Another "Goodbye To All That" defection from the left:

Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.

Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept at not taking the measure of the left's mounting incoherence. To face it directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately, first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror.

Now, I find myself in a swirling metamorphosis. Think Kafka, without the bug. Think Kuhnian paradigm shift, without the buzz. Every anomaly that didn't fit my perceptual set is suddenly back, all the more glaring for so long ignored. The insistent inner voice I learned to suppress now has my rapt attention. "Something strange -- something approaching pathological -- something entirely of its own making -- has the left in its grip," the voice whispers. "How did this happen?" The Iraqi election is my tipping point. The time has come to walk in a different direction -- just as I did many years before.

Devastating, and similar to my own conversion from partisan liberal Democrat to "indepedent moderate" (briefly) to full-on Republican hack. You ignore the nonesense and venom and hate coming from the left for a time, until the day comes you can't ignore it, and then you fixate on it. And then within a week or a month you depart from that politics, and soon after you begin to find those flaws unforgivable and disgraceful.

Thanks to NickS.

Posted by: Ace at 08:36 AM | Comments (18)
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Truer words were, of course, never spoken. But now there's proof, in the form of an album to be released, it seems, on June 7th, in which he sings rock hits with a swing beat.

Go here to listen.

There's just something that feels right about Mr. Paul Anka rockin' out Suvivor's Eye of the Tiger, or The Cure's Lovecats. (The latter of course is now my go-to make-out cut. It is the very definition of sex on vinyl. I think I'd play Eyes Without a Face first to set the mood, and then go on a make-out integrity kick with Lovecats.)

But it just gets better. Because he also covers Van Halen's Jump -- this time the way it was supposed to sound all along -- and just to prove he's "down with" this newfangled form of rock we call "grunge," he also slices like a hammer covering Soundgarten's Blackhole Sun and Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. (The blasting horns really slice the "a mulatto/an albino/a mosquito/my libido" part; his "Yeah!" really kicks it up a notch too.)

Thanks to Johnny Catbird, who swiped it from Michele from ASV, who also lists her non-snobby Top 100 Films of All Time.

I'd argue with a lot of her choices -- and her order -- but her list is a fat lot closer to my list than that of the idiot reviewers from Time.

TiVo/DVR Alert! Stumbo tips:

Paul Anka to perform "Smells Like Teen Spirit" On The Late Show With David Letterman June 14th.

I'm sick to death of people knocking television. Television is so sweet. It's sweeter than those stupid ninjas that people claim to be sweet.

1) Television is NOT a mammal (although it often shows mammals).

2) Television is totally sweet, I mean really freaking sweet and awesome.

3) The purpose of television is to flip out and kick your ass through seriously sweet entertainment, like Mr. Paul Anka performing a big-band swing version of Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Posted by: Ace at 08:04 AM | Comments (14)
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The media wants to be seen as credible. They also want to engage in left-liberal advocacy as they see fit. And if they're not taken as credible, that advocacy isn't particularly effective.

John Leo suggests that the one issue the media has previously all but refused to discuss -- its political bias -- is becoming less of a forbidden issue. And that maybe, with this latest gaffe, they'll begin to comprehend that they cannot contiue doing business as usual.

Instead of trampling Newsweek—the magazine made a mistake and corrected it quickly and honestly—the focus ought to be on whether the news media are predisposed to make certain kinds of mistakes and, if so, what to do about it. The disdain that so many reporters have for the military (or for police, the FBI, conservative Christians, or right-to-lifers) frames the way that errors and bogus stories tend to occur. The antimilitary mentality makes atrocity stories easier to publish, even when they are untrue. The classic example is CNN’s false 1998 story that the U.S. military knowingly dropped nerve gas on Americans during the Vietnam War. On the other hand, brutal treatment of dissenters by Fidel Castro tends to be softened or omitted in the American press because so many journalists still see him as the romanticized figure from their youth in the 1960s. Another example: It’s possible to read newspapers and newsmagazines carefully and never see anything about the liberal indoctrination now taking place at major universities. This has something to do with the fact that the universities are mostly institutions of the left and that newsrooms tend to hire from the left and from the universities in question.

I once complained to an important news executive that he ignored certain kinds of stories. He said that he would like to do them but that his staff wouldn’t let him. He admitted his staff had been assembled from one side—guess which?—of the political spectrum. This conversation hardened my conviction that the biggest flaw in mainstream journalism today is the lack of diversity

Almost all of the media's recent gaffes could have been avoided had they simply had a few influential (not token) conservatives in the newsrooms, who could ask of these stories the same sort of questions that liberals ask of any conservative-tilting story.

Posted by: Ace at 07:51 AM | Add Comment
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Saw it late last night. I don't even think it merits a full review. I'll just make a few points:

1. You know that Christmas special, Santa Clause is Coming To Town, where they explain the origins of Santa and the various rituals associated with him? And then a chorus of off-screen children (to whom the story is being told) all say, "Ohhh! So that's why kids started writing letters to Santa!"

This whole trilogy was like that. Half the movies were just showing you how the original Star Wars trilogy myth began. "Ohhh, so that's how Anikin became Darth Vader!"

But none of this is necessary. Look, all that was just backstory in the first trilogy, and you don't need to show how the backstory happened. We all figured that Anikin was burned by fire or radiation or something, thus requiring his Vader armor/life support; does it really matter it turned out to be lava? I don't think so.

Half the plot points in these prequels aren't there to advance the story (such as it is) in the prequel trilogy, but just to explain the starting situation in Star Wars IV. And that's kind of boring.

2. Hayden Christiansen was better as Anikin, but not quite good. He's a bit beefier, a bit manlier, and the scar on his face and mechanical arm make him a bit less callow. As I was watching a late-night showing, I had to drink a lot of diet coke, and the Padme-Anikin scenes were welcome opportunities to use the lavatorial facilities. From what I saw of them, though, they were bad.

3. I still find the digital video fairly low-res and blurry and I miss the crispness of actual film.

4. In each of the first-trilogy films, there was a strong narrative drive. A leads to B leads to C leads to D, etc. (One exception, of a sort, is RotJ, which actually is two films-- the rescue Han film and then the assault on Endor film. But both of those stories had their own strong narrative drive.)

These prequels have nothing like that. Because there's no real narrative drive, they have to go to Jedi Council periodically and get some sort of random side-mission in order to find something to f'n' do with their time. These movies are like video games in more ways than one-- including, alas, in terms of story, where fairly self-contained and non-plot-advancing "side missions" are the norm.

There weren't any "side missions" in the first trilogy. Each next bit of action was more or less inevitable due to decisions and circumstances from the previous scenes. In each of the new movies, one could easily imagine a thousand other meaningless side-missions rather than the ones chosen without losing much at all.

Long story short: Everyone knocks Lucas on his dialogue. But any decent screenwriter can come in and give the dialogue a polish. His real failing as a writer is in terms of structure, plot, inevitablility, and narrative arc. And those problmes are much more difficult to fix, particularly if you have a headstrong filmmaker like Lucas who apparently isn't compentent enough to know he's incompetent.

5. The much praised action is actually kind of sucky. The opening battle starts promisingly enough, with a roller-coaster vertigo-inducing tracking shot of fighters weaving in between proto-Star Destroyers, but then the action gets too frenetic, too busy, too silly, and just too much to have much of an impact.

The later light-saber fights are like this. Yes, these guys move their light-sabers pretty damn quickly, and I guess their stunt-coordinators should be praised. But in so many scenes it's just the same damn thing over and over again, a tumble here, cutting a droid in half here, etc. And the very fast pace of the saber-fighting makes it a hard to follow; indeed, with all of the flashing light of the sabers, the fights just tend to look like stroboscopic dances where you really can't see much except white-blue flashes moving quickly across the screen.

6. Threepio gets his memory wiped. Artoo does not. That means that little bastard has known throughout the entire trilogy that Darth was Luke's father, and Leia his sister, and yet the little piece of shit never said a word. (And he could have of course-- not only did Threepio understand his buzzes and beepings, but of course Luke picked up his musical language eventually, too.)

7. No one has yet explained why, if the idea was to hide Anikin Skywalker's child "where the agents of the Sith would never find him," the best place to do so was on Anikin's home world of Tatooine, with his brother's family, and under his actual given name of Luke Skywalker.

Jesus. You want to knock the Stormtroopers' marksmanship; but they seem to be better shots than the Imperial Intelligence Division are detectives.

8. Lucas, an aging boomer liberal, feels bad about the original trilogy being pro-war and militaristic and about good guys versus bad guys. So now, with more money than God, he attempts to do another swashbuckler, except his liberal pieties won't admit of actual "bad guys" anymore.

The war here is of course all contrived, a "fictitious threat" if you will; both sides are pawns of Chancellor Palpatine. That really makes the movies sort of lame, because we know it really doesn't matter who wins in any particular engagement; Lucas' point is that war is futile, all created by the manipulations of the powerful.

Well, fine. But in that case, what the fuck does it matter if the Separtists win or the Republic wins? It doesn't.

Sorry, Lucas. But if you're going to make a swashbuckling space fantasy war movie, you really can't make it an anti-war movie, along the lines of What If They Gave a War and No One Showed Up? except with rayguns and light-sabers.

The final Matrix movie did this too-- the liberal filmmakers wanted to make an anti-war statement, so they contrived an unsatisfying conclusion whereby the humans just negotiated with the machines that had been exterminating/imprisoning them for hundreds of years.

A cop-out, I think. Throw a lot of action at the screen to impress the yabbos while constructing a confusing an unsatisfying point about peace being preferable to violence to impress the New York Times' film critic.

All in all-- a snoozer punctuated by occasional pretty flashing lights and silly robots and not a single surprise in the whole thing.

Oh, wait, there's one tiny suprise that comes right at the end, involving Liam Neeson's Qui-Jonn character; but it's a stupid surprise, and once again exists solely to explain something that happens in the later trilogy.

Wait for DVD.

"The Prophesy Said the Chosen One Would Bring Balance To the Force: And of course the prophecy turned out to be 100% right. Did a single Jedi, including the incredibly-wise Yoda, ever wonder if bringing "balance to the Force" was a good thing?

In the beginning of the trilogy, the Force was quite unblanced. There were several thousand Jedi and, as far as we know, two or three Sith, tops. The Force was "unblanced," but in a good way.

Well, Anikin sure did bring balance to the Force. At the end of this trilogy, there are two Sith and two Jedi left alive (well, four, if you count the infants Leia and Luke, but you really can't count them, as they're not Jedi yet).

Balance. Two and two. Can't get much more balanced than that.

Did this stupid green puppet Yoda ever once consider the possibility that you don't want "balance" when your side is clearly winning?

Stupid.

Posted by: Ace at 02:13 PM | Comments (96)
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Must read, seriously:

In today's Dubai, home to cutting-edge resort design and prestigious golf and tennis tournaments (in which, we presume, women sometimes wear shorts or tennis skirts) it is still unlawful to be allowed entry into the country if one's passport is stamped by Israeli Customs. Will keeping the pages of an odd Koran or two dry really change the rancid philosophy that holds 1.5 billion people in a death grip of shame, perversion and hatred?

Yet [Frank Rich, is his most recent idiotic colum] can't let himself go that far, because that would actually serve to put him to the right of this administration even as it would install him directly in the center of American public opinion. Those complaining about Koran abuse see the latest yawning episode as either a shameful display of America's arrogance and disrespect for the world's second largest religion or one more foul-up by a government and its military that only serves to make the fight harder.

Nonsense. The other two Abrahamic religions have come to terms with the fact that modern life has ample accommodation for religious practice but will not tolerate discrimination based on one's spiritual proclivities. Of course, both Christianity and Judaism have their radicals; it would be virtually impossible for that not to be so. But only Islam has institutionalized hate and slaughter to the point that massacres and bombings by radicalized Muslims hardly surprise anymore. What is so sensational and troubling about abuses in American-run military prisons is that Americans thought that we all were past the era when deviants were given the keys to jail cells.

...

What bugs Mr. Rich is that interrogators used inmate's religious nuttery as a way of breaking them down. Given that radicalized Muslims have been characterized by mainstream adherents as having perverted Islam's tenets and practices, wouldn't poking that particular sore spot be a useful and legitimate questioning tactic?

...

When the president tosses yet another off-handed "Islam is Peace" remark he does no service to the thousands who have been slaughtered and oppressed so "peacefully." When the media refuses to use certain words (e.g. "terrorist") for fear of insulting Muslims and seeming to be on the side of the US government, thus inciting yet another Islamist riot, it hardly demonstrates an understanding of the stakes in this fight. Neither the government nor the media wish to call out the foe, no matter that that very same foe yells in our face each and every day what its intentions are.

We may be winning or losing this war; it's getting harder each day to tell. But if we lose, it will not be because the enemy is superior in strength, morality or guile. It will be because we have failed to take the threat with the seriousness and dead calm that an existential crisis demands. We have failed to identify the enemy and in doing so have turned the fight in on ourselves. The current spat between the government and the media would make for lively entertainment in another time. As we grow towards what is likely to be a showdown with thousands, maybe millions, of radicalized religious fanatics it might be a good idea for us to come to some agreement on whom we fight before it is too late.

From Via Instapundit. As he says, read the whole thing.

Related: Newsweek Puts the American Flag in the Trash Can for Japanese Edition: Odd which symbols Newsweek frets about desecrating and which it doesn't.

Instapundit Is on F'n' Fire Update: When does the left excuse and engage in apologism over brutal beatings of gays and women? Why, when such outrages are perpetrated by a swarthier "oppressed group," such as Muslim immigrants, of course.

The left has come along way since that "content of his character" hooey, huh?

Posted by: Ace at 12:18 PM | Comments (6)
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This is sort of interesting. I don't think it's happened before:

When your movie is shelved and you're fired, even the people closest to you assume your film was wretched. So Paul Schrader just wanted it seen.

Now his "Dominion Prequel to the Exorcist" is finally coming out....

...

It was deemed too cerebral and scare-free by the production company, Morgan Creek, which brought in Renny Harlin to do some reshoots. By the time Harlin was done, he had remade the movie, and Schrader's finished product was put in the can — to stay.

...

The two prequels can serve as a ready-made seminar for film schools, too.

"It is the easiest term paper imaginable: Compare and contrast. ... More likely the professor will say you can do a term paper on anything BUT the two "Exorcists," Schrader said, laughing.

The similarities include the same settings (East Africa); same general premise (how a young Father Merrin lost his faith and first encountered Satan); same star (Stellan Skarsgard); two of the same credited screenwriters (William Wisher and Caleb Carr, although Alexi Hawley did some heavy rewriting for Harlin); same cinematographer (Vittorio Storaro, a three-time Oscar winner for "The Last Emperor," "Reds" and "Apocalypse Now"); and several of the same supporting players.

But as any filmgoer familiar with their work might expect, the final products from Harlin and Schrader are quite different.

After all, Harlin's credits include "Deep Blue Sea," "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master," "Die Hard 2," "Cliffhanger" "The Long Kiss Goodnight," and, most recently, "Mindhunters." Schrader wrote "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull" and directed "Affliction."

Harlin's metier is horror and action; Schrader's the tortured souls of troubled men.

...

"During the course of the screening, I just kept feeling better and better. Because I was saying, `Boy, this is really bad. If this gets much worse, maybe my film has a chance. Maybe there will be a curiosity about what my film was like.' Because what would have been the worst scenario for me was if Renny's film was pretty good. Then we wouldn't be sitting here, and my film would be forever lost."

I wasn't a fan of MST3K, but I do love watching wretched movies and ragging on them. (One of the best for these purposes: the vile King Arthur film First Knight. Hilarious.)

Both of these movies must be positively hideous, but I'm looking forward to getting them both on Netflix and seeing which path to failure each director chose.

This does seem like a bit of publicity stunt-- taking a second bite at the apple after the public spit the first rotten bite out -- and an attempt to recoup losses.

Still, I think it's pretty interesting, stunt or not. The movies are terrible, but it's an interesting glimpse into the creative process, and into creative failure. In stereo.

Posted by: Ace at 12:41 PM | Comments (30)
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The poor PepsiCo executive millionaire is of course a "victim" in this morality tale.

Apparently she's permitted to make her anti-American speech, but the bloggers who criticize her are thuggish and inflamatory for doing so.

Always remember: when they speak, it's dissent.

When we speak, it's chilling their dissent.

I grow weary of the MSM's and liberal's semantic gymnastics. They think they can definte words -- "dissent," "extremist," "centrist," "maverick," etc. -- and thereby define reality.

Wrong.

We don't agree with your self-serving definitions, and you no longer have a monopoly on defining the terms of debate.

You're reacting like any other guild or monopoly being challenged by an upstart -- defensively, angrily, haughtily, "how-dare-you"-ly. You're afraid.

And I've never been a blogger triumphalist, but I will say your fears are well-founded.

Adapt or die.

I prefer the latter.

Related: This idiot at the Washington Post thinks that no one has yet disproved the authenticity of the Rathergate forgeries.

1, we have, even if Dick Thornberg was being nice to his employers by not quite saying so, and 2, that seems immaterial -- the media seems to have a new standard, I guess: "If we print it, and you can't disprove it, it remains true until you do so."

I thought as a general matter those asserting a claim were responsible for proving it, rather than simply inviting others to disprove it, but there are, I guess, different standards now for our Royal Scriveners.

Posted by: Ace at 09:42 AM | Comments (26)
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It's in he New York Times, yes; but I wonder what page of the print edition. I'm guessing it's hidden in a fold-out ad for a Macy's sale on flatware.

Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan began to assemble the equipment necessary to build a rudimentary biological weapons laboratory before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, letters released by the Defense Department show.

The operatives were not immediately able to obtain a sample of the deadly anthrax strain that they wanted to reproduce in their laboratory, according to the letters.

According to these letters. There certainly are many others not captured yet.

The letters are among the documents recovered in late 2001 after the invasion of Afghanistan that United States intelligence officials have frequently cited as evidence that Al Qaeda was working to develop biological weapons.

The letters, recently made public as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request, detail a visit by an unnamed Qaeda scientist to a laboratory at an unspecified location where he was shown "a special confidential room" with thousands of samples of biological substances.

The scientist tried to buy anthrax vaccines, which would be necessary to protect any Qaeda members working with the material. He also bought a sterilizer, a respirator and an air-contamination detector, one letter said.

"The conference was found to be highly beneficial for our future work," the letter said. "I finalized all the accessories required for the smooth running of our bioreactor."

A separate handwritten letter includes a detailed list of additional equipment that would be necessary, like an incubator and a centrifuge, as well as a crude layout of a four- or five-room laboratory.

The letter specifies a training program for the staff, lasting six to eight months for senior workers and two to four months for technicians.

The letters appear to be the same documents referred to in the report of a special presidential commission on intelligence failures and unconventional weapons led by former Senator Charles S. Robb of Virginia and Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the federal appeals court.

The report, released in March, describes a biological weapons program that "was extensive, well organized and operated two years before the Sept. 11."

None of this is proof, but it does suggest that, in legal terminology, the FBI had its head stuck all the way up its ass in insisting, from day one, that the anthrax attacks must have been a domestic lunatic posing as an Al Qaeda terrorist (who just happened to have his anthrax ready to be shipped on 9-11).

Posted by: Ace at 09:22 AM | Comments (14)
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I had thought this issue had been resolved. Appparently not. Self-proclaimed "reformers" still want to "regulate" political speech on the Internet, and, I suspect, regulate it out of existence.

RedState's been following this.

He suggests:

You don't have to be a lawyer to comment, and you don't have to write 10 pages of legalese. Just send an email to internet@fec.gov and explain your concerns. If you've got any extra time you can actually skim the rule and see all the places that the FEC asks for comment.

RedState explains that the FEC still wants the power to "investigate" pretty much any old political blog, and he's not sanguine about having to answer subpoenas. Neither am I.

The period for public comment on the proposed rule changes ends June 3rd, and apparently there hasn't been much comment at all yet. Let them know you're not happy about allowing the so-called "professional" media a monopoly on political speech.

Thanks to David.

Posted by: Ace at 09:06 AM | Comments (2)
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This chick is pretty hot, and the set-up pretty implausible, so I'm doubting this is an actual clip from a soccer game. I think it might be a cut from some European commercial designed to look like a real incident.

My suspicions aside, it's still pretty funny, and you get to see boobies.

Obviously, a light content warning for tasteful sports-related nudity.

Thanks to Tim. GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAALLLLL!

Posted by: Ace at 08:36 AM | Comments (15)
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