see, his corporate overlords insisted on blurring the faces of dead American soldiers in a "collage of actual bloody bodies at the end of the film." He's been censored! Denied his opportunity to inflict gratuitous pain and suffering on the families and friends of the dead in service of his art (and politics)! Poor Brian!
De Palma is a vile POS, and a pretty sorry director, too — overrated, overblown, and completely derivative. His career should have ended years ago. I remember a great (late 70s?) Saturday Night Live parody commercial for a De Palma film called The Clams — a silly ripoff of Hitchcock's The Birds, complete with clams gathering on a jungle gym. As I recall, the money line at the end was "every couple of years, he picks the bones of a dead director and gives his wife a job."
I just watched Anthony Hopkins on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Very odd segment, and it's clear that Hopkins is not very comfortable as a talk show guest, but he and Craig got on OK. Some nice English-Irish-Scottish-Welsh banter.
I've always liked Hopkins and greatly admired his acting. The World's Fastest Indian is one of my all-time favorite movies, and Hopkins was just tremendous as Burt Munro.
My high opinion of Hopkins was affirmed during this interview, and even raised a couple of notches: Hopkins mentioned in passing that his favorite actor was Robert Mitchum.
Anthony Hopkins, who trained at RADA, was discovered by Sir Laurence Olivier, was a member of the Royal National Theatre, won an Oscar and a couple of Emmies, and was nominated for several more, admires above all others Robert Mitchum.
Damn. That Anthony Hopkins is a fine judge of acting and a person of great character. I'm impressed.
If you haven't seen The World's Fastest Indian, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's a true story, and I guarantee that you'll feel better about the human race just knowing about Burt Munro and the many people who helped him. Hopkins said that this was "the best film I've been in," and his portrayal of Munro is simply amazing, incredible, awesome, and every other superlative you can think of. You must see this film.
The bad news is that Hollywood is relentlessly cranking out film after film intended to undermine support for the war against Islamofascism. The good news is that Americans are avoiding these propaganda pieces in droves. Most recently, Babel, The Kingdom, and Rendition have all bombed at the box office.
But it's not just that film-makers are making anti-war movies. They've also gone out of their way to avoid portraying the most believable and likely villains around today, Islamist terrorists, even if it meant rewriting stories like Tom Clancey's The Sum of All Fears to kowtow to the demands of CAIR (unindicted co-conspirators in a terrorism-financing operation). The film version replaced the Islamist terrorists in Clancy's novel with cartoon neo-Nazis.
Michael Fumento noted the difference between Hollywood then and now:
In 1942, Hollywood went to war. It began pumping out countless movies designed both to entertain the public and bolster its will to fight. A lot of them were cheap, hokey, or both. But even in a nation that seemingly needed little reminder of the dastardly attack on Pearl Harbor or the evils of the Nazis, they kept drilling home the message that we must persevere no matter the costs or the duration.
Well that they did. President Franklin Roosevelt lived in constant fear that the public would turn against the war. Indeed a Gallup Poll taken just five months before Germany’s collapse and long after the American public began learning of the horrors of the Holocaust, showed about one-fourth did not want to drive on to unconditional surrender.
Fast forward that reel to the post-9/11 era. Just how many Hollywood movies (not documentaries) have been made in which the bad guys are Islamist terrorists that do not specifically concern the Sept. 11 attacks? If you have to guess, guess “none.”
Read the whole thing. As Fumento observed, Hollywood seems bent on convincing us that either Islamist terrorists aren't really a threat or that they're no worse than we are.
Also, read Ed Driscoll's Hollywood Nihilism, which argues that the change in Hollywood predates 9/11 and Bush ("who's the real enemy," indeed).
It's really remarkable (and disgusting) that Tinseltown — with its well-known predilection for hedonism, its commitment to feminism, its enthusiastic embrace of alternative lifestyles, and its general "do your own thing" attitude — has consistently sided with the most barbaric, mysogynistic, intolerant, and repressive religio-political movement on the face of the earth, a movement that would, given the chance, behead or stone to death practically every last one of them.
Thirty years ago yesterday, Star Wars opened in just 32 theaters across the country, and producers worried it would lose money. In Los Angeles this weekend, well over 20,000 fans are attending a five-day celebration of the anniversary, the Postal Service has issued Star Wars stamps, and George Lucas is making clips from the Star Wars movies available for "remixing" at StarWars.com.
But not all Star Wars fans are celebrating this weekend. An Aussie on his way to a 30th anniversary photo shoot made the mistake of letting his Star Wars laser pistol poke out of his backpack and alarm the hoplophobes in a Melbourne mall. Police, not knowing whether the laser blaster was fully charged, took no chances:
"It was a replica gun. We weren't sure what we were dealing with," Senior-Constable Daniel Sage told the Herald Sun newspaper. Photographs showed a gun closely resembling the weapon carried by Star Wars rogue Han Solo in the cinema classic.
The man had been on his way to pose for a community newspaper ahead of the 30th Star Wars movie anniversary when he was surrounded by armed police, forced to the ground and handcuffed.
Police said despite being a harmless replica and a close match to a weapon from a galaxy far, far away, the man would be charged with possessing an unregistered firearm.
Don't Australians realize that laser pistols don't kill people, people kill people? (Also, battle droids …)
In other movie news, today is the 100th birthday of Marion Morrison, better known as John Wayne. The Duke carried a plain old revolver, not a laser pistol, but he changed movies forever, too. Check out the fine tribute poem posted by commenter shirley at Firetop.
