gmane.music.dadl.ot

Early Hitchcock film found in NZ

Andrew Irwin — 2011-08-03T05:39:44

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/film/5383230/Early-Hitchcock-film-found
-in-NZ

A rare early film from Alfred Hitchcock that was unearthed in New Zealand
has been labelled "priceless" by historians of the suspense master.

The National Film Preservation Foundation and the New Zealand Film Archive
found part of Alfred Hitchcock's 1923 film
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Shadow_%28film%29> The White Shadow
following an international search.

It is considered to be the earliest feature film for which the celebrated
director is credited.

Hitchcock, who was just 24 at the time, was the writer, assistant director,
editor and production designer on the melodrama.

The lost film starred Betty Compson as twin sisters - one good, and the
other "without a soul".

The New Zealand Film Archive announced today that the film turned up among a
cache of unidentified American nitrate prints held in the archive for the
last 23 years.

However, only the first three reels of the six-reel feature have been found
and no other copy is known to exist.

New Zealand projectionist and collector Jack Murtagh is credited for
salvaging the film, as well as other silent-era movies. After he died in
1989, the nitrate prints were sent to the Film Archive by his grandson, Tony
Osborne.

"From boyhood, my grandfather was an avid collector - be it films, stamps,
coins or whatever. He was known, internationally, as having one of the
largest collection of cigarette cards and people would travel from all over
the world to view his collection. Some would view him as rather eccentric.

"He would be quietly amused by all the attention now generated by these
important film discoveries," said Osborne in a statement.

For fans of the master of suspense, it is a once in a lifetime discovery.

"This is one of the most significant developments in memory for scholars,
critics, and admirers of Hitchcock's extraordinary body of work," said David
Sterritt, Chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and author of The
Films of Alfred Hitchcock.

"Hitchcock's own directorial debut came only two years later. These first
three reels of The White Shadow - more than half the film - offer a
priceless opportunity to study his visual and narrative ideas when they were
first taking shape."

Hitchcock went on to direct classics like The 39 Steps, Dial M For Murder,
Rear Window and To Catch a Thief.

He died in 1980 aged 80.

 

 

Andrew Irwin

[John Scalzi] The Belief Schism

Johne Cook — 2011-08-01T16:06:10

SF author John Scalzi tackles belief and believers (two related but distinct
things). I always find it fascinating to read the specific nuance that
thinkers have for their thoughts.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/08/01/the-belief-schism/
The Belief Schism
Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |*
*

RIP John Stott

Andrew Irwin — 2011-07-27T22:06:53

http://www.allsouls.org/Publisher/Article.aspx?ID=273279


John Stott died in his retirement home at St. Barnabas College at
3.15pm on Wednesday 27th July. He was surrounded by Frances Whitehead,
and a number of good friends. They were reading the Scriptures and
listening to Handel's Messiah when he peacefully went to be with his
Lord and Saviour.


Various tributes on the page follow...

----------------------

I've been reading a lot of his books recently, and I'm going through
The Cross of Christ chapter by chapter with a friend. A very wise and
well thought out man, finally seeing his Lord, Saviour Father and
friend face to face.

-----------------------
Andrew Irwin

Pro bono laptop repair, Monsieur Hire, and jam

Johne Cook — 2011-07-25T19:27:33

Some people mark the changing of time by the seasons, others, by the
beginning and ending of sports calenders. I mark the passage of time by how
often I am 'volunteered' to fix Alicia's laptop.

Alicia is sort of related. She is the younger sister of Mike Badtke, the
husband of my daughter, Ashlei. Alicia recently graduated from High School,
which means she still hangs onto the self delusion that she knows
everything. The fact that her mother, Cindy, approaches me on a semi-annual
basis to fix the laptop simply side-steps the issue, I think. Alicia doesn't
have to confess her ignorance or her (fairly common) internet indiscretions,
and I don't have to rub her nose in it. Cindy loves her daughter, and I
don't mind playing the geeky hero on occasion.

I was approached on Saturday to help Alicia get her new iPod Touch to work
with the laptop on Saturday. The presenting problem was simple: the iPod
could not be connected to iTunes, because iTunes wasn't connecting to the
iTunes store. I noticed that she had three different antivirus apps, all
expired. As I expected, none of them connected to the internet to receive
updates. While digging into the issue, I noticed that the weather app in the
sidebar also wasn't updating because it apparently couldn't connect to the
internet, either. However, her browsers connected to the internet just fine.
And then I noticed the Frostwire icon on the desktop. I looked at the amount
of battery she had left and closed the lid.

I said there were more things going on than I would have laptop battery
power available to fix that day, and asked for the family to take the laptop
back home and send it to church the following day with my daughter, Ashlei
(who lives near them and attends my church). I asked for them to send along
the new iPod and a power cord for the laptop.

The problem was simple - the laptop was infected by virii likely acquired
during the downloading of songs on Frostwire. (The Frostwire service itself
is just another P2P app, however, songs people download are frequently
infected and young downloaders don't always know how to protect themselves.)
I settled down for an afternoon of clearing out non-functioning programs,
disinfecting the laptop, and then installing new programs to keep her laptop
secure.

I spent much of the afternoon waiting for various lengthy processes to run;
I installed and loaded and ran and updated and immunized Spybot Search &
Destroy. I ran Malware Bytes. I unloaded all the non-functioning and
out-of-date antivirus apps and got one current one loaded. There were any
number of complete hard drive scans, both quick and full. There was a lot of
time to kill while her laptop was performing various and sundry tasks, and I
spent that time watching stuff. I got caught up with Suits (USA Network). I
went looking for a good noir mystery thriller to keep my mind engaged.

And that's how I found Monsieur Hire, the obscure French-subtitled film. It
cropped up in one of my Netflix searches, and was described as just weird
enough to sample. I have a thing for good noir, and sometimes even less-good
noir. I fired it up and watched the first five minutes, then five more, then
five more. What saved it was how it suggested suggestive scenes (if that
makes sense) without ever being explicit. This is not an overt film. I was
just curious to give it some time to develop.

I'm glad I did. Roger Ebert gave it four stars. I wish I'd thought to
research it first, because I could have perhaps committed fully to it
earlier, but as it was, it was on an every five minute bubble, forever at
risk being turned off in favor of something else (my back-up plan was to
finally watch Nic Cage in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which I still haven't
gotten around to seeing). There are times for mindless flicks, and times for
something with foreign subtitles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsieur_Hire
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19900615/REVIEWS/6150303

Something socially aberrant happens, but it is so matter-of-fact that I kept
watching. The movie wasn't about a fetish, although a lesser film would have
been obsessed with one in its place. I thought I knew where the film was
going to go, and it kept subverting my expectations. The 'hero' wasn't
heroic, but was both completely sure of himself and completely vulnerable.
The girl wasn't a victim and yet willingly threw her at two completely
different men. The young man wasn't completely stupid nor predictable. The
inspector was a good man (or was he?) who had an interesting way of
conducting a murder investigation.

About halfway through, I realized with a start that I was hooked. Because of
the subject matter, I never would have sought out such a film, and yet, and
yet, and yet.

After watching my fair share of mindless CGI-laden summer blockbusters,
perhaps I was ready for such a different kind of film. I was most impressed
by what the film left out. It was an elegant little exercise, and I have to
say that after getting to the end, it really left me impressed, and (in a
way) entertained. It really was about what is, and isn't, love. With
subtitles.

Back to the laptop - strangely, McAfee turned out to be very effective
finding and removing viruses, but was too devoted to locking her system down
so tight that it wouldn't connect to the internet, the original problem I
was there to fix. I finally wiped McAfee back off her system and replaced it
with the free AVG, and all was good with the world. The afternoon turned
into twilight and I finally got the laptop back to the place where I was
able to connect iTunes to the internet to get her iPod Touch to work. By the
time I was done with everything else, that was almost an afterthought. It
was by far the easiest thing I did all day.

I arranged to meet Cindy at an Arby's restaurant to drop off the laptop.
When she pulled up, she asked how much I wanted. I demurred, as I always do,
invoking the 'family discount.' She smiled produced a small, heavy paper bag
containing two jars of home-made jam. The 'payment' didn't match the effort
or my time, but I was strangely touched. (As it happens, it's really great
jam, as only real home-made stuff can be. The love poured in helps in some
undefinable way.)

I went through the drive-through and splurged on some dinner for us and went
home to sit with Linda and catch up with Big Brother 13, a shared guilty
pleasure. I'm sure I'll hear from Cindy again about fixing Alicia's laptop,
likely in 2012. Who knows what new obscure treasure I'll dig up then.

Honestly, I'm kind of looking forward to it.

Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |

We can relax - Roger Ebert likes Captain America!

Johne Cook — 2011-07-21T18:24:32

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110720/REVIEWS/110729997


  Captain America

 * BY ROGER EBERT / * July 20, 2011

 Cast & Credits
Capt America/Steve Rogers Chris
Evans<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Chris%20Evans&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>
Peggy Hayley Atwell
Bucky Sebastian Stan
Col Phillips Tommy Lee
Jones<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Tommy%20Lee%20Jones&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>
Schmidt/Red Skull Hugo
Weaving<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Hugo%20Weaving&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>
Howard Dominic Cooper
Dr Erskine
<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Stanley%20Tucci&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>Stanley
Tucci<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Stanley%20Tucci&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>
Nick Fury Samuel L Jackson
Dr Zola Toby Jones

Paramount Pictures presents a film directed by Joe
Johnston<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Joe%20Johnston&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>.
Written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, inspired by the Marvel
comic books. Running time: 125 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for intense sequences
of sci-fi violence and action).

 *Printer-friendly*<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110720/REVIEWS/110729997&template=printart>»
*E-mail this to a
friend*<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110720/REVIEWS/110729997>»

[image: AddThis Social Bookmark Button]<http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php>

 It was a pleasure to realize, once "Captain America: The First Avenger" got
under way, that hey, here is a real movie, not a noisy assembly of
incomprehensible special effects. Of course it's loaded with CGI. It goes
without saying it's preposterous. But it has the texture and takes the care
to be a full-blown film. You know, like with a hero we care about and who
has some dimension. And with weight to the story. As we plunge ahead into a
limitless future of comic-book movies, let this be an inspiration rather
than "Thor" or "Green
Lantern<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=REVIEWS01&TITLESearch=Green%20Lantern&ToDate=20111231>
."

The words "The First Avenger" are fraught with significance for Marvel fans.
We have already had films inspired by Iron Man, the Hulk and Thor. Still to
come, without doubt, are Ant-Man and Wasp. This film opens with the
discovery of an enormous flying wing embedded in polar ice, and when a
gloved hand reaches out to brush away the ice on a window, why, there's
Captain America's shield! This film's plot involves his origin story and
adventures during World War II, and I'm sure we'll discover in sequels that
he was revived after the cryogenic nap to crusade again in the new day.

We open with an archetypal 90-pound weakling; comic books of that period
featured ads showing muscle men kicking sand into the face of such
specimens, who were advised to mail-order Charles Atlas for body-building
help. Young Steve Rogers (Chris
Evans<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Chris%20Evans&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>)
is a puny Brooklyn kid who is routinely beat upon by bullies; he dreams of
joining the Army and defending America against the Nazis. Turned down as
4-F, he tries again and again to enlist, and eventually makes it into basic
training, where he's always falling off the rope and bringing up the rear.

But the kid has courage. This attracts the attention of the hard-boiled Col.
Phillips (Tommy Lee
Jones<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Tommy%20Lee%20Jones&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>)
and a scientist named Erskine
(<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Stanley%20Tucci&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>Stanley
Tucci<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Stanley%20Tucci&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>),
who supervises a secret government program. In no time at all, and without
really receiving any explanation, he's being strapped into an ominous
sarcophagus in Erskine's laboratory, which emits sparks and smoke, and
eventually the new Steve Rogers, now a foot taller and built like Mr.
Universe. He adopts a costume and a stars-and-stripes shield, which serve
primarily to make him highly visible, although the shield has special powers
(but apparently only when it's positioned correctly).

Young Steve's Army confidante both before and after his transformation is
the sultry Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), whose full red lips make her
resemble a classic military pin-up of the period. He narrates their tour of
the Brooklyn neighborhoods where he was picked on, and they grow close, but
only PG-13 close, because Marvel has apparently determined that fanboys find
sex to be icky.

<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110720/REVIEWS/110729997>

 (Enlarge Image<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110720/REVIEWS/110729997>
)
 Now the full-bodied story comes into play, involving, as all good
comic-book movies must, a really first-rate villain. This is a Nazi
commandant named Johann Schmidt (Hugo
Weaving<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Hugo%20Weaving&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>),
who essentially controls his own private army and has schemes of surpassing
Hitler. His minions salute him, not Der Fuhrer, and he has dreams of
creating super weapons. Eventually, as the rules of comic-book drama
require, Captain America will pair off against Schmidt, who is revealed to
be the hideous Red Skull, whose skin tone makes him resemble those ducks
marinated in red sauce you sometimes see hanging in Chinatown restaurant
windows. Schmidt demonstrates once again that, when it comes to movie
villains, you can't do better than Nazis.

The film pays full dues to Marvel mythology, providing Captain America with
his sidekick Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), not such a kid as he was in the
comics. We also meet Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), who supports Erskine's
research and will eventually, as we know, father Iron Man. And there is Nick
Fury (Samuel L.
Jackson<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Samuel%20L.%20Jackson&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>),
another World War II hero destined to graduate to his own comic book and, no
doubt, movie. Jackson has the chops to play a first-rate superhero.

The adventures of Captain America are fabricated with first-rate CGI and are
slightly more reality-oriented than in most superhero movies — which is to
say, they're still wildly absurd, but set up and delivered with more
control. CGI makes another invaluable contribution to the movie, by
shrinking the 6-foot Chris
Evans<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Chris%20Evans&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>into
a vertically challenged 90-pound weakling, and then expanding him
dramatically into the muscular Captain America. This is done seamlessly and
he's convincing at both sizes; I doubt there's a single shot in the movie
that shows Evans as he really is.

I enjoyed the movie. I appreciated the 1940s period settings and costumes,
which were a break with the usual generic cityscapes. I admired the way that
director Joe Johnston<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Joe%20Johnston&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>("October
Sky<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=REVIEWS01&TITLESearch=October%20Sky&ToDate=20111231>"
and "Jumanji<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=REVIEWS01&TITLESearch=Jumanji&ToDate=20111231>")
propelled the narrative. I got a sense of a broad story, rather than the
impression of a series of sensational set pieces. If Marvel is wise, it will
take this and "Iron
Man<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=REVIEWS01&TITLESearch=Iron%20Man&ToDate=20111231>"
as its templates. See it in 2-D if you can.


Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |*
*

Fill er up.

Mike Findlay — 2011-07-08T17:22:33

Cop:  I think you are driving drunk.
Driver: No, I'm not, give me a breathalyzer
Cop: No we don't like those anymore, pee in this cup.
Driver:  What?  You can't make me pee in a cup.
Cop:  Off to jail with you buddy and kiss your license goodbye.


Brave new world we got ourselves.

Mike F.  



----- Forwarded Message ----
From: TheNewspaper <sharedarticle-Tdrh2E+Ad1PH3Z/rdEEG2A< at >public.gmane.org>
To: mdfindlay-rphTv4pjVZMJGwgDXS7ZQA< at >public.gmane.org
Sent: Fri, July 8, 2011 12:17:19 PM
Subject: Updates from TheNewspaper.com

TheNewspaper  
Updates from TheNewspaper.com 
    
________________________________
 
Minnesota: Appeals Court Expands DUI Implied Consent Reach 
Posted: 08 Jul 2011 01:59 AM PDT
Anyone accused by a police officer in Minnesota of driving under the influence 
of alcohol (DUI) can be compelled to produce a urine sample without a warrant, 
according to a June 27 decision by the state court of appeals. A three-judge 
panel weighed the case of Kim Marie Ellingson who had been stopped for speeding 
after midnight on May 3, 2009. The officer later arrested her for DUI.

Just days before, the state supreme court handed down its decision in the case 
of Minnesota v. Underdahl forcing disclosure of the source code that governs the 
operation of the Intoxilyzer 5000EN breath testing machine. The revelation 
allowed defense attorneys to uncover flaws in the device's operation. 
Prosecutors put thousands of cases on hold. Most jurisdictions switched to blood 
or urine testing to avoid the breath machine's problem.

Precedent already allowed police to take blood or breath without a warrant, 
although physical force could not be used without a judge's prior approval (view 
decision). No clear directive existed for warrantless urine collection. 
Nonetheless, a police officer insisted Ellingson provide such a sample under the 
implied consent statute. At trial, Ellingson insisted the police should have 
first obtained a warrant, as required by the Fourth Amendment.

"One exception to the warrant requirement is the existence of exigent 
circumstances," Judge Thomas J. Kalitowski wrote for the three-judge panel. 
"Exigency can be created by a single factor, in which case consideration of the 
totality of the circumstances is unnecessary."

To get this result, the prosecution's expert witness claimed waiting just 
fifteen minutes could cause a blood alcohol reading in the bladder to decrease 
by 0.002 -- enough to change a .081 conviction into a .079 acquittal.

"Appellant is correct that the forensic scientist testified that alcohol in the 
bladder is not destroyed by the body's natural processes in the same way as 
alcohol in the blood is destroyed," Kalitowski wrote. "But the record supports 
the district court's finding that the body's natural processes cause the alcohol 
concentration of urine to change rapidly."

Under this reasoning, the court affirmed Ellingson's conviction. A copy of the 
ruling is available in a 100K PDF file at the source link below. Source 

    
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To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. Email delivery powered 
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Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610

Jon Stewart: Moral Kombat (with a nod to CA and WI)

Johne Cook — 2011-07-02T02:37:28

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-june-30-2011/moral-kombat

Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |*
*

160 Million and Counting

Peter Chattaway — 2011-06-28T19:20:24

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/opinion/27douthat.html

June 26, 2011
By ROSS DOUTHAT

In 1990, the economist Amartya Sen published an essay in The New York Review of Books with a bombshell title: “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.” His subject was the wildly off-kilter sex ratios in India, China and elsewhere in the developing world. To explain the numbers, Sen invoked the “neglect” of third-world women, citing disparities in health care, nutrition and education. He also noted that under China’s one-child policy, “some evidence exists of female infanticide.”

The essay did not mention abortion.

Twenty years later, the number of “missing” women has risen to more than 160 million, and a journalist named Mara Hvistendahl has given us a much more complete picture of what’s happened. Her book is called “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.” As the title suggests, Hvistendahl argues that most of the missing females weren’t victims of neglect. They were selected out of existence, by ultrasound technology and second-trimester abortion.

The spread of sex-selective abortion is often framed as a simple case of modern science being abused by patriarchal, misogynistic cultures. Patriarchy is certainly part of the story, but as Hvistendahl points out, the reality is more complicated — and more depressing.

Thus far, female empowerment often seems to have led to more sex selection, not less. In many communities, she writes, “women use their increased autonomy to select for sons,” because male offspring bring higher social status. In countries like India, sex selection began in “the urban, well-educated stratum of society,” before spreading down the income ladder.

Moreover, Western governments and philanthropic institutions have their fingerprints all over the story of the world’s missing women.

From the 1950s onward, Asian countries that legalized and then promoted abortion did so with vocal, deep-pocketed American support. Digging into the archives of groups like the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Hvistendahl depicts an unlikely alliance between Republican cold warriors worried that population growth would fuel the spread of Communism and left-wing scientists and activists who believed that abortion was necessary for both “the needs of women” and “the future prosperity — or maybe survival — of mankind,” as the Planned Parenthood federation’s medical director put it in 1976.

For many of these antipopulation campaigners, sex selection was a feature rather than a bug, since a society with fewer girls was guaranteed to reproduce itself at lower rates.

Hvistendahl’s book is filled with unsettling scenes, from abandoned female fetuses littering an Indian hospital to the signs in Chinese villages at the height of the one-child policy’s enforcement. (“You can beat it out! You can make it fall out! You can abort it! But you cannot give birth to it!”) The most disturbing passages, though, are the ones that depict self-consciously progressive Westerners persuading themselves that fewer girls might be exactly what the teeming societies of the third world needed.

Over all, “Unnatural Selection” reads like a great historical detective story, and it’s written with the sense of moral urgency that usually accompanies the revelation of some enormous crime.

But what kind of crime? This is the question that haunts Hvistendahl’s book, and the broader debate over the vanished 160 million.

The scale of that number evokes the genocidal horrors of the 20th century. But notwithstanding the depredations of the Chinese politburo, most of the abortions were (and continue to be) uncoerced. The American establishment helped create the problem, but now it’s metastasizing on its own: the population-control movement is a shadow of its former self, yet sex selection has spread inexorably with access to abortion, and sex ratios are out of balance from Central Asia to the Balkans to Asian-American communities in the United States.

This places many Western liberals, Hvistendahl included, in a distinctly uncomfortable position. Their own premises insist that the unborn aren’t human beings yet, and that the right to an abortion is nearly absolute. A self-proclaimed agnostic about when life begins, Hvistendahl insists that she hasn’t written “a book about death and killing.” But this leaves her struggling to define a victim for the crime that she’s uncovered.

It’s society at large, she argues, citing evidence that gender-imbalanced countries tend to be violent and unstable. It’s the women in those countries, she adds, pointing out that skewed sex ratios are associated with increased prostitution and sex trafficking.

These are important points. But the sense of outrage that pervades her story seems to have been inspired by the missing girls themselves, not the consequences of their absence.

Here the anti-abortion side has it easier. We can say outright what’s implied on every page of “Unnatural Selection,” even if the author can’t quite bring herself around.

The tragedy of the world’s 160 million missing girls isn’t that they’re “missing.” The tragedy is that they’re dead.

- - -

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/abortion-and-the-missing-160-million/

Abortion and the Missing 160 Million

by Ross Douthat
June 28, 2011, 10:28 am

Responding to my column’s claim (pegged to Mara Hvistendahl’s remarkable new book) that the spread of sex-selective abortion places pro-choice liberals in an uncomfortable situation, Matt Yglesias suggests that abortion isn’t really the issue here, and asks that we imagine a world in which sex selection takes place at the contraceptive stage, through the use of a “boy pill” or “girl pill”:

On joint Douthatian and Yglesian principles, nobody’s being killed here. But I think that if we found out that use of the “boy” pill was extremely widespread, this might still legitimately worry us for three kinds of reasons. One is that widespread use of the boy pill would express the inegalitarian idea that men are more valuable than women. A second is that widespread use of the boy pill would reflect the existence of ongoing inequities in society that make it the case that a male child is more valuable than a female child. The third is that there are plausible reasons to believe that even a relatively small gender gap in the population could have problematic macro-scale consequences for society.

As it happens, sex-selective medical intervention overwhelmingly takes the form of abortions. But there are plenty of reasons you might be concerned about the phenomenon that don’t have to do with abortion specifically.

But I wasn’t suggesting that pro-choice liberals have no reason to be “concerned about the phenomenon” of 160 million missing girls. (I would hope that they’re concerned!) My point was that the story of sex-selective abortion creates more difficulties — both intellectually and, I would submit, emotionally — for abortion-rights supporters than it does for those of us on the pro-life side of the argument. For one thing, it presents a policy problem: If the right to abortion is a fundamental human liberty, how do you address sex selection without infringing dramatically on the right to privacy? (A similar problem would obtain in the Yglesian hypothetical: How far would liberals be willing to go to restrict access to the boy-producing contraception? What would a liberal court have to say about efforts to ban it? Etc.) In “Unnatural Selection,” Mara Hvistendahl ends up endorsing a strict anti-sex selection regulatory regime — and good for her. But some of her proposals would be deemed hopelessly invasive by abortion-rights supporters if they were implemented in the United States. And once you start talking about how the right to abortion is being terribly “abused,” and suggesting that we need to regulate and restrict abortions that are happening for the wrong reasons, you’ve conceded a significant amount of ground to the anti-abortion side of the argument.

At the same time, sex-selective abortion focuses attention on the humanity of the fetus/embryo/unborn child — which is being aborted, after all, because it manifests an essential human characteristic — in ways that Yglesias’s hypothetical “boy pill” would not. Here I would just urge readers to pick up Hvistendahl’s book (you don’t have to trust me: trust Tyler Cowen, who says that it will make his “best books of 2011″ list), and then try to imagine how differently the narrative would read if the technology in question were a contraceptive pill rather than ultrasound-plus-abortion. It isn’t just that the graphic details — the female fetuses lying around a Third World hospital, the description of how an ultrasound works, etc. — would be entirely absent. I suspect that the entire tone of the book would be altered, and its power diminished, if its story wasn’t written in the shadow of those millions of missing girls’s all-too-temporary existence. And the fact that Hvistendahl holds no brief for the pro-life movement only makes her story’s implicitly anti-abortion emotional wallop that much more striking.

Of course I’m coming at this from a pro-life perspective, and it’s entirely possible that I’m reading my own views into the text. So go read it yourself, and see if you agree.

A THEME TO A KILL: JOHN BARRY ...AND JAMES BOND

Peter T. Chattaway — 2011-06-28T07:54:34

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/4199/28/

with Mark and his guests David Arnold, Don Black and Tim Rice

Steyn on People
Saturday, 25 June 2011

For the first of our summer audio specials, we celebrate the work of James 
Bond's music man and the composer who defined the sound of spy music. John 
Barry died earlier this year, and we had so much response to Mark's 007 
double-bill Song of the Week that he decided it would be nice to hear a 
bit more of the music, and also some of the stories behind it from John's 
friends and colleagues. So to discuss the Barry style Mark rounded up two 
Oscar-winning lyricists and a composer. All three were part of the big 
memorial concert last Monday night at the Royal Albert Hall in London, so, 
if you couldn't get tickets, we hope you'll dial up our podcast as the 
next best thing:

Tim Rice and Don Black were guests on our Christmas Show two years ago, 
when they touched briefly on their Bond songs. Tim is best-known as the 
lyricist of Evita, Aladdin and The Lion King, but he also collaborated 
with John Barry on the theme song for Octopussy. And Don has written more 
James Bond lyrics than anybody else, from Thunderball to The Man With The 
Golden Gun, Diamonds Are Forever to The World Is Not Enough.

Joining Tim and Don is David Arnold, the composer of Independence Day, 
Godzilla, the remake of Shaft, Hot Fuzz, Voyage Of The Dawn Treader and 
the TV series Little Britain. But he's also John Barry's successor in the 
James Bond music chair. He's composed every Bond picture of the last 15 
years, from Tomorrow Never Dies to A Quantum Of Solace, and is about the 
only person other than Judi Dench's M to survive the transition from the 
Pierce Brosnan era to the Daniel Craig regime. He also made an album of 
Bond songs, Shaken And Stirred.

Our two-part special provides over two great hours of music and 
conversation. We'll track Bond themes from You Only Live Twice, Moonraker, 
A View To A Kill and many more performed by Tom Jones, Nancy Sinatra, 
Louis Armstrong, Lulu, Rita Coolidge, Duran Duran, A-Ha and, of course, 
Shirley Bassey. We'll also hear Barry songs performed by Frank Sinatra, 
Tom Petty, Anthony Newley, Kanye West, Iggy Pop, Pulp, Coldplay, and the 
Mormon Tabernacle Choir, plus TV themes like "The Persuaders", other Barry 
film scores from The Ipcress File to Out Of Africa, and the world's 
greatest shampoo commercial.

In Part One of the show, Tim Rice delves into the John Barry Seven's 
raucous pop career, Don Black distinguishes the anatomical origins of 
"Diamonds Are Forever" from the non-anatomical origins of "Thunderball", 
David Arnold takes us behind a unique moment in On Her Majesty's Secret 
Service -- and Mark explores the evolution of the James Bond theme from Dr 
No to The Living Daylights.

In Part Two, Tim explains why the Octopussy song isn't called "Octopussy", 
Don recalls his and John Barry's Oscar-winning song "Born Free", David 
picks some favorite moments from Barry's later orchestral scores -- and 
Steyn sings "Goldfinger".

To listen to Part One, click here 
<http://www.steynonline.com/images/stories/john%20barry%20part%201.mp3>. 
To listen to Part Two, click here 
<http://www.steynonline.com/images/stories/john%20barry%20part%202.mp3>. 
Each is a little over an hour.

The picture above shows John Barry and his then wife Jane Birkin back in 
the Swingin' Sixties and looking not un-Bondlike.

Begin migration to Google Groups

Bruce Geerdes — 2011-06-27T17:39:07

OK, you probably all received an invitation to Yahoo Groups. Ignore
it. While I remain List Czar, I have made the command decision to
migrate to Google Groups instead. It provides an experience much more
like what we're used to, simple messages conducive to discussions,
without a bunch of useless clutter.

I've already moved the 16 people that subscribed to Yahoo Groups. I'll
see if I can't send Google Groups invites to the remaining people.
(Apologies if you get a duplicate invitation if you're already a
member.)

We've got two months before thehood.us expires. Let's aim for a
completed transition in one month, the end of July. In the meantime,
try to start using the Google Groups address
(dadl-ot-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw< at >public.gmane.org) for starting new discussions.

the top ten movies in north america

Peter T. Chattaway — 2011-06-27T02:45:41

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -- Following are ticket sales for the top 10 movies 
at the North American box office for the June 24-26 weekend, according to 
studio estimates issued Sunday. Final data will be issued Monday.

[***] 1 (+) Cars 2 .......................... $68.0 million   68.0 million
[***] 2 (+) Bad Teacher ..................... $31.0 million   31.0 million
[***] 3 (1) Green Lantern ................... $18.4 million   89.3 million
[***] 4 (2) Super 8 ......................... $12.1 million   95.2 million
[***] 5 (3) Mr. Popper's Penguins ........... $10.3 million   39.4 million
[***] 6 (4) X-Men: First Class ............... $6.6 million  132.8 million
[***] 7 (5) The Hangover Part II ............. $5.9 million  243.9 million
[***] 8 (7) Bridesmaids ...................... $5.4 million  146.7 million
[***] 9 (8) Pirates of the Caribbean: ... .... $4.7 million  229.1 million
[***] 10(9) Midnight in Paris ................ $4.5 million   28.6 million

NOTE: Last weekend's position in parenthesis. + indicates a new release.
Figures are rounded.

- - -

FWIW, despite the crushingly bad reviews it got -- it is the first Pixar 
movie to get trashed as "rotten" at Rotten Tomatoes -- Cars 2 is almost 
tied with 2009's Up for the 4th-biggest opening in Pixar's history.

http://boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?view=openings&id=pixar.htm&p=.htm

Also FWIW, Bad Teacher has the fourth-highest opening of any live-action 
film starring Cameron Diaz, behind only The Green Hornet (2011, $33.5 
million) and the two Charlie's Angels films (2000, $40.1 million; 2003, 
$37.6 million).  All four Shrek movies opened bigger, too.

http://boxofficemojo.com/people/chart/?view=Actor&id=camerondiaz.htm

Also FWIW, Bridesmaids is only a couple million bucks away from passing 
Knocked Up to be the biggest movie Judd Apatow has ever produced.

http://boxofficemojo.com/people/chart/?view=Producer&id=juddapatow.htm

Also FWIW, Midnight in Paris is now the fourth-highest grossing film that 
Woody Allen has directed ... though he's made movies pretty much every 
year since the late '60s, so this obviously doesn't take inflation into 
account (although, if we *did* take it into account, Midnight Paris would 
need only another two million bucks or so to crack Woody's top ten):

  1986  Hannah and Her Sisters                                $40.1 million
  1979  Manhattan                                             $39.9 million
  1977  Annie Hall                                            $38.3 million
  2011  *** MIDNIGHT IN PARIS ***                             $28.6 million
  2008  Vicky Cristina Barcelona                              $23.2 million

http://boxofficemojo.com/people/chart/?view=Director&id=woodallen.htm
http://popwatch.ew.com/2011/06/23/woody-allen-midnight-in-paris-adjusted-for-inflation/

Also FWIW, Kung Fu Panda fell off the domestic top ten this week, and it 
is currently only the 12th-highest-grossing DreamWorks cartoon in North 
America, but overseas it currently ranks #6, and as of this writing, it is 
virtually tied with How to Train Your Dragon for the #7 spot worldwide 
(behind the three Shrek sequels, the two Madagascar films and the original 
Kung Fu Panda).  Here is how the overseas-only grosses compare:

  2010  Shrek Forever After                                  $513.9 million
  2004  Shrek 2                                              $478.6 million
  2007  Shrek the Third                                      $476.2 million
  2008  Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa                          $423.9 million
  2008  Kung Fu Panda                                        $416.3 million
  2011  *** KUNG FU PANDA 2 ***                              $340.0 million
  2005  Madagascar                                           $339.1 million
  2010  How to Train Your Dragon                             $277.3 million

http://boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=dwanimation.htm

Also FWIW, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is now the third 
movie ever to gross over $750 million overseas; you might say it's the 
top-grossing movie overseas that is *not* directed by James Cameron:

  2009  Avatar                                              $2021.8 million
  1997  Titanic                                             $1242.4 million
  2011  *** PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES ***  $756.1 million
  2003  The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King        $742.1 million
  2009  Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs                       $690.1 million

It is also now the #8 film of all time worldwide, though it is still only 
the #79 film of all time in North America.

- - -

http://movies.yahoo.com/news/movies.ap.org/cars-2-keeps-pixar-drivers-seat-with-68m-ap

LOS ANGELES - Pixar Animation remains undefeated at the box-office races.

The Disney unit's animated sequel "Cars 2" cruised to a No. 1 finish with 
a $68 million opening weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday. That 
makes 12 wins in a row for Pixar since the company's first feature film, 
1995's "Toy Story."

"It couldn't be any better than that. What an unbelievable track record 
these guys have," said Chuck Viane, head of distribution for Disney.

"Cars 2" added $42.9 million in 18 overseas markets, giving it a worldwide 
total of $110.9 million.

Domestically, "Cars 2" nearly matched the $68.1 million debut of 
Disney-Pixar's "Up" two years ago, though it was well below the company's 
record of $110.3 million for last year's "Toy Story 3."

The original "Cars" had a $60.1 million debut in 2006, but factoring in 
today's higher admission prices, it sold more tickets than "Cars 2."

Premiering in second-place was Cameron Diaz's classroom comedy "Bad 
Teacher" with $31 million. The Sony Pictures release added $12.9 million 
overseas in about 10 countries.

The previous weekend's No. 1 flick, Ryan Reynolds' "Green Lantern," fell 
to third-place with $18.4 million. That was off a steep 65 percent from 
its revenues over opening weekend, raising the domestic total for the 
Warner Bros. superhero tale to $89.3 million.

Both new wide releases came in ahead of industry projections, which had 
pegged "Cars 2" at an opening of around $60 million and "Bad Teacher" at 
about $25 million.

"Cars 2" features Owen Wilson and Larry the Cable Guy reprising their 
voice roles for race car Lightning McQueen and tow truck Mater as the two 
are caught up in a spy adventure during an international racing tour.

The movie overcame unusually harsh reviews for Pixar, whose films include 
such critical darlings as "Ratatouille," "Finding Nemo," "The Incredibles" 
and "WALL-E."

Disney's Viane said audiences gave "Cars 2" top grades in exit surveys, a 
sign that the movie should have a long life at theaters like previous 
Pixar flicks.

"I'm always concerned when it comes to dollars and cents. What does the 
paying public think?" Viane said.

With global settings that include Japan, Italy, France and Great Britain, 
"Cars 2" also has strong prospects as it continues to roll out overseas.

The international haul for "Cars 2" included $9.3 million in Russia, $8.1 
million in Mexico and $7.6 million in Brazil.

While the G-rated "Cars 2" cornered the family market, "Bad Teacher" was 
the weekend's grown-up choice, starring Diaz as a foul-mouthed, boozy, 
gold-digging educator.

"She just went with it with great abandonment. She totally just let it 
go," said Rory Bruer, head of distribution for Sony.

While women accounted for 63 percent of the audience for "Bad Teacher," 
Sony executives hope word-of-mouth over Diaz's brazen performance will 
draw more men to see it in the coming weeks.

Overall domestic revenues totaled $176 million, up 6.7 percent from the 
same period last year, when "Toy Story 3" remained No. 1 in its second 
weekend with $59.3 million, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com.

For the year, revenues are down 7.6 percent compared to 2010's, though a 
strong summer has helped Hollywood erase most of a big downturn in 
business from the sluggish winter and spring.

The upcoming Fourth of July weekend looks huge as Paramount's sci-fi 
sequel "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" blows into IMAX theaters Tuesday 
night and general cinemas Wednesday. That will be followed in mid-July by 
the Warner Bros. fantasy finale "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: 
Part 2."

"With `Cars 2' and the one-two punch of `Transformers' and `Harry Potter,' 
I think we have a shot at knocking that revenue deficit down to the 
break-even point or even pulling a little bit ahead of last year," said 
Hollywood.com analyst Paul Dergarabedian.

- - -

http://movies.yahoo.com/news/movies.reuters.com/critical-bomb-cars-2-races-box-office-victory-reuters

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "Cars 2," a Pixar sequel judged by critics to be 
the worst movie produced by the Disney-owned animation studio, sped to the 
front of the pack at the weekend box office in North America.

According to studio estimates issued on Sunday, the cartoon earned about 
$68 million during its first three days of release across the United 
States and Canada.

The first "Cars" opened to $60 million in 2006, or $72 million if adjusted 
for higher ticket prices. "Cars 2" also had the benefit of premium pricing 
for 3D engagements.

Critics lambasted the new film, a shocking development given that they 
usually fall over themselves to praise Pixar movies. Indeed, Pixar's "Toy 
Story 3," which opened to $110 million a year ago, was among the best 
reviewed films of 2010.

The latest sequel, viewed more as a merchandising opportunity for Pixar's 
Walt Disney Co parent than another creative milestone for the 
groundbreaking animation house, received approval of just 34 percent of 
critics surveyed by Rotten Tomatoes. The previous low for a Pixar film was 
74 percent for the first "Cars."

The Wall Street Journal said the film "seldom gets beyond mediocrity," 
while the Chicago Tribune said it was "virtually joke-free." But 
fortunately for Disney, the target audience of young boys does not read 
reviews.

(Reporting by Dean Goodman; Editing by Vicki Allen)

- - -

http://movies.yahoo.com/news/usmovies.thehollywoodreporter.com/disney-and-pixars-cars-2-hit-red-states

You can take the stock car out of the small town, but you can't take the 
small town out of the stock car.

Even though Disney/Pixar's Cars 2 is set overseas this time -- with big 
oil playing the enemy -- the 3D toon did best in America's heartland, 
a.k.a., the red states.

The turnout was so strong that the pic roared past expectations to gross 
an impressive $68 million in its domestic box office debut.

In the sequel, Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) travels to Tokyo, Italy and 
London to participate in the Grand World Prix. He's accompanied by Mater 
the tow truck, voiced by Larry the Cable Guy, the ultimate hick.

Mater plays more of the lead this time, and is inadvertently swept up in 
an international espionage case involving big oil trying to squash the 
alternative fuel movement.

Some conservatives lashed out at Pixar CEO and Cars 2 director John 
Lasseter over the storyline. The Lonely Conservative, a blog, accused the 
movie business of trying to indoctrinate children with "left wing 
propaganda."

But Cars 2 lost none of its appeal in flyover states, where both Larry the 
Cable Guy and NASCAR are immensely popular.

As with the first film, Cars 2 overperformed in the South, Midwest, South 
Central (including Texas) and Mountain states.

But if the big oil vs. alternative fuel wasn't a turn off for more 
conservative parts of the country, nor was it a draw for more liberal 
regions. Cars 2 underperformed on the East Coast, and slightly 
underperformed on the West.

Reviewers were largely critical of Cars 2, unusual for a Pixar title. Yet 
moviegoers gave the film an A-CinemaScore. Males made up 53% of those 
buying tickets for the toon, while 36% of the audience was under the age 
of 12.

Cars 2 enjoyed a great launch overseas, where it grossed $42.9 million 
from 18 territories (repping about 25% of the international market).

There's no doubt that Disney and Pixar tailored Cars 2's storyline to woo 
foreign audiences. The first Cars grossed roughly $200 million 
internationally, one of the lowest showings for a Pixar title.

Cars 2 opened to $9.3 million in Russia and $7.6 million in Brazil, the 
best showings ever for a Pixar movie. In Mexico, the sequel debuted to a 
$8.1 million and in Australia, $5.2 million.

- - -

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2011&p=.htm

The Domestic Top 15 of 2011 (as of June 26, 2011)

[***] 1  (1) The Hangover Part II (R)                       $243.9 million
[***] 2  (2) Pirates of the Caribbean: On ... Tides (PG-13) $229.1 million
[***] 3  (3) Fast Five (PG-13)                              $207.7 million
[***] 4  (4) Thor (PG-13)                                   $177.2 million
[***] 5  (5) Kung Fu Panda 2 (PG)                           $153.0 million
[***] 6  (7) Bridesmaids (R)                                $146.7 million
[***] 7  (6) Rio (G)                                        $139.6 million
[***] 8  (9) X-Men: First Class (PG-13)                     $132.8 million
[***] 9  (8) Rango (PG)                                     $123.0 million
[***] 10(10) Hop (PG)                                       $108.1 million
[***] 11(11) Just Go with It (PG-13)                        $103.0 million
[***] 11(12) Gnomeo and Juliet (G)                          $100.0 million
[***] 13(13) The Green Hornet (PG-13)                        $98.8 million
[***] 14(17) Super 8 (PG-13)                                 $95.2 million
[***] 15(26) Green Lantern (PG-13)                           $89.3 million

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?view2=worldwide&yr=2011&p=.htm

The Worldwide Top 15 of 2011 (as of June 26, 2011)

[***] 1  Pirates of the ... Tides (PG-13)    229.1 + 756.1 = 985.2 million
[***] 2  Fast Five (PG-13)                   207.7 + 389.0 = 596.7 million
[***] 3  The Hangover Part II (R)            243.9 + 283.2 = 527.1 million
[***] 4  Kung Fu Panda 2 (PG)                153.0 + 340.0 = 493.0 million
[***] 5  Rio (G)                             139.6 + 329.6 = 469.2 million
[***] 6  Thor (PG-13)                        177.2 + 259.6 = 436.8 million
[***] 7  X-Men: First Class (PG-13)          132.8 + 184.4 = 317.2 million
[***] 8  Rango (PG)                          123.0 + 119.3 = 242.3 million
[***] 9  The Green Hornet (PG-13)             98.8 + 129.0 = 227.8 million
[***] 10 Just Go with It (PG-13)             103.0 + 111.9 = 214.9 million
[***] 11 Battle: Los Angeles (PG-13)          83.6 + 118.9 = 202.5 million
[***] 12 Gnomeo and Juliet (G)               100.0 +  90.0 = 190.0 million
[***] 13 Hop (PG)                            108.1 +  68.8 = 176.9 million
[***] 14 Bridesmaids (R)                     146.7 +  21.3 = 168.0 million
[***] 15 No Strings Attached (R)              70.7 +  77.1 = 147.8 million

- - -

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/domestic/

The Domestic Top 10 of All Time (as of June 26, 2011)

[*2*] 1  Avatar (2009)                                      $760.5 million
[*2*] 2  Titanic (1997)                                     $600.8 million
[***] 3  The Dark Knight (2008)                             $533.3 million
[*7*] 4  Star Wars (1977)                                   $461.0 million
[***] 5  Shrek 2 (2004)                                     $441.2 million
[*4*] 6  E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)                  $435.1 million
[*3*] 7  Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)   $431.1 million
[***] 8  Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)  $423.3 million
[***] 9  Toy Story 3 (2010)                                 $415.0 million
[*2*] 10 Spider-Man (2002)                                  $403.7 million

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/

The Worldwide Top 10 of All Time (as of June 26, 2011)

[*2*] 1  Avatar (2009)                     760.5 + 2021.8 = 2782.3 million
[*2*] 2  Titanic (1997)                    600.8 + 1242.4 = 1843.2 million
[*4*] 3  The Lord of the Rings: ... (2003) 377.0 +  742.1 = 1119.1 million
[***] 4  Pirates of the ... Chest (2006)   423.3 +  642.9 = 1066.2 million
[***] 5  Toy Story 3 (2010)                415.0 +  648.2 = 1063.2 million
[***] 6  Alice in Wonderland (2010)        334.2 +  690.1 = 1024.3 million
[***] 7  The Dark Knight (2008)            533.3 +  468.6 = 1001.9 million
[***] 8  Pirates of the ... Tides (2011)   229.1 +  756.1 =  985.2 million
[*2*] 9  Harry Potter and the ... (2001)   317.6 +  657.2 =  974.7 million
[***] 10 Pirates of the ... End (2007)     309.4 +  654.0 =  963.4 million

--- Peter T. Chattaway ------------- http://filmchatblog.blogspot.com/ ---
Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments; only afterwards do they
    claim remembrance, on account of their scars. -- Chris Marker, La Jetee

need new e-mail addy soon?

Peter T. Chattaway — 2011-06-25T19:24:13

The first e-mail address I ever got was the one I'm using now, at UBC.  I 
got it back in 1994, after coming home from an archaeological trip to the 
U.K. and getting the addresses of all the people there who had expressed 
interest in keeping in touch.  I still have some of those addresses in my 
address list, even though I haven't sent anything to those people or 
received anything from them in over a decade.  But anyhoo.

Lately, UBC has been dropping hints that it will abandon the Netinfo / 
Interchange e-mail system that they've been using since whenever.  And I 
just noticed that the my.ubc.ca website includes a message now saying that 
this changeover will happen in August, at least for students.

It is not clear to me how, or when, this will affect alumni accounts such 
as mine.  But, after holding on to this account for so long, just for 
sheer purposes of momentum and continuity, I now find myself thinking I 
will probably need a new e-mail account in the next few months, and I will 
probably have a loooooot of profiles and accounts to update (here, at 
Facebook, at Amazon.com, etc., etc., etc.).

Side note:  There are certainly e-mail lists that I'm on, where I wouldn't 
mind if the people in question happened to lose track of me... but I'm 
also a little nervous about updating my contact info with certain 
publicists.  They might ask who I'm writing for now, and, um, I don't want 
to admit to them just yet that I'm currently *between* writing gigs... 
which is to say, I'm not really writing for anyone at the moment, though I 
hope to be once the kids are in kindergarten, or thenabouts ...

Anyway.  What to do?  I don't like Yahoo's interface.  Gmail seems to be 
okay, but I've already got an account that I started for my blog (at 
Blogger, natch), and while I do use that account for all my other Google 
stuff (like my Android, my Google Contacts, my Google Calendar), I'm not 
sure I'm ready to make that my personal e-mail thingamajig.

What I'm really going to miss is writing my e-mails in Pine, or whatever 
system I'm using right now.  Until a few years ago, it was possible to 
Telnet into my account; now, I'm using PuTTy.  Would it still be possible 
to PuTTy into whatever account I have *after* this?  (Hmmm, would it be 
possible to do that with my existing Gmail account?  I don't know.)

And then there's my e-mail archiving.  Until the summer of 2000, the only 
way to download my e-mails to my hard drive was to copy each e-mail folder 
as a single massive block of text; if I want to search for anything in my 
e-mails from that era, I have to open the file in WordPad or some such 
thing and do a word search within the open file.  (And Windows, alas, 
seems to think the files are too big to scan, so that if I want to know 
*which* of the massive folders has a particular word or name, I have to 
open each folder individually and search within it until I find it.)

*Since* the summer of 2000, UBC has let me download zip files whenever I 
download each folder, so that I now have each and every e-mail as an 
individual file (with a related subfolder containing attachments, if any). 
So I've been downloading zip files and extracting their contents ever 
since.

If I were to switch to another e-mail provider, though, how would I be 
able to back up my files?  Would I, indeed, be able to?

Hmmm.  I suspect someone here is going to mention Outlook Express or 
something.  But the one time I tried it (for reasons I can't remember 
right now), I didn't like it.

Sigh.  I hate change.

Speechworld vs. Realworld

Peter Chattaway — 2011-06-25T18:56:25

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/270460/speechworld-vs-realworld-mark-steyn

The widening gulf between Obama’s rhetoric and reality

June 25, 2011 7:00 A.M.

The Democrats seem to have given up on budgets. Hey, who can blame them? They’ve got a ballpark figure: Let’s raise $2 trillion in revenue every year, and then spend $4 trillion. That seems to work pretty well, so why get hung up on a lot of fine print? Harry Reid says the Senate has no plans to produce a budget, but in April the president did give a speech about “a new budget framework” that he said would save $4 trillion over the next twelve years.

That would be 2023, if you’re minded to take him seriously. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, did. Last week he asked Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, if he’d “estimated the budget impact of this framework.”

“No, Mr. Chairman,” replied Director Elmendorf, deadpan. “We don’t estimate speeches. We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech.”

“We don’t estimate speeches”: There’s an epitaph to chisel on the tombstone of the republic. Unfortunately for those of us on the receiving end, giving speeches is what Obama does. Indeed, having no other accomplishments to his name (as Hillary Clinton pointed out), giving speeches is what got the president his job. You remember — the stuff about “hope” and “change.” Were the CBO in the business of “estimating speeches,” they’d have run the numbers and concluded that under the Obama plan, vague abstract nouns would be generating 87 percent of GDP by 2016.

For whatever reason, it didn’t work out quite like that. But that’s no reason not to give another speech. So there he was the other night expounding on Afghanistan. Unlike Douglas Elmendorf, the Taliban do estimate speeches, and they correctly concluded from the president’s 2009 speech that all they need to do is run out the clock and all or most of the country will be theirs once more. Last week’s update confirmed their estimate. “Winning” is not in Obama’s vocabulary. Oh, wait. That’s not true. In an earlier unestimated speech, he declared he was committed to “winning the future,” “winning the future” at some unspecified time in the future being a lot easier than winning the war. In fairness, it’s been two-thirds of a century since America has unambiguously won a war, but throughout that period most presidents were at least notionally committed to the possibility of victory. Obama seems to regard the very concept as something boorish and vulgar that would cause him embarrassment if it came up at dinner parties. So place your bets on how long it will be before Mullah Omar’s back in town. And then ask yourself if America will have anything to show for its decade in Afghanistan that it wouldn’t have had if it had just quit two weeks after toppling the Taliban in the fall of 2001 and left the mullahs, warlords, poppy barons, and pederasts to have at each other without the distraction of extravagant NATO reconstruction projects littering their beautiful land of charmingly unspoilt rubble.

That’s not how the president put it, of course. But then the delightful appeal of an Obama speech is the ever wider gulf between Speechworld and Reality. So in this instance he framed our retreat from the Hindu Kush as an excellent opportunity to stop wasting money overseas and start wasting even more in Washington. Or in his words:

“America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.”

Gee, thanks. If America were a Kandahar wedding, that would be the cue to fire your rifle in the air and grab the cutest nine-year-old boy. Naturally, not everyone sees eye to eye. Like Afghanistan, ours is a fractious land. But as Obama said:

“Our nation draws strength from our differences, and when our union is strong, no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach.”

Climb ev’ry mountain. Ford ev’ry stream.

Are you sure we can afford ev’ry stream? Yes, it’s far less rugged than it sounds. In compliance with EPA regulations, no real hills and dales were harmed in the making of this glib rhetorical imagery.

“At his best,” wrote the New York Times of Obama’s speech, “the president can be hugely persuasive.”

Er, if you say so. He’s mostly persuasive in persuading you there’s no urgency about anything: All that stuff about Americans sweating and straining for the most distant horizon is his way of saying you can go back to sleep for another couple of decades.

If we hadn’t been assured by the New York Times that this man is the Greatest Orator of All Time, there would be something offensive in the leader of the Brokest Nation in History bragging that we’re not the guys to shirk a challenge, however grueling and demanding it may be, no sirree. The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along. Remember Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Fla.? “I never thought this day would ever happen,” she gushed after an Obama rally in 2008. “I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.” Is Peggy really the gal you’d want to hike a steep hill with?

In Speechworld, nation-building can be done through flatulent rhetoric. In Realworld, nations are built by people, and in America the productive class is battered and reeling. Obama wasted a trillion dollars on a phony stimulus that stimulated nothing but government, and wants to try it one mo’ time. That’s what yokes “nation-building” near and far. According to the World Bank, the Western military/aid presence now accounts for 97 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP. The bit that’s left doesn’t function, not least because it doesn’t need to. How can, say, Helmand develop an economic base when everybody with a whit of sense is making massively inflated salaries as a translator for the Yanks or a security guard for some EU outreach project? When the 97 percent revenue tide recedes with the American withdrawal, what’s left will be the same old 3 percent ugly tribal dump Afghanistan was a decade ago. It will leave as little trace as the Obama stimulus.

The sheer waste is appalling, immoral, and deeply destructive. In Kandahar as in California, all that matters is excess: It’s not working? Then you need to spend more. More more more. What does it matter? You’re not spending anything real. America would have to find $15 trillion just to get back to having nothing in its pocket. But who cares? As long as we’re united in our commitment to excess, no CBO debt-to-GDP ratio graph is too steep for us to take to the next level, and no horizon — 2060, 2080, 2104 — is too distant to serve as a plausible estimate for significant deficit reduction.

In Realworld, political speeches would be about closing down unnecessary federal bureaucracies, dramatically downsizing or merging others, and ending makework projects and mission creep. The culture of excess that distinguishes the hyperpower at twilight would be reviled at every turn. But instead the “hugely persuasive” orator declares that there’s nothing to worry about that even more government can’t cure. In Speechworld, “no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach.” In Realworld, that’s mainly because we’re going downhill. And the horizon is a cliff edge.

The Reincarceration of Conrad Black

Peter Chattaway — 2011-06-25T18:46:28

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/270492/reincarceration-conrad-black-mark-steyn

June 25, 2011 7:02 A.M.
By Mark Steyn

I am overseas at the moment and have just caught up on the coverage of Judge Amy St Eve’s decision yesterday to send my old boss (and now NRO colleague) Conrad Black back to jail. Following the Supreme Court’s overturning of the “honest services” basis of his conviction, Conrad was released from prison in Florida, after serving two years, to await re-sentencing. Given that he was, in effect, improperly convicted on the majority of charges, a civilized and humane justice system would have concluded that it was both absurd and vindictive to return him to his cell for the one shred of the United States Government’s case that has not been tossed out along the way in Conrad’s seven year battle.

But the Department of Justice is not civilized and humane. As I wrote here:

The federal justice system is a bit like one of those unmanned drones President Obama is so fond of using on the unfortunate villagers of Waziristan. Once it’s locked on to you and your coordinates are in the system, it’s hard to get it called off. Three years ago, during his trial in Chicago, I suggested to the defendant he’d be better off saving his gazillions in legal fees and instead climbing under the tarp in the bed of my truck and letting me drive him over the minimally enforced Pittsburg-La Patrie border crossing to Quebec and thence by fishing boat to a remote landing strip on Miquelon where a waiting plane could spirit him somewhere beyond the reach of the U.S. Attorney. Estimated cost: about a thousandth of what he’d spent on lawyers to date. P’shaw, scoffed Conrad, or ejaculations to that effect. He was not a fugitive but an innocent man, and eventually he would be vindicated by the justice system of this great republic.

But that’s not possible – because, with a system that relies on multiple charges and an ability to pressure everybody else in the case to switch sides, you can win (as Conrad did) nineteen-twentieths of the battles and still lose the war. He’s a wealthy businessman, and nobody has any sympathy for those. But it’s even worse if you’re a nobody. A New Hampshire neighbor of mine had the misfortune to attract the attention of federal prosecutors for one of those white-collar “crimes” no one can explain in English. The jury acquitted him in a couple of hours. Great news! The system worked! Not really. By then, the feds had spent a half-decade demolishing his life, exhausting his savings, wrecking his marriage, and driving him to attempt suicide. He’s not a big scary businessman like Conrad, just a small-town nobody. And he’ll never get his life back. Because, regardless of the verdict, the process is the punishment – which is the hallmark of unjust justice systems around the world.

As to white-collar crime, what about the one type of white-collar crime that goes entirely unpunished? For an accounting fraud of $567 million, Enron’s executives went to jail, and its head guy died there. For an accounting fraud ten times that size, the two Democrat hacks who headed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, walked away with a combined taxpayer-funded payout of $116.4 million. Fannie and Freddie are two of the largest businesses in America, but they’re exempt from SEC disclosure rules and Sarbanes-Oxley “corporate governance” burdens, and so in 2008, unlike Enron, WorldCom or any of the other reviled private-sector bogeymen, they came close to taking down the entire global economy. Yes, yes, I know two wrongs don’t make a right (unless you’re Jamie Gorelick), but what then is the point of the SEC?

Judge St Eve’s decision is appalling. In my weekend column, I write about “nation-building” at home and abroad. Federal justice shares with those subjects what is the defining characteristic of US Government in the early 21st century – grotesque excess and an utter lack of proportion.

Warning Signs and U-Turns With Mark Steyn

Peter Chattaway — 2011-06-25T17:59:25

http://www.hughhewitt.com/transcripts.aspx?id=8d23afb9-b64a-4ebc-b4b2-79f48bb69c66

Friday, June 24, 2011

HH: Joined as we are when we are lucky on Thursdays by Columnist To the World, Mark Steyn. You can read all of Mark’s work at www.steynonline.com. Mark, I’m very frustrated with you this week, because my computer audio wouldn’t work, and I see a video of you in a hunting jacket, taking it off into a very natty suit, talking to the Australians about…what was that all about?

MS: I did a special video speechette for Australia’s most prominent political columnist, Andrew Bolt, who’s facing a hate speech type situation similar to what I faced in Canada. And I began with, I thought as I was speaking to them direct from New Hampshire, I ought to begin with…you know that moment in, I think it’s the beginning of Goldfinger, where Bond comes up out of the sea?

HH: (laughing)

MS: …and he’s in a wetsuit.

HH: Yes.

MS: And he peels off the wetsuit, and he’s got an immaculate tuxedo, I believe even with a carnation in his buttonhole underneath it. And so I thought I’d have, I took off my plaid coat, and I had my suit on underneath it.

HH: Is that video available with the audio? I got it in an email, and the audio wasn’t…is it available at www.steynonline.com?

MS: Yeah, it’s actually available at something called the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia, which I think is IPA.something or other. And it’s actually gone all over the internet in the last couple of days, so it’s on a lot of other websites, too. So you should be able to find it fairly easily. <http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/mark_steyn_on_free_speech_while_he_still_has_it>

HH: People duly noted and on alert. Now, Mark Steyn, I want to start today with the fact that the Justice Department announced the arrest of Abu Khalid Abdul Latif, also known as Joseph Anthony Davis, and Walli Mujahidh, also known as Frederick Domingue, in Seattle, where they were planning to machine gun a recruitment station, as well as Yonathan Melaku, 22, who was, “not on our radar screen,” even though he was in the Marine Corps Reserve, and he’d already shot at the Marine Corps Museum, and a Marine Corps recruiting substation in Virginia, as well as a U.S. Coast Guard recruiting office in Woodbridge. So we’ve got sudden jihad syndrome on both coasts.

MS: Yeah, well it’s not that sudden. There was a curious decision by the secretary of the Army a couple of days ago to grant conscientious objector status to a Muslim serving in the United States Army on the grounds that he shouldn’t have to go off and fight Muslims in other countries. Now this is fascinating to me, because a conscientious objector is supposed to be guys who object to violence in general, object to killing people and shooting people in general, that they’re principled about it, whereas the objections of these people are that they don’t want to have to go off and fight other Muslims. In other words, they’re not conscientious objectors. They’re choosing sides. And the secretary of the Army’s curious decision seems to acknowledge, or seems to suggest, that an American, being an American Muslim is incompatible with serving in the American military. If that’s true, then it puts a real question mark, I think, over a basic sense of identity. And I think that’s what you see when you look at the backgrounds of these guys who were arrested in Seattle and in other parts of the country.

HH: That is true. I hadn’t seen that Army decision. I’ll have to look that up. But I bring this up because people have been talking about what did the Taliban think of the President’s speech last night. I’m just wondering what jihadists around the world, including home grown jihadists in the United States, thought of the President’s speech last night. What do you think they thought, Mark Steyn?

MS: Well, I think his speech validated their view of the United States, which is that it’s like a sort of late period, puffed up, Ottoman sultan. You know, it’s ostensibly extremely rich and powerful, but it’s gotten all soft and decadent, and plumped up on its cushions, and it doesn’t have the staying power. There’s a Taliban saying, supposedly, that they like to say out there in Afghanistan. The Americans have the watches, but we have the time. And Obama confirmed that. He basically said to them, look, all you guys have to do is run out the clock on this. We aren’t in the victory business any longer. I wrote a big cover story for National Review a couple of weeks ago pointing out that it’s two-thirds of a century since the United States unambiguously won a war. And Obama is now basically saying victory is not in my dictionary. You can flip through all the pages until you get to V, and you ain’t going to find it in there.

HH: He also had a curious line in the speech last night about America, it’s time to do our nation building at home. What does that mean, Mark Steyn?

MS: Well, what it means is that he reads too much Thomas Friedman, the supposed great thinker of the New York Times. Thomas Friedman is about the world’s worst prose stylist, and he uses the same six or seven phrases, like ticks of a man with columnar Tourette’s every couple of weeks, and one of them that he likes to use is nation building at home. But the fact is, we’ve had nation building at home. They dug a big hole, and they stuck trillions and trillions of dollars in it to no effect. And now they’re saying, now he’s saying forget the last two years. That’s just the warm up. The serious nation building is yet to begin. I think that’s just, I hope that’s just lame spin, because if he’s serious, that what we need is not just Obamacare speed stimulus, but double Obamacare speed stimulus, then we might as well all move to Waziristan, because the standards of living are going to be higher there by the time he’s done with us.

HH: He also said in last night’s speech, Mark Steyn, that it is time to live within our means. And yet today, and I’ll talk to Jon Kyl next hour, Jon Kyl and Eric Cantor threw up their hands and said we’re done. They want us to raise taxes. So when he says live within our means, he means live within the means that we have after we soak the rich even more, and raise taxes on every conceivable activity in the country.

MS: Yeah, and there aren’t enough of the rich to soak. So he’s soaking, what he’s doing is soaking the guy who runs the hardware store, and the lady who has the hair salon. They’re the people he’s soaking. And to be honest, all those people give enough. They give enough to the United States Treasury, and the United States Treasury wastes it. There is waste everywhere you look. If you stand at any crossroads in this country and look in any direction, you’re seeing government waste. The civil rights branch of the Department of Education wants to crack down on romantically flirtatious jokes at American colleges. The make work project of wasteful government know no end. The government has to live within its means. And if the government lived within its means, the American people would find it a lot easier to do so.

HH: Mark Steyn, I don’t know if you saw yesterday’s New York Times, but front page, above the fold, was a story by Charles Duhigg – Public Unions Take On Boss To Win Big Pensions. It focuses on the city of Costa Mesa, California, one of the city councilmen from which, Jim Righeimer, will be on today after I talk with you. And the unions there are attempting, quite thuggishly, to take over a city. And even the New York Times has now figured this out. Do you think the moment of Waterloo has arrived for just, for government generally, both federal, state and especially at the local level, that the public is saying we’re done?

MS: Well, I think some of the public is saying that. But I think as you see in Continental Europe already, there’s actually quite an…and to a certain extent in Wisconsin, there’s actually quite a large chunk of the public that has a vested interest in keeping this racket going. And so it’s less of a clear, it’s not, you know, the people against wicked rulers. It’s actually something closer to civil war, and that’s why if they were responsible, unions would recognize that they cannot bleed the productive class any further. They’re killing this country. And if they don’t get that, then the options, the likelihood of Greek-style violence and worse, becomes inevitable.

HH: Now I rode out to see a district attorney today with a client that I’m representing, and he’s in the construction business. And he told me tales of woe and horror in California about the construction business – houses, commercial, residential, everything is dead except the government sector.

MS: Right.

HH: And that our unemployment rate is actually, he believes, quite much higher than 12%, which California advertises it. I got the sense from him, Mark Steyn, that the whole country knows what’s up.

MS: Yeah.

HH: That’s what reassures me, that if we can survive another 18 months, a big U-turn is coming. What do you think?

MS: Yeah, I think it really has to be a big U-turn. I hope that the polls overstate the base of Obama support, that in fact there’s a big chunk of people who are just kind of reluctant to be explicit about their antipathy toward what the administration is doing, because they’ve actually, once they’ve destroyed the property market, there isn’t a lot left for most people, most small businesses and most ordinary families, to fall back on. You know, in other words, what’s going on in this country is chipping away at the very base of people’s security. And if that isn’t reversed in November next year, then we’re in huge trouble.

HH: Karl Rove has a piece in the Wall Street Journal today, Mark Steyn, last question, where he says people still like Obama. I commented on my blog that that ought to be people say they like Obama to pollsters, because I think people feel an obligation not to root against the first African-American president, but that his numbers are actually much worse than they record. What do you think?

MS: Yes, I think that’s true. I mean, I’m often struck by, for example, after the Kerry-Edwards fiasco in 2004, people kept those bumper stickers on their cars. I noticed driving around liberal Vermont that you see these kind of ghostly shadows where the Obama sticker from 2008 used to be.

HH: A hint of an O.

MS: And it’s been peeled off and left, just leaving that sort of faint, magic rectangle of what might have been.

HH: Mark Steyn, www.steynonline.com, thank you, Mark.

End of interview.

Panic Stations

Andrew Irwin — 2011-06-25T06:17:21

So after years of making friends with woman, thinking there is something more, asking them for coffee and getting turned down I signed up at an NZ based internet dating site 3 weeks ago.

I signed up because when I had my surgery just over a month ago, the night after was very bad, bleeding, pain, uncomfortable bandages, throwing up, really needing to pee but unable to. In the middle of it a nurse asked there was anything specific I wanted. I thought for a moment and realised what I really wanted in this earth was for there to be a woman I loved, for me to know that she loved me back and for her to just put her arms around me and tell me her version of "there, there, it's going to be all right". Instead of saying that, I asked for a lozenge because the breathing tube had scraped by vocal cords and I was very sore there too. (I assume it was the breathing tube, unless they removed the hemmoiroids the long way)
Over the next week I looked around my entire social life and realised there was no hope there.

My first date in 12 1/2 years is tomorrow night.

Help!

She seems nice but I have doubts about her, and she is also uncertain with me. Our message board posts have been more serious, but we have both said that can get a lot of things clear and out of the way. We swapped cell phone numbers and had a fun joking conversation for an hour or so today.

She is a Christian but at an AOG/New Life based church, I'm an evangelical Anglican and her dad is a liberal Anglican minister.

Andrew Irwin

RIP Peter Falk

Mike Findlay — 2011-06-24T21:17:14

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2011/06/24/actor-peter-falk-dies.html

I didn't know he has been suffering from alzheimers/dementia.  That is sad.

Although everyone knows him from Columbo, my favorite role by far was as Der 
Filmstar in Wings of Desire.  Such a wistful, kind and endearing performance.  


Mike F.

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The Huntsman Candidacy

Peter Chattaway — 2011-06-24T05:30:49

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/the-huntsman-candidacy/

by Ross Douthat
June 22, 2011, 2:13 pm

Can a moderate Republican win the G.O.P. nomination? That’s the question everyone’s asking with regard to Jon Huntsman, who formally announced his candidacy yesterday, and the answer is a resounding yes. From George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole through George W. Bush and John McCain, the modern-day Republican Party has a long tradition of picking nominees whose records and positions place them to the left of True Conservatism, at least as defined by movement institutions, talk radio and the like. Even in the age of the Tea Party, there’s reason to imagine this pattern persisting: Many Republican primary voters hold heterodox positions (for instance, on tax increases on the rich) relative to the official conservative line, several of the crucial early primaries allow independents to cross over and vote, and in races against incumbent presidents there’s a high premium on electability. It’s certainly possible for a Republican to be too liberal for the primary electorate, and often a moderate candidate has to flip-flop on a key issue (or six) to appease the party’s interest groups. But the historical record suggests that there’s more room between Rush Limbaugh and the center than many commentators (and politicians) seem to think.

But note that most of the winning moderates I just listed came into their races as frontrunners, with massive establishment support. Huntsman doesn’t have that kind of frontrunner status, which means that the real question for his candidacy is slightly different: Not whether a moderate Republican can win, but whether a moderate can win as an insurgent. This is a trickier case, but here too there’s a model: The McCain campaign in 2008, which crashed and burned early and then turned into a come-from-behind affair, in which a man the base mistrusted on almost every issue nonetheless emerged victorious at the end of a long drawn-out slugfest. And sure enough, Huntsman seems to be following the McCain ‘08 playbook, hoping to upset Mitt Romney in New Hampshire, eke out a win in South Carolina, and then ride the momentum from those wins all the way to the nomination.

But there’s a further wrinkle, which is that the Mitt Romney of 2012 has a very different profile than the Romney of 2008. In ‘08, Romney labored — with some success — to brand himself as Mr. Conservative, and woo movement voices and institutions to his banner. After “Obamneycare,” though, that path to the nomination has been closed, and this time around Romney seems to be running a campaign premised on competence rather than ideology, positioning himself as the heir to George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, and all the other moderate Republicans who held off populist challengers on their way to the convention. In other words, Huntsman doesn’t just have to thread the moderate-as-insurgent needle, he has to do it against a moderate frontrunner whose profile — competence, business experience, Mormonism — is remarkably similar to his own. If Romney were still the candidate of talk radio and Jim DeMint, Huntsman might be able to outflank him in states like New Hampshire by positioning himself as the more electable and more independent-minded candidate. But as it stands, it isn’t clear how a rich handsome well-coiffed Mormon RINO distinguishes himself from the more famous, better-funded rich handsome well-coiffed Mormon RINO who’s currently leading in the polls. (Maybe his anti-interventionist positioning will do the trick, but in a domestic-oriented campaign season, that seems somewhat unlikely …)

This may explain why the former Utah governor has spent the last few weeks staking out unexpectedly (and somewhat implausibly) right-wing positions on economic issues, explicitly endorsing the Ryan budget and (alas!) embracing the balanced-budget amendment boondoggle. He’s trying to get to Romney’s right, because that’s the only place he sees real domestic-policy running room. But while that running room exists, it’s by no means clear that Huntsman of all people is the right guy to make that move work — especially since he risks alienating his natural constituency in the process. And if the question the Huntsman campaign is testing is “can a moderate Republican win the nomination by rebranding himself as the ‘true conservative’ insurgent in a race against a moderate frontrunner,” I suspect that the answer is no.

Geert Wilders Acquitted

Peter Chattaway — 2011-06-24T05:11:25

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/270312/geert-wilders-acquitted-mark-steyn

June 23, 2011 8:21 A.M.
By Mark Steyn

Geert Wilders has been acquitted of all charges at his show trial in Amsterdam:

The court ruled that some of Wilders’ statements were insulting, shocking and on the edge of legal acceptibility, but that they were made in the broad context of a political and social debate on the multi-cultural society.

“On the edge of legal acceptability,” eh? As for the latter part — “the broad context of a political and social debate” — the genius “jurists” are effectively conceding what I said when this racket got going — that the Dutch state was attempting to criminalize the political platform of a popular opposition party. That’s the sort of thing free societies should leave to Mubarak & Co, and even then, you can only get away with it for a while before people draw the obvious conclusion.

Nevertheless, as in all these cases, the process is the punishment. The intent is to make it more and more difficult for apostates of the multiculti state to broaden the terms of political discourse. Very few Europeans would have had the stomach to go through what Wilders did — and the British Government’s refusal to permit a Dutch Member of Parliament to land at Heathrow testifies to how easily the craven squishes of the broader political culture fall into line.

And at the end the awkward fact remains: Geert Wilders lives under 24-hour armed guard because of explicit death threats made against him by the killer of Theo van Gogh and by other Muslims. Yet he’s the one who gets puts on trial.

That’s the Netherlands, 2011. Shameful. As for the Islamic imperialists, they’re taking their case to the logical venue. As Reuters reports:

Minorities groups said they would now take the case to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, arguing the ruling meant the Netherlands had failed to protect ethnic minorities from discrimination.

“The acquittal means that the right of minorities to remain free of hate speech has been breached. We are going to claim our rights at the U.N.,” said Mohamed Rabbae of the National Council for Moroccans.

The genteel evasions of the eunuch prose (“minorities groups”) are a big part of the problem here.

Georgia's anti-immigrant law leaves millions in cropsrotting in the fields

James — 2011-06-23T17:55:08

With the level of unemployment in the US, I'm surprised.

=====

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/22/georgias-anti-immigr.html

Georgia's anti-immigrant law leaves millions in crops rotting in the
fields<http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/22/georgias-anti-immigr.html>

Cory Doctorow <http://www.boingboing.net/author/cory-doctorow-1/> at 8:44 AM
Wednesday, Jun 22, 2011

Georgia's tough anti-illegal-immigrant law drove a sizable fraction of the
migrant labor pool out of the state, and as a result, "millions of dollars'
worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops [are] unharvested and
rotting in the fields." The jobs the migrants did paid an average of
$8/hour, without benefits, a wage that is so low that the state's
probationed prisoners have turned it down. Guest-writing in the
*Atlantic's* economics
section, Adam Ozimek doesn't believe that the farms would be
viable<http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/georgias-harsh-immigration-law-costs-millions-in-unharvested-crops/240774/>
if
they paid wages that legal American workers would take: "it's quite possible
that the wages required to get workers to do the job are so high that it's
no longer profitable for farmers to plant the crops in the first place."

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out
of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well,
driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to
leave millions of dollars' worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other
crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials
into something of a panic at the damage they've done to Georgia's largest
industry.