Peter Jackson: The new kids on the blog

calendarlive.com: The new kids on the blog: "While it is hardly surprising that cyberspace can be fertile soil for misinformation, Jackson's ruse underscores a newer phenomenon: the rapid evolution of weblogs — or blogs — as movie marketing tools.

Costing almost nothing to maintain, the vast majority of blogs are mental clearinghouses for their authors, lo-fi Web confessionals or bully pulpits that vary from current events to niche pastimes to sex. Directors' blogs, by contrast, are slickly engineered to virally market their movies — to stoke fan ardor.

Some observers say this approach allows studios to put a spin on moviemaking — and, by playing to fan interest, head off potential controversies. Movie marketers say the sites allow blogger-directors to reach out to fans in an up-close-and-personal way."

Camera of Sean Penn, Journalist, Confiscated in Iran

Camera of Sean Penn, Journalist, Confiscated in Iran: "NEW YORK Iran was rocked by bombings on Sunday, killing at least nine and wounding more than 30, as dozens of journalists from around the world gathered in advance of the presidential election this Friday. One of those journalists, actor Sean Penn--covering the events for the San Francisco Chronicle--was involved in a separate incident, and had his video camera confiscated for a time."

I don't understand. If there are bombings in Iran then it's a quagmire right. How can Sean Penn blame Bush for the quagmire if he hasn't attacked Iran yet.

He'll figure it out. He's documenting the lovely state of life there so that if Bush does attack Penn can talk about how peaceful and free things were before the "invasion":

"Several hundred women at a sit-in outside the entrance to Tehran University demanded rights revoked after the 1979 Islamic revolution. As chants and taunts arose, police and plainclothesmen surrounded the demonstrators, pushing away those trying to join the group. Officials also cut off cell phone service in the area, and challenged reporters nearby."

"In the process, they briefly seized the video camera of Penn, 44, who arrived in Iran as a reporter for his friend Phil Bronstein, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle."

I'll bet this whole incident was a Karl Rove operation. Right Sean? Let's ask Howard Dean.

Don't tell me about Gulags...

The American Spectator: "Prof. Bass, the perfect modern academic, obviously greatly admires this man, spent days with him, and has not one bad word to say about An's bosses, who, again, killed civilians without remorse by the thousands, who even sent An to be 're-educated' after the war because he had so much contact with Western ideas.

I am not sure how many mothers or fathers or children or widows of Vietnam war casualties read the New Yorker. I am not sure if anyone who edited the piece -- and it is edited well, although utterly without moral input -- had friends or family who fought there (such as my late father in law, Col. Dale Denman, Jr.). But how insulting, how insulting must an article like this be to them. How insulting it is to us all: to lavish praise on a man who helped kill our fellow Americans, to describe him in endearing terms, to try to make him seem like a kindly uncle.

If the New Yorker is one of the flagships of the Mainstream Media fleet, they are sailing in maddeningly disloyal, contemptuous waters and obviously have been for a while. Small wonder the media gloried in Mark Felt and Watergate last week. In those days, Americans actually trusted the Mainstream Media. The New Yorker piece by Prof. Bass makes it clear how wrong we were. He's a fine writer but a man whose piece lacks any moral compass at all. And what of the fellow journalists in Saigon cheering him on? Now we know a bit more about why the war turned out as it did."

Hmm. A Professor, the MSM, lack of moral compass: what a surprise. Sigh.

Church of the Masses: NY TIMES CALLING...

Church of the Masses: NY TIMES CALLING...: "James: So, in the last six months, there have been 37 pairings in the Times of the word "Christian" with words like "scary", "frightening", "theocratic" and "intimidating". My question is, what is it about Christians that makes you so scary?

Barb: (loud, snorting and sneering laughter) Are you kidding me?

James: What?

Barb: I finally get interviewed by the New York Times, and you ask me a question like that?! (more snorting and laughing)

James: (sniffs) Are you laughing because you think it's funny that people find Christians frightening?

Barb: No. I'm laughing because you want me to tell you why you and your friends are scared of Christians -- and I think you should ask your therapist!

Anyway, the interview went on from there. Basically, James was working on a story about how the same conservative Christian think-tanks that were behind the ascendancy of the Religious Right are now trying to take over Hollywood.

Barb: Are they?

James: Aren't they?

Barb: My experience is that the Christian initiatives in Hollywood are all organic - arising out of the industry itself.

James: Yeah, but where is the funding coming from?

Barb: They are all shoe-string underfundeds! Act One's funding comes from all over. Little drops of water from many sources --

James: Are you a Bush voter?

Barb: Whaaaaaaaaaaaaa?

In the end, I gave him some soundbites about post-Passion Hollywood, but it was clear that James had pretty much decided what he was going to write about (ie. Vast Rightwing Political Conspiracy spreading into Hollywood), and was searching for proof.

So, during this follow-up interview, Sunday, we had the following exchange.

James: I'm having a hell of a time chasing down the money connections between the DC conservative think-tanks and Hollywood Christians.

Barb: That's because they don't exist.

James: ("I'm no fool" snort) Yeah. How about you tell me 'off the record'?

Barb: Off the record, on the record, we don't get any money from rightwing covert opps!

James: Would you take money from them if they offered?

Barb: From whom?...Heck, I'd take money from Hugh Hefner! I'm just trying to meet payroll for the summer.

James: You're funny.

Barb: And poor....but with a few exceptions, Evangelical Christians outside of Hollywood don't financially support Hollywood Christians. They don't trust us.

James: Yeah, yeah...(trying another tack) So, is it your sense that some Evangelical Republicans from DC are trying to build a network in Hollywood?

Barb: I think that is accurate.

James: (Gotcha! exclamation) And why is that?!

Barb: Because being generally derided and despised by cultural leaders is a concern to them? You should ask them...

James: I'm trying, but everyone is being very paranoid in talking to me.

Barb: Does that surprise you?

James: Why is that, anyway?

Barb: You mean, besides the fact that the NY Times hates Christians?!

More laughter from James.

Barb: Honestly, the other reason you aren't getting the scoop is people don't have anything to say about this. There is no funneling of money from political Evangelicals to cultural ones. Is it being cagey and paranoid to not having anything to say about a plot that doesn't exist?

James makes an exasperated laughing sound.

A bit later, James asked me about a meeting that Act One co-sponsored last December between our writers and some Christians from DC.

James: Isn't it true that, as a result of the meeting, a feature film project was financed with money coming from DC?

Barb: Are you smoking crack?! No! There was no money! We bought a couple dozen sandwiches -- and lost money on that, as a matter of fact!

James: So, what was the purpose of the meeting?

Barb: The folks from Washington wanted to start a dialogue on some policy issues in the hopes that they could assist folks on this side of the country with government studies about some issues of joint concern.

James: (Ha!) What issue?

Barb: Well, we talked about global AIDS. Such a terrible plague. Hollywood doesn't talk about it enough.

James: Yeah, yeah. What else?

Barb: Oh yeah. There was information about the persecution of Christiansin the Sudan. There's another one you never see on primetime.

James: (depressed sigh) Anything else?

Barb: Yes. Sex.

James: Yeah! Tell me!

Barb: We talked about the problem of pornography and STD's. All about the societal wages of the Sexual Revolution.

James: (humph...)"

A view of your local campus...

Tom Wolfe has written a novel capturing life at your local elite college. In my experience he's right on the mark.

VDH's Private Papers :: The Right Stuff: "That Wolfe is, as his ageist detractors never fail to point out, a 74-year-old Southern man, only makes his accomplishment all the more impressive. His eyes and ears are as sharp as ever. Friday nights at his fictional Dupont University, as at any school, bump with profane nursery rhymes (popularly known as gangster rap) and shrieks of girlish delight at manly antics. Wolfe notices that young men consider it a matter of duty to watch ESPN in 3-hour blocks, even when it means being up as early as ten-thirty. (My roommates went beyond the call by placing a second TV atop the main one, for ESPN-2.) He notices that the Mashed Potato or whatever dance they did in ancient days has become The Act, Clothed. Here is a sound that every college student recognizes: that terrible ascending chime of AOL Instant Messenger ringing into dorm hallways from every room. And below the computer is a nest of wires attached to the “techie alphabet toys…the PC, the TV, the CD, DVD, DSL, VCR, MP4…each asleep rattlesnake-style with a single tiny diode-green eye open….” Wolfe paints a portrait true to life itself, composed of hundreds of acute social observations, garnered through years of research on nearly a dozen campuses. "

"One passage explores how campus parlance has the F-word as an exclamation (“F!”), a noun (“You silly F!”), an imperative expressing contempt (“F that”), or an adverb modifying and intensifying an adjective. But if you think that’s F-ing insightful, observe that the S-word has become a synonym for everything: possessions (“Where’s your S?”), lies or misleading explanations (“Are you S-ing me?”), drunk (“S-faced”), trouble (“in deep S”), ineptitude (“couldn’t play point guard for S”), care about (“give a S”), ignorance (“he doesn’t know S”), hopeless situation (“up S Creek”), disappointment (“oh, S!”), startling (“holy S!”), et cetera (“and massages and S”), very (“mean as S”), violence (“before the S hit the fan”), verbal abuse “(don’t give me S”), self-importance (“he thinks he’s some S”), and feces, literally (“S”). Wolfe records 32 usages. I’ve personally heard all 32 of them as part of my higher education, but I’d never reflected on the phenomenon quite so vividly."

I've spent enough time around college dorm rooms to know this is dead on.

"But did they have Girls Gone Wild way back when? How about roofies, ecstasy, coed bathrooms, proliferating sex columnists, AIDS? (One thing remains constant: since 1980, about 45% of students have reported an excessive fondness for drink.) Slang, too, bespeaks campus change. I consulted Connie Eble, a lexicographer of college slang at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 1974, she says, students there were asked to list what they considered “good, current campus slang.” Thirty years later, they were asked again. The 2004 study found that 95% of the terms from 1974 were no longer used. (Put another way, only 5% of the slang words survived.) “Bad,” which in ’74 meant “good,” now means “bad” again. The word for “impressive” or “interesting” is “tight.” To express approval, avoid “That’s cosmic!” Try “Off the heezy fo’ sheezy.”

The study also found that these days, “words are more explicitly sexual and derogatory.” Disco-era sorority sisters may have disliked being called “foxy mamas,” but less so, I’m sure, than “sorostitutes.” Worse is the term butterface, a ‘female with an attractive figure but a less-than-appealing face.’ (As in “…everything but her face.”) But that language should become more sexualized is appropriate seeing that everything else on campus has. Sexual liberation is no longer a movement, but brisk business. A new student-run porn magazine with real students has sold tens of thousands of copies at Boston University. “We wanted Boink to represent college and all that college is,” says the editor, not unreasonably. At my alma mater, adult film producers would drive up from Los Angeles to host parties in which their actors performed with—on—our students. The story made the cover of Rolling Stone. There is more of this on the way. But we’re supposed to think this is all old hat? What about the speech codes? And the aggressive political correctness?

Wolfe, of course, notices these, too. One day at Dupont U., a class is shown a photograph of bullfighting and a girl lets slip, “That—is— horrible! It’s—so—wrong!” “That’s your reaction to a culture different from your own?” snaps the professor. “Spanish culture is far older than ours, by a factor of millennia…. Would you favor us with a list of alien cultures you find most objectionable?” The students chuckle while Charlotte absorbs the lesson: “Denigration of another culture, especially one whose people are less well off than your own, and referring to anything as evil, which would indicate you might very well have religious convictions, were more socially unacceptable at Dupont than cruelty to animals.”

Political correctness, along with literary postmodernism (“B.S.”), radical feminism, and an obsession with race appear in Charlotte Simmons just as they appear on nearly every American college campus. And because this appearance is unpleasant to those politically disposed to defend them as signs of progress, Wolfe has been denounced for writing a jeremiad disguised as a novel. Wolfe is “a right-wing scold, a moralizing antique, William Bennett in an ice-cream suit,” said the Chicago Sun-Times’s Henry Kisor, echoing other liberal critics. In fact, such a deluge of this kind of criticism greeted the publishing of Charlotte Simmons that the deluge itself became a news item. But these literati are reacting exactly like those university presidents who insist on continuing Byzantine and morally shocking racial quotas while demanding even more insistently that these policies remain secret. Wolfe is telling it like it is. If his liberal critics don’t like what they see, their quarrel is with the universities, not Mr. Wolfe.

In truth, the university has changed dramatically over the past 30 years. For instance, the number of women enrolled in higher education rose from 5,035,862 in 1975 to 9,263,000 in 2003, an increase of 84%. (Male enrollment rose by 15%.) Minority undergraduate enrollment increased from 16.3% to 30.1% between 1976 and 2001. But perhaps the greatest transformation is this: the activist students and junior faculty of the ’60s and ’70s are today’s department chairs and administrative grandees. And they have been working hard to refashion the campus in their image. The result? A survey of 183 colleges shows that in four departments—English literature, political science, religious studies, and philosophy—more than 80% of the faculty identifies as liberal, and no more than 5% identifies as conservative. In sociology departments, 0% identify as Republicans. (One lonely discipline seems to resist the spirit of progress: agriculture.) Federal Electoral Commission filings report the first- and second-ranking organizations in the country in terms of per capita contributions to the Kerry ’04 campaign: the University of California and Harvard, respectively.

The one-party university promotes intellectual rigor with the sort of success achieved by the one-party state. This helps explain why the Larry Summers affair at Harvard became a show trial. The outrage…the self-effacement…the formal reprimands promulgated in large halls via secret ballot—it's enough to make you a believer in what Roger Kimball called the “Sovietization of intellectual life, where the value or truth of a work is determined not by its intrinsic qualities but by the degree to which it supports a given political line.” The spectacle of radical feminists savaging and humiliating Summers—while pledging to tolerate campus bullying no longer—is proof enough that the supposed oppressed are in control of academia’s commanding heights. But Wolfe is as alive to the comedy as to the tragedy of the American university. “Queer Theory” and “Ethnic Separatist Studies” remind one less of Leninism than the 19th century’s numerology and phrenology, in that they both discourse in bizarre pseudo-scientific lingo about things that don't exist. Still, the high priests of the academic occult have been successful enough at churning out half-educated true believers to ensure that Reason will not reign on campus any time soon."

Read it and weep.

JustOneMinute: Bush Aide Edited Science! and sauce for the gander.

JustOneMinute: Bush Aide Edited Science!: "Please, I'm begging now - can we drop the notion that the intersection of science with government was pure until Evil BushCo corrupted it?"

I posted that it is wrong to insert bias into scientific data. That works both ways.

Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming - New York Times

Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming - New York Times: "A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase 'significant and fundamental' before the word 'uncertainties,' tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust."

This is wrong. It's wrong when the MSM inserts their bias into the story, and it's wrong when Bush administration officials do the same.

Level 5 Leaders

Power Line: Stand up for Janice Rogers Brown: "As California's Chief Justice has ruefully acknowledged, Justice Puglia was 'a strong personality...not shy of stating his beliefs, nor about challenging others to justify theirs' but surprisingly willing to listen and modify his views. He was, as his long-time colleague Justice Coleman Blease noted: 'formidable' and 'intimidating,' but he had a 'heart of gold.'
...There are similarities in the descriptions of Justice Puglia and President Lincoln that are striking.

In a speech in 1906, Norton Parker Chipman recalled that his friend Abraham Lincoln was 'firm as the granite hills,' yet capable of great patience and forbearance. Carl Sandburg described Lincoln as 'both steel and velvet...hard as rock and soft as the drifting fog. Reading these words caused a shock of recognition, for I had been seeing exactly this sort of paradox and contradiction in the life of Justice Puglia."

This sounds very much like the Level 5 leader described in Jim Collins' brilliant book on leadership: Good to Great.

ScrappleFace: Gitmo Study Sparks Arab Probe of Bible Abuse

ScrappleFace: Gitmo Study Sparks Arab Probe of Bible Abuse: "(2005-06-04) -- Friday's release of a Pentagon study on mishandling of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay detention center has sparked Saudi Arabia's leader to call for similar probes of Bible handling in detention facilities throughout the Muslim world."

Now that's comedy.

Yale grades portray Kerry dumber than Bush

Yale grades portray Kerry as a lackluster student - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - Washington - News has the story.

The pictures would have decided the election anyway. Holy cow.

Kubrick and the Human

Triablogue: "'Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage,' says Kubrick, reaching for the iced water. 'He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved - that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.'

Like what? 'Well, many aspects of liberal mythology are coming to grief now -- but I don't want to give any examples or I'm going to sound like William Buckley....'"

A friend of mine convinced me that all of Kubrick's films were about dehumanization. Maybe we were wrong. They are about Humanization: Depravity.

Church Webmasters - Stop Working for Free

Boyink Interactive, LLC : "Are you a web developer working on your church's website on a volunteer basis?

Stop it.

Immediately.

Walk away.

Or start billing for your time, at rates competitive in the local market.

Why?

Because when a church gets a website for free, it evidently has no value. Things with no value get replaced or reimplemented on a moment's notice, on staff whim, or as soon as the person leading the effort is called away."

This is sound thinking. (Hat Tip: effective web ministry notes)

Here I am

I'll be the resident stenblographer for a meeting of pastors from around the globe. You can follow the action here:

Geldof condemned over Pope 'invite' - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News

Geldof condemned over Pope 'invite' - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News: "The National Secular Society (NSS) is pointing to the Vatican's refusal to condone the use of condoms, saying it has helped spread HIV in Africa.

The society, which campaigns for religion to be taken out of public life, says it will create a counter-campaign of protest against any decision by Pope Benedict XVI to get involved.

NSS executive director Keith Porteous Wood said Geldof should not have written to the Pope about attending the Hyde Park event."

Is the Pope more tolerant the the National Secular Society? Will the Pope reject the invitation because secular people will be involved?

We report, you decide.

Personal Data for 3.9 Million Lost in Transit

Personal Data for 3.9 Million Lost in Transit - New York Times: "In one of the largest breaches of data security to date, CitiFinancial, the consumer finance subsidiary of Citigroup, announced yesterday that a box of computer tapes containing information on 3.9 million customers was lost by United Parcel Service last month, while in transit to a credit reporting agency."

What has Brown done to you?

The way back machine: Chirac's corruption battle

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Q & A: Chirac's corruption battle: "France's President, Jacques Chirac, has been accused of corruption during his time as Mayor of Paris and as president of the Gaullist RPR Party.

Judges investigating the allegations wanted to question him, but have been thwarted by Mr Chirac's claim to presidential immunity, causing one of them to resign in disgust."

Maybe Michael Moore will do a documentary: Jacques and Me.

When will the quagmire end?

Transterrestrial Musings: "PARIS (Routers) August 25, 2004

Sixty years after Paris was seized by the 'Allies,' and the beginning of the American occupation, France remains a failed nation, mired in political corruption and beset by vast pockets of Muslim extremism and anti-semitism, into which the gendarmerie fear to tread. The economy continues to struggle under economic policies driven by failed ideologies, and many of its best and brightest continue to flow out of the country, with only ex-dictators and their families, and hysterical movie stars willing to move there.

Sadly, history has born out the predictions of those who, in the spring of 1944, warned against invading. Many had pointed out what a poor prospect the region was for any kind of democracy, with its long history of belligerence and arrogance, and failed republics."

The Politics of Art

OpinionJournal - Extra: "Two things are worth noting about this article. The first is that it was written by a well-known, much-admired novelist. The second is that it appears to be representative of the political views of a considerable number of other artists who think that all conservatives (including conservative artists) are evil or stupid, or both. Ms. Smiley goes so far as to use the theological term 'invincible ignorance,' which implies that there's no point in arguing with such benighted folk, since their ignorance is invincible.

One finds the same quasireligious language in virtually all of Mr. Kushner's plays, used to much the same purpose: it is meant to indicate that disagreement with the author is not merely wrong but evil, and must necessarily lead to damnation. (Conversely, a play like 'Trumbo' exists not to persuade anyone of Dalton Trumbo's goodness--that is taken for granted--but to serve as a quasireligious ritual of collective self-congratulation, an opportunity for progressives to join together in celebrating a fearless defender of the true faith. That the defender in question was a hack screenwriter who tacitly connived at mass murder on a near-genocidal scale is irrelevant; all that matters is that he 'stood pat' when ordered by the House Un-American Activities Committee to inform on his similarly complicit colleagues.)

Now, it's one thing to feel like this, much less to say so out loud, if you're an elected official. That way lies a more proximate form of damnation. But what if you're an artist? What if you not only believe that more than half of your fellow men are ignorant, but allow this belief to influence the way you make art? The answer is to be found in plays like 'The God of Hell' and 'Embedded,' which are written not for a hypothetical mixed audience of red and blue Americans but for a 100% left-liberal audience whose 100% agreement is presupposed."

This is a very intelligent piece on the nature of art. I've often said that the place least likely to have real debate is the college campus. I must admit I am wrong. It seems there is even less debate in the "arts community". Everyone there knows what you're "supposed to think".

Question authority.

United Airlines Wi-fi

The New York Times > Technology > United Airlines Approved for In-Flight Internet Service: "United Airlines plans to announce today that it is the first domestic airline to receive approval from regulators to install wireless Internet networks on its planes."

Praise the Lord! Now they just need to offer it free and mix in a power supply and they've got my business.

Harvard’s Diversity Grovel by Heather Mac Donald

Harvard’s Diversity Grovel by Heather Mac Donald: "The “underlying . . . fact” of universities, he told the faculty at a February 15 meeting, is that they were “originally designed by men and for men.” In Summers’s view, the male origin of universities undermines any claim they might make to using objective tests of merit. “That reality [of a male founding],” he said, “shapes everything from . . . assumptions about effectiveness in teaching and mentoring, to concepts of excellence.” In other words, there is a male “concept of excellence” in genome research, say, that may not be the same as a female or black “concept of excellence” in genome research.

The deconstruction of objective standards into race and gender politics is common throughout the humanities. If Summers acts on his embrace of deconstructive relativism—he called on February 15 for “rethinking our assumptions in [such] areas [as ‘excellence’]”—standards in science will be the next to go. Any department that claims that it cannot find qualified candidates to meet the Senior VP for D’s “metrics” could face the charge that it is using white male “concepts of excellence.” Thank you very much, but I think I’ll stick with those “concepts” in the interest of ensuring that my medicine works and the airplane I’m using stays in the air."

If you wan't to see the decline of Higher Education at Harvard and probably most other elite institutions, you must read this article.

If you don't read this whole article... well, woe unto you.