by Steve Finefrock - Hollywood Forum [scriptwriter]

Princeton seminarians failed the Good Samaritan test in a clever psychology experiment, as outlined in a clever book of clever insights, “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell – worthy of your examination at length. From its footnotes I found the origin of “six degrees of separation” and read its original Psychology Today article. Re-reading Gladwell’s book led me to a chapter which I do not remember reading, for it would have long ago – four years past – stuck as firmly as burr under a saddle.
 
Blessed are those who expect little, for they shall not be disappointed – so says a clever bromide. It summarizes so much biblical teaching – folks is sinners, even the best don’t do well enough to deserve general praise. At Princeton this was confirmed in ‘70s social ‘research’ that confirms so much in religious teaching. Even seminarian students don’t measure up to the teachings of our culture. [more]

by K. Lloyd Billingsley [author, analyst ]

Wednesday the California Senate Education Committee held a hearing on SB 1322, which allows members of the Communist Party USA to teach and hold meetings in California’s public schools. This measure, authored by state Sen. Alan Lowenthal, a southern California Democrat, has left many puzzled.

The Sacramento Bee endorsed the bill and mocked those who regarded the prospect of Communists in the classroom as a cause for concern. On one level, it isn’t. The Communist Party USA is pretty much a dead parrot, and few people outside American university faculties, theological seminaries, insane asylums, and homeless shelters actually believe in Communism. Unfortunately, the bill is historically misleading. [more]

We know how certain groups are likely to vote. Obama has strong community support from his home states of Hawaii and Illinois. He attracts strong African-American support. Clinton has strong community support from her homes states of New York and Arkansas. She attracts strong support amongst white women. McCain has strong community support from his home states of Arizona and Iraq. He attracts strong support amongst crabby people.

For folks who reject identity politics or are just too post-modern to make up their own minds, I have constructed the following quiz. It has but ten questions (to help impatient McCain voters) and it is possible to get a perfect score (to motivate Utopian Obama voters). It is also very unfair to satisfy the view of reality of most Clinton voters. [more]

The gaggle of ragged boys looked carefully for the parents, and when the coast was clear, in they swooped: first one living room, then the next, and finally they'd scooped up the contraband from each boy's home, and collect quite a profit from the local store owners. And they spent their ill-gotten booty on bubble gum with "sample" razor blades, wrapped in heavy paper, printed with "give this to your dad" -- and so began this early American "outsourcing" drama. And it would be followed soon by dozens of subsequent chapters of classic economic fable.
 
Local stores despised the "invasion" of mail-order catalogues in the early 20th century, and cursed the day Congress authorized the U.S. Post Office to commence "Rural Free Delivery" to farms outside the normal city/town delivery zone.  Thus began an economic empire [of multiple, competing catalogue brand names], and a Hatfield-McCoy battle royale. Suddenly, folks could order the finest, and most fashionable, dresses and shirts and trousers, at a much lower cost, from the distant Sears and Ward's order centers, all without ‘patronizing’ the higher-priced local store. With the savings in their meager home budget, they could then afford a new contraption, perhaps the "thresher" that made their farm more efficient. [more]

by Steve Finefrock - Hollywood Forum [scriptwriter]

Charlton Heston would have smiled at learning there are bolder Hollywood conservatives arising today, than were available when he related to me [in a private, handwritten note in ’98] that he had to focus his political capital on the NRA’s call for a major figure to combat encroaching anti-SecondAmendmentitis.  His later retreat into mental deterioration was the cause of joy for Michael Moore Morons, and grief for conservatives in a Tinsel Town that is more right than most can possibly know. At least for now.

Heston’s political capital served the NRA well – others are taking up the HWD creative cudgel which I urgently advocated back then, so the “movement” is moving a bit faster. Pauline Kael’s assessment of Heston – “With his perfect, lean-hipped, powerful body, Heston is a god-like hero; built for strength, he is an archetype of what makes Americans win. He represents American power -- and he has the profile of an eagle." – stills stands like Mt.Rushmore, as journalistic accuracy despite her leftwing POV. As Heston’s publicist Mike Levine noted in today’s e-newsletter, Heston would be front-and-center of Mt.Rushmore, if it were being chiseled today. [more]

Recently, at least if you’re a conservative, writer-director David Mamet has taken on heroic proportions.   And it has nothing whatever to do with his rather second-rate,  obscenity-laced plays and movies, everything to do with a piece he wrote for the Village Voice. In it, he announced that, at the age of 60, he has decided to stop being a liberal.  It’s always a cause for celebration whenever anyone leaves the darkside, and I suppose if I had ever liked anything he’d written besides the script for “The Untouchables,” I’d be somewhat more excited by his conversion.

The truth is, within 24 hours, half a dozen friends had forwarded me the piece.  What I found odd was that they were so thrilled at the news that not one of them even took exception to the paragraph in which Mamet compared a president, George W. Bush, he had always considered a monster with a president, John F. Kennedy, whom he had always revered.  I guess he was striving for irony in listing similar things each had done.  But how was it he could write, “Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs” and have nobody raise an objection? [more]

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka set a new flood of briefs into SCOTUS – Supreme Court of the United States – which is the standard to this day. The amicus curiae – friend of the court petition – puts any and all manner of pleadings of experts and advocates before SCOTUS, including the now-famous blue-eye/brown-eye experiments. These experimental findings of psychologists were instrumental in the Court declaring separate-but-equal educational settings to be intrinsically unequal.
 
To the end of replicating the historical amicus experiment, my black history professor played the nasty teacher in a short version of the process, as the one who tormented the chosen ‘brown’ eyed children, subjecting them to insult, yet with no power to physically injure them.  Dr. Levy was one of two tag-team teachers in this class, the first offered in the Oklahoma college system for black history, to which I was enrolled as a white among a  balanced mix of races. Dr. Levy’s tale of teacher’s torment stuck tight inside my mind’s moral corner all these nearly forty years. [more]

Gold is where you find it, even if thirty years ago. A little tome of “Murphy’s Laws” cousins was published thirty years ago as “The Official Rules” – followed by its sequel of additions triggered by the first book, “The Official Explanations,” both by Paul Dickson [whose latest regards the history of the space program]. As a Senior Fellow of the Murphy Center for the Codification of Human and Organizations Law, I give you a sampling from the first issue. The second book has my additions, and maybe an extract  from there will come at a later time. But here’s a sampler, many perhaps worthy of your own enthusiastic distribution on the net – with a few pithy rejoinders, of course:
 
 
David Broder’s Law: Anybody that wants the presidency so much that he’ll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.
– WaPo, July 19,1973 [changed his mine regarding Fred Thompson] [more]

Growing up, as I did, in the home of Russian Jewish immigrants, it figures that I’d start out thinking that, by all rights, FDR belonged on Mount Rushmore.  But, all these years later, I have concluded that most of America’s woes can be traced back to his presidency, and that the best reason for his being up there along with Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington and Teddy Roosevelt, is that his head was already made of stone.

Although FDR is often, mistakenly, credited with bringing the Great Depression to an end, as Amity Shlaes made clear in her book, “The Forgotten Man,” his policies, which can best be described as Socialistic and anti-business, in reality prolonged America’s misery.  The mere fact that he and his economic advisors thought it made perfect sense to keep raising taxes during the 1930s suggests that their primary motive wasn’t to lift the country out of its economic morass, but to take advantage of the situation to inflate the power of the federal government. [more]

by Steve Finefrock - Hollywood Forum [scriptwriter] 3/27/08

Aren’t they scrutinizing McCain for every little slip!  Seeking, searching, scrutinizing every blunder, every ‘narrative’ endorsement which they bring with them to the campaign, these referees, in the striped-shirts of supposed neutrality, to point out every stumble, every lapse, every hesitation to prove McCain is bursting with Senior Moments.

One such moment occurred overseas this past week, and was hardly worthy of a news factoid entry, but for this striped-shirt bias – and it was enhanced by his senatorial companion, Joe Lieberman, contrastingly correcting his gaffe. Many yaparama shows focused over the weekend on its existence, though it hardly merited such attention among the other memorable moments of the week’s news for review. But for their narrative – McCain is so-o-o old – it would have passed unheralded. [more]

new @ ExileStreet

...Hollywood’s Holy Week Christophobic Fantasy
by Brian Fitzpatrick CMI

On NBC’s Law & Order, a college student influenced by a radical Christian youth minister murders his mother to save her soul after she commits adultery with a Muslim.

When will Hollywood ’s secular bigots figure out that Bible-believing Christians have nothing in common with fundamentalist Muslim terrorists?

On Wednesday, Law & Order served up another of those famed episodes ripped from the headlines – except the violence-preaching madrassa is Christian, not Muslim, the evil cleric brainwashing children quotes the Bible, not the Koran, and American Christians haven’t executed anybody by stoning since the Salem witch trials. 

The plot for this episode is so ludicrous it hardly merits retelling, but for clarity’s sake, here’s a quick summary.  The police find the body of a woman art gallery owner killed by stoning, and immediately suspect the killer had “strong religious views.”  Suspicion falls first on a Muslim artist.

Time for a cheap shot at the Bush administration: the National Security Agency is wiretapping the gallery owner by mistake, revealing that she was having an affair with the artist.  Suspicion shifts to her irreligious husband, who apparently didn’t mind being cuckolded.  For reasons not explained, the police decide to arrest their son, Jason, a college student. [more]

Bernard Lewis’ studies of Islam and Arabic society are conducted by this Princeton prince of intellect without ever entering the home of Islam, forbidden to enter the Hejaz by the Saudi government. His studies have gotten no closer than Turkey’s academic sources, for Mr. Lewis, author of many learned pieces of many lengths on Islam, Muhammad [PBUH] and Arabism is a Jew.
 
He’s never had access to the Ka’aba, Islam’s mosque of central symbolism in the heart of Mecca. He’s never viewed Medina where Muhammad [PBUH] died, but does have access to the famed ‘far mosque’ in Jerusalem – for it is accessible to Jew, Gentile, Muslim and Buddhist [and even atheist tourist], due to being in the custody of Jews of Israel.  That is only one central fact to remember, among so many in this centuries-old story.  Jerusalem is Judaism’s first-city, and only holy city; Muslims declare it their third city, after Mecca and Medina, and eagerly desire to bring it under their control, and thus similarly banned from visits by Jews. And other heathens – known in Arabic as ferengi [did Roddenberry find this Star Trek term therein?] [more]

Most 12-step programs start out by requiring that people have to understand that they’re powerless over their addiction and that only by turning their lives over to a Power greater than themselves can they be restored to sanity.  Far be it from me to suggest that I am that Power, but clearly someone has to step in and try to rescue these poor liberal souls.  Even the most harebrained among them deserves that much.

First, though, they have to acknowledge that Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha, Dick Durbin, Charles Rangel, Harry Reid and Charles Schumer, are not moderates, but, rather, leftists with a Socialist agenda.  Furthermore, they must recognize that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, CNN, the three major networks, the news magazines and the New Yorker, are not objective in their reporting of political events, and neither are Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher, in their commentary.  If these entities and individuals are not on the payroll of the DNC, they certainly should be.  They certainly put in longer hours than Howard Dean. [more]

by Richard S. Lowry [author] 3/22/08

It is hard to believe that it has been five years since Jessica Lynch and the 507th Maintenance Company rolled through the dusty streets of An Nasiriyah on March 23, 2003. Eleven of Jessica’s fellow soldiers were killed that morning, five were captured and a dozen more injured. Lynch was critically injured and near death when she was brought into a military hospital near the site of her ambush.

Within hours of the ambush, the North Carolina Marines of Task Force Tarawa moved to secure the bridges in An Nasiriyah. LtCol Rickey Grabowski’s 1st Battalion, of the 2nd Marine Regiment rolled into the city and encountered stiff resistance. By midmorning they had rescued nearly half of the soldiers who had been ambushed and by noon the Marines were charging forward through a hail of RPGs, AK-47 gunfire, mortar and artillery barrages. By sunset, Grabowski’s Marines had secured their objectives but at a terrible cost. Eighteen of America’s finest died and another dozen were wounded. [more]