Signs of the Times

Surgical Mask Fun

Well, it's good to know there are still people out trying to make lemonade from lemons. I guess.

Here are some fun and creative surgical masks to lighten up this whole doomsday pandemic situation.

Has Leftist Politics Killed the Hollywood Drama?

I came across an article by S. T. Karnick over at Big Hollywood. This piece titled Leftist Politics Killed the Hollywood Drama makes some good points about why the movies, on the whole, aren't delivering.

Analysts have blamed these poor performances on audiences’ unwillingness to watch serious films, especially because people tend to want to escape from their problems during economic hard times.

I think that’s not the case at all. The reality is that Hollywood’s theatrical film wing has largely forgotten how to do good dramas, and the central problem is the ever-greater politicization of Tinseltown in recent years.

Comedies, action movies, and other genre films have been largely free of the incursion of left-wing politics, due both to their genre expectations and the audiences to which they’re pitched, especially the young, who are less energized by politics. And those films are doing very well.

Dramas, on the other hand, aimed as they are at more mature audiences, have been thoroughly overtaken by progressive politics. The poor box office performance of the numerous dreary and politically slanted antiwar films of the past few years exemplify this trend, as do the numerous tracts against bourgeois normality and for sexual radicalism and other outlier attitudes evident in Milk, The Reader, Transamerica, and other such filmic delights of the past couple of years.

Mr. Karnick is a frequent contributor here at Salvo. Here are a few of the articles he has written for us: Girly Men and The Tyranny of the Minority

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Salvo issue 8 (Spring 09) is now available! Individual copies and back issues can be purchased here.

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The New Definition of Harassment: "I just feel offended"

AB 537 has added sexual orientation and gender identity to the nondiscrimination provisions in California's Education Code.

If there is any doubt as to the meaning of the new measures, THIS website of the San Francisco Unified School District helps us out: if someone merely feels offended, then they have been harassed.

SFUSD wrote: "Students don’t find using inappropriate language harassing, but I do! Then the language is harassing. If you find an action or use of language offensive/harassing then, it is.”

There is only one problem. I feel harassed by this radically subjective definition of harassment.

Eugenics and the Dark Secret of the American Left

To an outsider, the Fernald school in Waltham Massachusetts looked like any other educational institution. During the school’s hay day in the 1920’s and 30’s, few passers-by would have guessed the dark secret lurking behind the brick walls – a secret penetrating to the heart of American liberalism.

Fernald was no ordinary school. Set up in 1848 with funds from the Massachusetts State Legislature, the institution was designed for the incarceration of “feeble-minded” children. Throughout the early 1900s, hundreds of thousands of low-intelligence (though not necessarily retarded) children were warehoused at Fernald in unspeakable conditions.

Treated like animals and denied any affection, these “human weeds” were considered genetically inferior from the rest of society.  In his book The State Boys Rebellion, Michael D'Antonio shows that one of the purposes behind the Fernald school was to prevent these “idiots” from reproducing and diluting the gene pool. Margaret Sanger, icon of the American left and founder of Planned Parenthood, put it even more succinctly: “The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.” It was not until the 1960s that the school began releasing their children to live in the outside world.

The ideology behind Fernald was supplied by the American Eugenics movement. It was customary for American liberals of the 1920s and 30s to identify human beings as either hereditarily valuable or inferior. Taking Darwin’s theory of natural selection and applying it to human society, they typically classed Jews, Gypsies, Blacks, Native Americans and those of low-IQ as harmful to the human gene pool.

“People were told, we can be rid of all disease, we can lower the crime rate, we can increase the wealth of our nation, if we only keep certain people from having babies,” said Michael D'Antonio.

In his New York Times bestseller Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg shows that before Hitler gave eugenics a bad name, almost all the leading progressive intellectuals of the early 20th century interpreted Darwin’s theory as a writ to “interfere” with human natural selection. Indeed, when the National Socialist sterilized over 50,000 “unfit” Germans, a former advisor to Teddy Roosevelt exclaimed, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”

Although contemporary left-wingers have tried to hush it up, it is a fact of history that the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, the National Research Council, Planned Parenthood and the pre-1960's Democratic Party, all supported the right of the US government to engage in Eugenic selection, while thirty states adopted legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization of certain individuals or classes. Conservatives, orthodox Roman Catholics and radical libertarians, on the other hand, were routinely ridiculed for their opposition to such policies.

The underlining premise behind the American eugenics movement was the view that irresponsible individualism in breeding would act as a cancer on the human gene pool, harming posterity. Government held the future of the human race in its reigns and could improve the evolutionary direction of the nation – and indeed the world - through strategic intervention.

The Fernald school is no longer operating and by the 1960’s all the states had canceled their sterilization laws. After Hitler gave the politics of race hygiene a bad name, American and British “progressives” stopped defending government’s right to direct the gene pool.

Nevertheless, the ideological coordinates behind these abuses remain as intact as ever within the minds of American left, although they have found a myriad of different expressions.

KEEP READING

What Does a Trillion Look Like?

A quick link to the good people at Uncommon Descent:

 

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See also: The Universal Lottery

Decreasing the Surplus Population

"The last time that Britain’s population was cut in half was the 14th century. The cause was the Black Death.

"Seven centuries later, a leading British environmentalist is urging a similar decrease in what Ebenezer Scrooge famously called “the surplus population.” Only this time, he’s asking for volunteers.

"In February, Jonathan Porritt, the chairman of the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission, said that couples with more than two children were placing an 'irresponsible’ burden of the environment.'

"He accused his fellow environmentalists of “betraying the interests of [their] members” by not telling  people to be responsible for “their total environmental footprint.
 
"Not surprisingly, Porritt’s comments didn’t sit very well with a lot of Britons. But he’s convinced, as he wrote on his website, that “logic” and “sound evidence” are on his side.

"So, six weeks later, he upped the ante: he declared that the UK must cut its population from its current 61 million to 30 million “if it is to build a sustainable society.”

Keep Reading

Faith Fighter Finished

GAME CREATED-FAITH FIGHTER BY MOLLEINDUSTRIA:
Choose your belief and kick the s___ out of your enemies. Give vent to your intolerance!

You can choose between 6 characters: God (from the old testament), Jesus, Buddha, Budai (a.k.a. the laughing Buddha representing the chinese folk religion), Ganesha, Muhammed plus a secret final boss.

OFFICIAL STATEMENT OF THE ORGANIZATION OF ISLAMIC CONFERENCE (OIC):
When his attention was brought to an internet report posted by metro.co.uk on an online game depicting holy figures such as Prophet Jesus and Prophet Muhammad (PBUT) fighting each other to the death, a spokesman of the OIC Islamophobia Observatory in Jeddah today expressed his concern stating that the computer game was incendiary in its content and offensive to Muslims and Christians.

He said that the game would serve no other purpose than to incite intolerance. He called on the Internet service providers who are hosting the game to take immediate action by withdrawing it from the web.

TWO CATHOLIC PLAYERS SEND STRONGLY WORDED LETTERS OF COMPLAINT
" . . . and we received two letters of complaints by two catholic players."

GAME TAKEN DOWN:
Today after an official statement of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) we decided to remove the game Faith Fighter from our site.

Faith Fighter was meant to be a game against intolerance that used over the top irony and a cartoonish style to express the instrumental use of religions.

Faith Fighter depicted in a mildly politically incorrect way all the major religions as a response to the one-way islamophobic satire of the Danish Mohammad cartoons.

If a established organization didn't understand the irony and the message of the game and is claiming it is inciting intolerance, we simply failed.

That is pretty weak. Good thing the Catholics threw their weight around in this matter though. Quite frankly, that's about as much attention as it deserves. Of course you can still get the game online, so none of it really matters anyways.

Science Split

Genetic research has led to an 'extraordinary flowering of knowledge', claims criticised charity

Genetic analysis is leading to an 'extraordinary flowering of knowledge', claims an internationally renowned science charity, as it countered accusations of funding costly and misguided research.

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Genetic research in 'blind alley' in hunt for cures

British scientist warns that the hope genetic research could provide a cure for common illnesses has proved a "false dawn".

Oh well. Maybe it's a good thing there isn't an absolute consensus with these issues. I'm just curious which side will be associated with cold hard academia and impossible luck, and which side will be associated with the naive feelings of the masses and mumbo-jumbo gods. But maybe that split doesn't have to happen with every debate.

Artificial Intelligence: "No Safety Issues For a Long Time”

Artificial life 'could be created within five years' according to THIS article in the Telegraph. It is not surprising that this has raised safety concerns, given all of the books and films that play off of the Frankenstein motif, where the scientist creates life which then becomes a threat to the human race.

In response to the safety concerns, the Telegraph article reports that scientists are assuring us that “there would be no safety issues for a long time.” This is because any initial organisms would be very primitive and need large-scale life support systems to be sustained.

“No safety issues for a long time”? What is that supposed to mean?
 

Throwing a Grenade at the Elephant in the Room

There is one thing about the Grand Theft Auto games that I've always wondered about. Why is it that there is never a zoo in the cities? It seems like it would be fun to pick off the penguins or throw a hand grenade at an elephant, right? Why not?

I just think that if its acceptable to have a video game where you can mow down women and police officers at will, why not let us blow up a panda bear or beat down a flamingo with a baseball bat? Are the people at Rock Star afraid of planting an idea in someones head? If that's the case, then they should take a good look at the seeds that they are already sowing. . . .

Disclaimer: If there actually is a zoo in one of these games, I take all of this back and would request info on which one it is and where I can get a copy.